Undoubtedly, we sense that our national and global life is in a state of crisis!

Covid-related health, relationship, and financial challenges exist everywhere. Senseless violence against innocent individuals has limited our freedom of ease in moving about. Tempers flare over trivial issues. Distrust of religious, political, and educational institutions and their leaders leaves many of us without solid footings.

This state of crisis is a collective reality and a collective realization; however, it exists for each of us in individualized ways and with individualized effects. When our own individualized sense of crisis is experienced within the collective sense of crisis, our individualized experience can get dramatically magnified and we can get tossed into what seems like a raging sea of chaos. The more we lose control of our individual sense of crisis, the more we amplify the collective sense of it. On the other hand, the more each of us is able to manage our internal sense of crisis, the more we may contribute to an overall calming and healing effect to achieve balance.

We do not exist as just a physical or a material entity. We are fundamentally spiritual beings—beings of consciousness—having, as the saying goes, physical experiences. Nevertheless the vast majority of us primarily identify with our physical nature. This physical nature becomes easily conditioned through repetition via the sensory neurological input we experience. Our brain coordinates that input, along with the meaning our mental nature assigns to it and the triggered associated feelings that result from it. We can look upon our brain as a computer that processes a multitude of experiences as data, but this brain computer cannot process meaning from it. Meaning is actually assigned to the input via another subtle level of our consciousness: the mental level, or mental body.

We could spend much time detailing and tracking how all the above operates, but here are the important points:

• Each one of us individually contributes to a collective universal human consciousness. This shared consciousness has an associated “feeling” or tone. In our present crisis, the tone consists of generalized anxiety and fear.
• Our individualized human consciousness results in our behavior, formed from a variety of personal neurological inputs and interpretations that develop into fixed habit patterns. These patterns are also affected by the larger collective field of consciousness in which we exist.
• The larger collective universal field, with its overt and subtle energies, can greatly increase any distress created and reinforced within our own individualized experience of consciousness.
• Because we largely identify with our physical nature with its ingrained tendencies and habit patterns, it can be a struggle to move into a place of interior freedom and peace.
• Ultimately, the way out of our individual and collective crisis situations is for each of us to do all that we can to realize how we unintentionally contribute to our collective sense of crisis.
• The solution is spiritual … and it is a spiritual struggle. It involves each of us discovering and ascending always more fully into the heights of our own spiritual center. We do this not as a private salvation project, but to participate in one of the central Christian doctrines known as eschatology, which refers to fostering the birth of a New Earth, or as the Nicene Creed says, ”the world to come.”

Spend some time in the days and weeks ahead periodically and consistently withdrawing your awareness away from the contents of your mind. Go to that place where you can witness what your mind is doing, saying, creating. If you perceive a sense of crisis, try to stay in your awareness at a distance from what you are witnessing your mind to be doing. Notice in those particular moments that nothing your mind is creating is actually happening. You are just being, just noticing … just witnessing.

The more we can individually shift away from our minds being “in control” the more we can live an authentic spiritual life and help calm the sense of panic about us.