As I write these words, Covid-19, popularly known as coronavirus, has infected over 90,000 people and killed more than 3,000 worldwide, with most of the cases so far being reported in China, where it originated. By comparison, season flu causes the deaths of between 300,000 and 600,000 each year. And the rate of new cases in China has gradually dropped, suggesting it may soon run its course. Yet this new disease, about which we know precious little, has instilled worldwide paranoia and panic and threatens to send the global economy into a tailspin.

Now, it’s certainly possible that the illness will prove to be as virulent as the hype surrounding it suggests. But what is clear is that we have become increasingly fearful as a species as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. News and disinformation, often indistinguishable, travel so fast and flood our nervous systems with so much data that we don’t know how to assimilate it and respond. After all, we’re still struggling to come to terms with the “climate emergency” and the “global terrorism threat”—terms designed to instill their own kind of terror.

In the midst of this collective trance of impending catastrophe, the question we might want to ask ourselves is one I often pose in satsangs and retreats: On present evidence only, without consulting the mind, is anything missing from this moment right now? Dropping the fears, judgments, interpretations, and stories, which are just projections and constructs of the mind, is there really a problem now? And now? And now?

As we drop out of the spinning mind into the heart, past the layers of fear and self-protection into the deepest inner knowing, what do we find? If we delve far enough, we encounter the peace and equanimity of our essential nature, the ground of being, which is not disturbed by the inevitable ups and downs, gains and losses, successes and failures. As Jean Klein liked to say, there may be problems, but there is nothing problematic. This deeper ground is the ultimate refuge and the fundamental reality beneath all the turbulence. In the midst of the drama, we have the option of returning home to the heart, where peace and love prevail.

Of course, this deeper knowing doesn’t preclude taking action to protect ourselves or responding to difficulties when appropriate, but it does inoculate us against the pandemic of paranoia and panic that periodically sweeps like a wildfire across the collective landscape—a landscape that’s itself just a projection of the mind. Right here and now, in the limitless openness between thoughts, where is the problem?