Empty Shell

Bulgarian artist and curator Voin Voinov shares his wandering and restless thoughts about the present state of emergency, and recalls long-lost communication skills to enter the stage of global interconnectedness, a way of caring for and feeling the world.

 

There is a lot to say about the present, but where to begin is the difficult point. When things turned, that we started a civilization to regress? How did we get misled that technology could replace spirituality? Sending electronic messages instead believing in in the power of the mind?

A connection lost along the way, between the separation of the world, colonization, capitalism, and new world orders. Why did we stop seeing and being part of nature, rather as an external entity, the human race, continuing to dig for gold, replacing inner values with materiality, causing destruction and finally-a tread to themselves alone?

»It is time to see and realize once and for all that nature is the ultimate technology.«

We reproduce the human psyche in technology – like replicas of biological and mental processes – about the way we are thinking, creating, thinking systems and here now, in the time of pandemic, the virus becomes also a symbolic matter, infecting not only our physical body, but also piercing the mind.

I look at this event as a global phenomenon, and I use the term “phenomenon” here to describe anything that arouses or comes to life, causing an effect. There is no coincidence in time here, this moment of interdependent co-rising of phenomena is indeed a call for consciousness.

»Every phenomenon is in co-rising relation to any other phenomenon. «

To re-think not only the human condition, where are we heading, how we treat one another, but to consider nature as the primary element for life. To open up and foresee qualities and ways of connecting between us, perhaps finding new more effective ways than the already established renovation of “social distancing” that has taken place and now confirmed.

Recall communication skills long lost, and not in practice; perhaps telepathy, vibrations of the heart, frequencies, and brain waves. The virus is here to remind us not about humanity, but about spirituality. About the unrealized power of the mind, that instead of equality, care, and love, have caused only terror, wars, death, and destruction.

We separated the phenomena of life from being alive, perhaps unconsciously, but in terms that will have consequences. Separating the subject from itself, replaced by the ego. The self-elevation, realization and growth is a process that can be looked and developed not only from the standpoint of the ego, that the western imposed method of the individualist society has settled. That fulfilment has called for nothing else.

You can’t separate anything from anything else. That is the point.

»Things in this dimension are interconnected; coexisting.«

It is an alarm call for authenticity, and what I mean here, is the human being to be able to be connected, to feel and express its emotions at any time, so freedom will again become a part of our fragmented selves.

Some 2,500 years ago, Buddha contemplated the nature of interdependent corising during every moment, when you look at a leaf or a raindrop. Meditate on all the conditions – near and distant. Of the contributions to the presence of that leaf or raindrop. The birth and death of any phenomena are connected to the birth and death of all other phenomena. The one contains the many, and the many contains the one.

»Without the one, cannot be the many; and without the many can not be the one.«

From a biological social perspective, illness/disease is not an entity in itself. It manifests in human life and social environments in a certain context. As the psychological can not be separated by the physical, and physical and psychological cannot be separated by the individuals or the groups, social conditions, connections and existence, and is therefore a consequence of the culture we live in.

»We are bio psycho-social, but also spiritual creatures.«

Spiritual – meaning that there is more to us than just the beholders of a little ego, that many of us are hanging onto, the ego that rules most of us, and the ones who rule this particular society. The virus is calling not for death; the virus is calling for healing. For fast erasure of the capitalist exploitation mechanisms, the disappearance of the fascist ways of society control strategies. It is an opportunity to all of us, to recognize oneself and the other as spiritual beings.

»It is about facing a cumulative, collective world trauma and enter the stage of healing – the spiritual dimension, as a global interconnected way of caring for and feeling the world.«