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23/05/2021 Facing the shadow during a pandemic of fear, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times THE STRAITS TIMES

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FOR SUBSCRIBERS Facing the shadow during a pandemic of fear

If we can explore the fear within our collective shadow, it can lead us towards transforming our increasingly troubled world.

Meira Chand

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/facing-the-shadow-during-a-pandemic-of-fear 1/9 23/05/2021 Facing the shadow during a pandemic of fear, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

To understand both the beauty and the darkness of our world, a collective change in our lives and attitudes is needed. PHOTO: LIANHE ZAOBAO

PUBLISHED 5 HOURS AGO

Over these past weeks, especially for those in Singapore with Indian connections, the unending pandemic distress and India's high number of fatalities have brought new anxiety.

Just when it seemed glimmers of hope were discerned, not only has Singapore returned to partial restrictions, but also, for many Indian nationals here, hardly a day passes without news from their homeland of yet another death. Even if one is not individually close to them, many of these fatalities are at the end of a chain of relationships chillingly near the personal domain.

Some countries, such as Britain, with large swathes of their population now vaccinated, appear to be on the upswing and emerging from lockdown, but others seem to be spiralling downwards.

No matter where one lives in the world, everyone is asking - when will this end and also, why is this catastrophe happening?

Depending on one's philosophy or religious conviction, the answer seems to be either that the pandemic is the wrath of God visited upon a degraded and unprincipled world; the unleashed madness of unethical scientiﬁc experimentation; or the result of the unbridled egoistical folly of collective human pride. Possibly, something of all these explanations and more have conspired together at this time.

If we look to Indian cosmology, it is said the world goes through repeated celestial cycles of Utopian and Dystopian epochs. Unfortunately, according to these ancient teachings, we are now in the last phase of Kali Yuga, our present dismal cycle, "the age of darkness, the age of vice and misery". Hindus believe civilisation degenerates spiritually during this bleak phase, and each individual cycle is said to last a very long time; Kali Yuga, which began 5,122 years ago, stretches through 432,000 years. If that is so, then we have a long way to go, and it is not a happy thought.

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/facing-the-shadow-during-a-pandemic-of-fear 2/9 23/05/2021 Facing the shadow during a pandemic of fear, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

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Rise of violence and hate

Fear defeats more people than any other thing in the world, said philosopher and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this moment, while we face a deadly pandemic, we also face a pandemic of fear.

There are those whose bravery is saving lives, but there are also those for whom fear now dominates life. As media platforms churn out the latest death tolls and other abysmal information, the constant feeling of being under threat affects us all. Constricted by the fear of contagion, we become more conformist and tribalistic, less accepting of outsiders or anything unconventional.

This fear is reﬂected in the rise of violence everywhere, particularly gun violence in the United States, violence towards the planet that sustains us, violence towards women, and xenophobic attacks on Asians in many places, including a recent incident of racist assault on an Indian in Singapore.

A global crisis of domestic violence has left many women trapped in lockdowns with their abusers, and political tensions are globally high with the rise of autocratic leaders spouting a culture of lies and control.

Unacceptable economic disparity is leading to aggressive confrontations on multiple levels everywhere in the world.

Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh writes: "We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We're afraid of many things - of our own death, of losing loved ones, of change, of being alone."

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/facing-the-shadow-during-a-pandemic-of-fear 3/9 23/05/2021 Facing the shadow during a pandemic of fear, Opinion News & Top Stories - The Straits Times All these fears belong to our shadow self, that buried area of uncomfortable personal emotional baggage we all carry deep in our subconscious.

Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist who spent his life studying this shadow, believed that, just as we have our own personal shadow self, humanity as a whole has a collective unconscious shadow.

In its darkness is contained all the past and present knowledge and experiences human beings share as a people, all the atrocities, cruelties, tragedies and horror perpetrated by humankind over the ages, and stored at an unconscious cellular level.

Jung viewed the two world wars as an eruption of this darkness, like a volcano when the pressure within becomes too great. If he were alive today, he would probably trace the ﬂood of pandemic horror to our collective shadow.