I did not experience Covid from a safe distance. I ended up in hospital and came close to death. What followed were months of extreme weakness and struggling to breathe. For a doctor who had spent his entire professional life treating other people’s lungs, it was a strange experience. The illness chose precisely the organ I understood best.
So I am not going to claim that the virus did not exist, that the pandemic was fabricated, or that governments acted in bad faith. The virus was real, people really did die, and governments did the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time. The question I want to ask lies elsewhere: could the pandemic, beyond its biological dimension, also have had a deeper meaning?
Two Levels That Can Coexist
In the previous article, we explored wetiko, the disease of the mind known under many names in cultures around the world. Paul Levy, who has written two books about wetiko, devoted an entire chapter to the pandemic. In his view, Covid was more than a physical virus. It was a way in which humanity’s invisible illness became visible. An immaterial virus of the mind took bodily form and appeared before the world.
The activist Martin Winiecki, whom Levy cites, described the pandemic as a global somatisation of wetiko: the bodily expression of something that had long been suppressed in humanity’s collective unconscious. He asks: how could a single virus bring seven and a half billion people to a halt within a matter of weeks? It resonated with something that had already been present within us for a long time.
This is where a materialist is likely to stop. Is anyone seriously suggesting that a psychological illness caused a biological virus? No.
The Moon on the Water
Levy uses an image drawn from the Buddhist tradition. When the moon is reflected on the surface of water, what causes the reflection? Not the moon. Not the water. Not even the eye that sees it. The reflection arises from the interplay of all three at once, as a single whole in which cause and effect cannot be separated.
This is how he understands the relationship between the physical virus and the virus of the mind. They are not two separate things, one of which caused the other. They are two aspects of a single field in which mind and matter interpenetrate. The outer event and humanity’s inner state correspond to one another, just as in a dream the image corresponds to what we experience. Levy therefore suggests that we approach the pandemic as we would a dream: symbolically, asking what it might be reflecting back to us.
Anyone familiar with Jung will recognise in this the principle of synchronicity: a meaningful correspondence between inner and outer events that is non-causal, yet significant. Inner and outer correspond because both are expressions of the same deeper reality.
What Is a Virus, Really?
Consider what a virus actually is. From a biological point of view, it is a strange entity on the boundary between the living and the non-living. It has no metabolism, does not breathe or feed, and cannot live independently. It is almost pure information, a piece of genetic code enclosed in a protein coat. It can reproduce in only one way: by entering a cell and forcing it to produce copies of itself.
Now recall how traditions describe wetiko. It has no independent existence. It lives entirely off the energy of its host. Indigenous cultures call it a cannibal spirit, a force that consumes the life of others because it has none of its own. The virus is a physical portrait of wetiko. If humanity’s illness were to become visible in matter, it could scarcely have chosen a more fitting form than an entity that is information parasitising life.
Winiecki goes further and identifies what this information conveys: wetiko spreads the illusion of separateness. It persuades us that each of us is an isolated ego trapped within the confines of our own skin, and that others are competitors or prey.
And what did the pandemic do to the world? It confined us to isolation, separated us from one another, and cut us off from community. Other people became potential sources of infection, and therefore threats. The disease of separation made us experience separation in physical, tangible form.
More Than One Kind of Transmission
Levy points out that the virus spread through several channels at once. Alongside physical contagion there was a psychological one: fear, anxiety and stress travelled around the world faster than the infection itself and were even more contagious. And fear and ignorance are precisely what wetiko feeds upon.
The third channel was society itself. The pandemic set in motion a mechanism we described in the previous article: the mutual projection of the shadow. Vaccinated and unvaccinated, compliant and defiant, each camp saw the other as a threat, while neither saw the force that was feeding on the division itself. Families fell out. Friendships broke apart. The physical epidemic subsided, but the psychological polarisation of society persists to this day.
What This Does Not Imply
A collective symbol does not imply individual blame. To say that the pandemic mirrored an illness of humanity does not mean that a particular person caused, attracted or deserved their illness. Such a conclusion would be both cruel and logically mistaken.
The symbol operates at the level of the whole. An individual’s illness has its own biological, social and fateful circumstances. I myself became seriously ill, and I do not regard that as a personal failure. Spiritual teachings that burden sick people with guilt for their illness do the very opposite of healing.
The Remedy Hidden in the Virus
Levy concludes with an idea familiar to any doctor with a holistic outlook: the remedy is also encoded within the illness. What did the pandemic give us, if we are willing to accept the gift?
Above all, an experience of interconnectedness. The phrase repeated around the world at the time, “we are all in this together”, was true. The virus recognised no borders, nationalities or wealth. It showed us that humanity is a single organism in which nothing happens in isolation.
We also discovered how malleable the world is, how quickly it can change. Structures we had regarded as immutable, transport, the economy, the working patterns of the entire planet, changed within a matter of days. We saw with our own eyes that humanity’s collective behaviour can change from one day to the next. That gives hope to anyone who doubts whether the world can still change.
And finally, it taught us compassion: for the vulnerable, the elderly, exhausted healthcare workers, and frightened people on both sides of a divided society.
Jung wrote that a new path visits humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it is discovered. The plagues of Egypt in the biblical story were not punishments inflicted for the satisfaction of the one who punished. They were an increasingly urgent call for Pharaoh to set enslaved life free. If the pandemic was such a plague, then we should ask what it was trying to tell us, and whether we understood.
Illness as Initiation
Finally, I return to my own experience. Shamanic cultures recognise the initiatory illness: the healer-to-be must first pass through serious illness in order to understand the territory through which they will later guide others.
The months when I could barely breathe taught me things no book can teach. What helplessness means. What it means to depend on others. What the world looks like from a bed you may never rise from again. I would not wish that experience on anyone, and yet I would not give it up.
Perhaps the same applies to humanity as a whole. We went through a shared initiatory illness. With every initiation, what matters is whether transformation takes place or whether we return to our old life as though nothing had happened. So far, it looks more like a return to the old.
Yet an initiation that fails has a way of returning, both in an individual life and in the life of humanity, until we understand what it asks of us. It would be wiser to understand it than to wait for the next one.
