Theatrical Masks In the public domain
"Interconnection is the truth of things. It's not sentimental. It doesn't take a spiritual understanding to get there" - Sharon Salzberg (Buddhist teacher and author)
The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an imposition of regulations ostensibly designed to prevent its spread. This has accentuated perceptions of curtailment of freedoms and basic human rights (including movement, earning a living, dignity, information) and magnified the degree of polarisation that we experience at the individual, community, business, institutional and nation-state levels. There is a separation rather than a bringing together. A fragmentation rather than a unity. More walls than there are bridges between people.
A MICRO CONTEXT OF PANDEMIC REGULATIONS
There are contradictory “expert” opinions about:
- whether the coronavirus should be classed as a widespread outbreak, a non-localised epidemic, a pandemic, or something else (Definitions also vary)
- how to predict and measure its spread (in different localities, across different demographics, in a different climate) and severity
- how to most effectively treat those who become affected
With regard to the mandatory wearing of masks, “experts” disagree on:
- the efficacy of masks to prevent the transfer of nanoparticles and the coronavirus between people
- whether the wearing of masks prevents our immune systems from naturally developing their own response to the virus
- whether and how the wearing of a mask changes our state of being - inhibits or disinhibits us
Time may produce clearer answers.
A common - sense discussion on the wearing of masks is worth having.
WHY WEAR MASKS? FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
In general, masks can be helpful, or they can be unhelpful.
- Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895 – 1975) talked in terms of a masked-ball or carnival as “the people’s second life, organised on the basis of laughter … an escape from the usual official way of life …. (people) for a time entered the Utopian realm of community, freedom, equality and abundance”. The carnival event was a temporary container (You voluntarily put on a mask in order to take off your mask, and you were contained within the facade of the carnival collective in order to be free for a while and have fun). (Bakhti, M. 1965) The very opposite of State-imposed ‘protective’ masks
- Different forms of masks can be deliberately and voluntarily used to hide the persona – literally and figuratively, for different reasons. The burqa/niqab for example. Wedding veils may be worn to symbolise purity or simply because of tradition. Large sunglasses, make-up used to increase mystery and attractiveness. A botox treatment to mask wrinkles. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Tegel prison in July 1944 of showing an outer calm, serenity, pride, poise, cheerful appearance, but masking an inside containing at that time an entirely different life force, mind-set, soul state. (Bonhoeffer, D. 1997) In certain settings (for example at the workplace) people may wear ‘masks’ to hide their true feelings, appear calm and in control. In a Christmas 2014 address to the Vatican Curia, the Pope, in listing dangers to individual and corporate health and functioning, included ‘existential schizophrenia’: living a double life, forgetting who we are. (McKenna, J 2014 and Ohlheiser,A 2014) Could 'existential schizophrenia' become a covid-19 hazard?
- Coronavirus masks are intended as protection by blocking human-to-human transmission. The belief of each wearer in the purpose and usefulness of mandatory mask-wearing is a determining factor in their attitude toward compliance. A person who believes that they do protect, and prevent transmission, will in many cases find their anxiety about infection being soothed, and be angry at those who do not comply as strictly. Those who do not believe may feel resentment and anger at having to comply.
WHO MOST READILY ADOPTS THE WEARING OF MASKS IN PANDEMIC SITUATIONS?
This may depend on a number of factors, that include:
Personality type
On the surface the person (in Myers-Briggs terms) characterised by being an extroverted, sensing, feeling, judging type may become stressed and disoriented if close, open interaction and contact with another, is blocked - physically or visually.
The introverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving type may naturally prefer ‘distance’, and less emotional contact.
The Enneagram 8 may on principle fight social distancing and the wearing of masks
We all react differently.
Click to enlarge
Physical
Factors such as the inhibition of breathing may affect some more than others. Yet others will be more disturbed by less speech clarity, physical discomfort. This in turn may impact emotional and social well-being, add to mental fatigue
Role
Direct sales staff who have face-to-face interactions with customers, line managers, those in the helping professions – because they rely on communication that goes beyond words and includes content and feelings conveyed through expressions, gestures, body language.
For all of us, un-masked faces in social proximity reveal whether the other person is threatening, angry, sad, joyful, welcoming, showing acceptance or dislike, being authentic, empathic, vulnerable, compassionate, being wary, is agreeing with us, and able to read what we wish to convey with our eyes, soul,lips, smile, frown ...
EQ and SQ
In meaningful communication, getting beyond masks, real or figurative, requires us to display both emotional and social intelligence. That is, self- awareness, being able to identify and manage one’s own emotions. And a social awareness, being able to recognise another’s emotion, empathise, handle relationships and conflicts. Having emotional and social intelligence enables us to act positively, brings about emotional healing. The wearing of masks is often a hinderance.
MASKS – THE MACRO SOCIETAL PICTURE
Our Interconnectedness
As opposed to that which separates, including masks, now is a time for that which brings together, connects and binds. A part of such a movement is our individual and collective practice that brings about and reinforces this natural phenomenon of interconnectedness.
Daisaku Ikeda and Hazel Henderson: "All things are mutually related to and interdependent with all other things. They all form a great cosmos maintaining the rhythms of life”
We need to be mindful of this great truth in our conversations, interactions, contacts.
Is every person a unique self with a brain and a mind that is theirs alone? Are our minds separate entities? Siegel sees mind as shared, certainly when we are relating, as “the emergent self-organizing process, both embodied and relational, that regulates energy and information flow within and among us”. As an analogy he shares, “I realized if someone asked me to define the shoreline but insisted, is it the water or the sand, I would have to say the shore is both sand and sea …. You can’t limit our understanding of the coastline to insist it’s one or the other. I started thinking, maybe the mind is like the coastline—some inner and inter process”. (Siegel, D.J. 2016)
Does this interconnectedness extend to other forms of life beyond the human?
Chief Seattle of the Duwamish said in 1854, “Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect”. This sentiment resonates with findings in Gestalt psychology, Integral Theory, the Collective Unconscious, Systemic Thinking, Rhizomes (Systems Biology), Chaos Theory, Quantum Physics and Neuroscience. It also resonates with aspects of Hindu, Buddhist, Shamanic and the Judeo - Christian mystical tradition. Ken Wilber talks of a holographic universe - the part contains the whole or replicates the whole, and yet each part still has a wholeness within itself (physically, biologically, spiritually).
Physicist Fritjof Capra of The Tao of Physics fame defines spiritual awareness as an “understanding of being imbedded in a larger whole, a cosmic whole, of belonging to the universe”. (Capra, F. 1999)
Physicist and philosopher David Bohm whose far-sighted and exciting work at the intersection of science and philosophy led him to believe that there is a deep, invisible “implicate” order (which we will never fully comprehend and understand) below and beyond our observed “explicate” reality, that one cannot separate the observed from the observer in attempting to understand phenomena (for example, even looking inward at our own feelings changes them), that all of mankind’s problems arise out of the way we think, and that we may enjoy individual freedom within this interconnected collective. His views are beginning to gain ground amongst leading Quantum physicists.
There is a deep sense that masks, physical or imagined, can never separate our infinitely diverse humanity from each other or from other beings, animals, things.
“… Because we are all interconnected, by way of our souls, we can never say, ‘What difference does it make, as long as I’m OK.” This is like the story our Sages tell of a passenger on a boat who was busy making a hole in the hull underneath his seat. When other passengers told him to stop making a hole, for he would sink the boat, the silly fellow told them to mind their own business — he had paid for his seat, and it was of no concern to anyone else what he was doing within his private four cubits’”. (Greisman, N. 2020)
Shifting cultural, societal and behavioural norms
Given the information on who we are, what makes us tick, and how we are all interconnected - could a highly-regulated way of living that includes masks (and unsocial distancing) begin to prepare us for a transhuman future, aided by a Fourth Industrial Revolution that ushers in artificial intelligence, 5G, robotics, merged-technology? Facilitate a military-like command and control leadership that influences and directs how we think, feel and behave, at every level? (This is certainly a possibility, if not a probability, in South Africa, where the ruling ANC/Communist Party/Trade Unions tripartite government is becoming rapidly unmasked during the coronavirus pandemic. It is promoting and enacting legislation and policies that land be expropriated without compensation, the Reserve Bank be nationalised, pension fund investments be prescribed by the state, the erecting of 5G towers on private land without permission, Draconian censorship of any criticism of the Government, and ex-president Zuma’s ex-wife who heads the National Coronavirus Disaster Management Council has said that the pandemic “… also offers us an opportunity to accelerate the implementation of some long agreed upon structural changes … These opportunities call for more sacrifice and – if needs be – what Amilcar Cabral called “class suicide” ….’. (Hoffman, P. 2020)
Cadre deployment has been practiced for years now. Comrades are rewarded for their loyalty to the party. This selection criterion takes precedence over competence and merit.
(Marxist Cabral led the revolutionary guerrilla war for independence against Portuguese Guinea, West Africa. His solution requires doing away with capitalism and adopting the non-colonial values of the masses).
Cry the beloved country! See Does Our Constitution Belong in the Waste Paper Basket?
Are we headed for a high-tech, low-touch world that dehumanises us, renders human interconnectivity null and void, drives us apart?
Delio’s clarity when describing the “noosphere”, a concept pioneered by Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - “a level of shared consciousness that transcends boundaries of religion, culture and ethnicity”, the complex evolutionary mind-brain-body system that is spiritual consciousness, and how we are evolving towards greater unity of love and shared virtues, is breath-taking.
In setting out her themes she often draws heavily on the brilliant French philosopher, Jesuit priest, palaeontologist and geologist de Chardin. She argues for a contemplative evolution, a new conscious love that “sees the world with new eyes and a new heart”. (Delio, I. 2013)
My own belief and hope is that what needs to be unmasked is unmasked, that in future we become driven by connection and compassion. That an underlying, invisible evolution of love has to be, by far, the most powerful force.
“It's the kind of thing that comes down to simple terms
It's not about you
It's not about me
Love is all about we
Yes, it's all about we”. (Neil Diamond ‘We’ 2005)
In the following Hebrew story, for ‘brother’ read ‘neighbour’ and ‘the other’ - at the family, community, societal levels …
A long, long time ago two farmer brothers who lived on and worked the same farm and equally shared, at the end of each day, the grain that they produced.
One had a big family. The other lived alone.
Now the one who lived on his own thought that his brother had many mouths to feed and deserved a bigger share of what they produced. Every night he sneaked some of his grain into his brother’s granary.
The brother with the large family thought that because he was blessed by a large family that would care for him when he was too old to work, his brother deserved a bigger share that could be put away for his old age when he would have no one to care for him. So, every night he sneaked some of his grain into his brother’s granary.
And every morning each brother would find his grain supply miraculously replenished.
One night while they were transferring grain, they bumped into each other, realised what had been happening … Hugged.
“The story is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, ‘This is a holy place – a place of love – and here it is that my temple shall be built’.
And so it was.
The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love”.
(Kurtz, E and Ketchum, K. 1994)
Related reading:
Are we losing touch?
Are we approaching a sub-human age?
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail 1965 Carnivalesque
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich (1997) Letters and Papers from Prison Touchstone NY
Capra, Fritjof (1999) The Tao of Physics: an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism Shambhala Publications, Massachusetts
Delio, Ilia (2013) The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love Orbis Books, NY
Greisman, Nechoma (2020) (edited by Rabbi Moshe Miller) The Ninth of Kislev: On Interconnectedness http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/97532/jewish/The-Ninth-of-Kislev-On-Interconnectedness.htm
Hoffman, Paul. Advocate. (2020) Survival of the nation trumps the revolutionary transformation of the economy 2 May 2020
Ikeda, Daisaku and Henderson, Hazel (2004), Planetary Citizenship Middleway Press
Kurtz, Ernest and Ketcham, Katherine (1992) The Spirituality of Imperfection: storytelling and the journey to wholeness Bantam Books
Mehrabian, Albert (1971). Silent Messages (1st ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. ISBN 0-534-00910-7
McKenna, Josephine (2014) Pope Francis to Curia: Merry Christmas, you power-hungry hypocrites December, 2014
Ohlheiser, Abby (2014) The 15 ailments of the Vatican Curia, according to Pope Francis December, 2014
Siegel, Daniel J. (2016) Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human W.W.Norton & Coy, Inc. NY
IMAGE FILE: Comedy and tragedy masks without background.svg
From Wikimedia Commons – the free media repository
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