The call sounds on the platform warning that the patient is connected to start the session like every week for a year. Seeing her face on the screen, the therapist distinguishes a gesture of tension. Luis is 36 years old and reports that he, like many people in that town in Austria, is very distressed. The scarce 800 kilometers separating them from the Ukrainian border makes them feel in imminent danger, once again in the span of two years.
He, like many others, follow the war from their phones or computers and experience discomfort caused by fear and overinformation. The anguish they experience is reinforced when they receive information that the Austrian government offers a box of iodine pills per family to eat in the event of a nuclear attack. His great fear is that he will not be able to arrive in time if he has to evacuate and return to his country of origin, far from the conflict zone and, at the same time, to feel that he is abandoning people who are very important to him.
The pandemic made the use of virtuality grow exponentially and from that moment on our daily life and our links were changed. The vast majority of human activities and links were sustained not only in technology, but in virtuality, which would be a kind of new dimension (perhaps the fifth, if we consider time as the fourth).
Since our birth, bonds cushion all the impacts of our relationship with the world. The human relationship softens the effect, stimulates and participates in our becoming. The relationship with the mother (or the caregiver who fulfills that function) sustains us, physically and emotionally, introduces us to the world and from there we move through different planes that include interaction with others and with the world until we reach planetary consciousness from the intrinsic planet-humanity-person relationship. This planetary consciousness has been affected since the beginning of 2020, when humans are forced to process large amounts of uncertainty with the consequent sense of vulnerability and an unknown closeness to disease and death.
Luis recounts something that caught his attention these days, which seemed unexpected to him. In the midst of the evacuation plans and their dismissal, Luis felt a need almost perceived as an urgency: he wanted to go to mass. He laughed while recounting it because he was never religious and less practicing. As he listened to the parish priest and tried not to miss parts of the sermon in German, he began to calm down. He looked at the children with signs calling to stop the war and he felt that he was one with all those people who were united and intertwined in their humanity by the fear and hope that was reflected in the innocent faces of those children, who were part of the borderline situation that we are going through as humanity.
Today we are faced with the existential implications not only of survival, of life and of death, but of how to live, of what matters deeply to us. These 5 guidelines will help us find a little calm and security in contexts like the current one.
1. Develop and practice the most human
The risk of technology and linkages arises mainly from the problem posed by Einstein, that it does not surpass or exceed humanity. That is, that technology - and its standardization - does not become an end in itself, nor that we allow our dehumanization, by losing ourselves in it. It's up to us, not technology. In fact, it is a problem that goes beyond the technology itself. And it has to do with developing and practicing what is most human: our free being and in relation. That is, the recognition of one's own subjectivity, of one's own authentic existence, in relation to that of the other and the world.
2. Exercise one's own freedom with creativity
Thanks to this sufficient primary support bond, the person will then be able to go through their individuation process. This means a progressive separation and autonomy from the aforementioned maternal and parental care, and from other predetermined structures. Once independence has been achieved, which implies facing existential loneliness and the construction of oneself from the exercise of one's own freedom and that of one's own sense, human beings are called to reconnect with the world and others, but from their creativity, through work, love, art, solidarity.
Creativity from the true self would be the genuine way of meeting and linking with the world, the healthy way to deal with existential anguish and isolation. Very different from an undifferentiated fusion, such as that of the baby or that of the adult with serious pathologies. There is also the pathology of the adult who undergoes predetermined structures of sense, leaving in the hands of others their freedom, because of the fear of being. However, this is what causes the most anguish and vital dissatisfaction, and, ultimately, pathology. Facing existential anguish instead in order to transform it into creative living, allows us to integrate, reunite with the world and self-realise.
3. Develop my own humanity
Likewise, every time I choose a more mature, broader and inclusive existence or a regression to a more egocentric and immature existence, I am somehow choosing a humanity. That is, social consequences are generated. Fromm (2007) posed this process of individuation, maturity and creativity of the individual as the core of a humanist, freer, more equitable and just society. The person who develops his own humanity can understand that he contains the whole of humanity. On the other hand, it should be clarified that individuation and creativity as a reconnection with the world, are constant processes in a person's life, unfinished, non-linear and rather spiraled.
4. Meditar
Environment and subject are shaped by the action-encounter of both, “mind and world emerge together in enaction”. The human capacity to practice full presence - for example, through meditation - would allow us to consciously open ourselves to that experience of indeterminacy and flow of mind and world, which we tend to ignore in the daily hustle and bustle. This experiential and cognitive faculty, which allows us to understand and transcend the yoic perspective and thus deepen compassion towards otherness, includes the other aforementioned perspectives regarding our relational existence. It opens itself to affective and existential intersubjectivity, to existentialist humanism, and to the emergence of a planetary consciousness.
Planetary consciousness would involve understanding and experiencing the human-nature I-You, our earthly relational existence. That is, to be aware that “humanity is a planetary and biospheric entity”, and, therefore, that “life is an emergency in the history of the Earth itself and man an emergency in the history of terrestrial life” in the words of the thinker Edgar Morin. This would imply further deepening humanism, to learn how to be-there on the planet. Thus to assume our community of human and planetary destiny, to which we are particularly summoned by this globalized era, where all the main problems have become increasingly transnationalized.
5. Strengthen our closest and deepest ties
The coronavirus pandemic is today the first in a long list that has been written decades ago: immigration, financial crises, environmental catastrophes, transnational terrorism, among others. Here our relational existence occurs from individual to community, to humanity and planet Earth. The difference is that this latest crisis has meant that for the first time in history it was experienced at the same time and with similar consequences in every corner of the world. Neither GDP per capita, nor the geopolitical hierarchy of the country, nor the social class of the person and his family, have protected anyone (although in a second stage, countries with the greatest resources have been able to vaccinate and lower the number of infections and deaths in less time). Each person has felt in the body and in his complete subjectivity the pandemic, quarantine and its affective and economic consequences. The life course of every person has been changed, that of the community, that of the whole humanity, and, even, that of nature, which has paradoxically felt a respite. Faced with the strict and initial isolation of people, nature has been able to take to the streets.
Each person is a cosmos of emotions, of longings, of sensations, of thoughts; humanity is all the people who constitute it, consciously and unconsciously; the planet is all the creatures that make it up; the cosmos, all the galaxies it contains. The cosmos that is the person is indivisible from the world: they occur together and at the same time.
What is already driving the pandemic is the inevitability of our relational existence: for example, the xenophobic expressions that initially arose towards the Chinese community because they were identified in a certain social imagination as “carriers of the virus”, have dissipated, since all communities have become infected. There is the inexorability of bonding and interdependence.
We can embrace the bond with the other or we can reject it, even deny it. What is undoubted is that we are related. Loneliness itself, as wealth and a sign of maturity, is defined by a previous internalized affective bond that has allowed us to develop enough to know how to be alone.
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