Thoughts on the virus, isolation and Ascension

by Eva Knausenberger

It doesn’t matter where I start to tell my thoughts of the past two months, because the experience has been quite multi-layered. Many are better wordsmiths also, but there you are…

I start by naming the issue, which has occupied us all: The Corona virus; a ghostlike insubstantial entity without a life of its own, which seeks entrance into the immune system of the physical bodies in order to unfold a life of its own, at the cost of the host.

I have some authority here because, having had the virus, I know that I was sicker than I have ever been. I know that the wounds it left behind are both physically and mentally debilitating and take a long time to heal. I am equally sure that the damage we caused nature over many decades, both to the life-forces and the physical body of the earth are equally slow to heal; has the earth ever been more in need of healing from the wounds human beings inflicted?

Ascension is a ‘time in between’, between Easter and Whitsun, it takes place between the physical earth, continues into the breathing life-forces surrounding the earth and then Christ disappears ‘into the clouds, leaving the stunned disciples wondering: What just happened? They do not understand.

It is perhaps ironic, for lack of a better word, perhaps also symbolic, that the virus also uses the path ‘between’ people to spread, endangering our physical breathing, digesting and absorbing but also our clear-thinking and will faculties. That is a medical fact. And there are no answers as to why, where from and how. How does one get rid of something as ghostlike and insubstantial as a virus?

In the Samaritan Course Rudolf Steiner pointed out that the human being must be wounded for healing powers to engage, but, he said, the forces in opposition to healing come forth with the same strength. “It is only when we take into ourselves the enlightening, healing power of the Holy Spirit, that we can differentiate between healing forces and forces in opposition to healing and only then can we master both consciously.”

In times when we were isolated from one another, one could have a strong sense that spiritually healing powers emerged strongly like never before, a spiritual, healing, helpful brotherhood of formed, both spiritual and spiritual in nature, but the opposing forces, often quite unobserved, used the time of isolation to polarise, accuse, blame, lie and obfuscate what was already sickening, became more so.

When we consider Rudolf Steiner’s words again “when we take into ourselves the power of the healing Spirit” ... we can also understand that there is no better time than Whitsun to explore the meaning and truth of what healing “the sickness of sin on the bodily nature of mankind” means, than now.​