In this episode of “5 Minutes,” Dr. Robert Svoboda explores the Ayurvedic perspective on pandemics, karma, and the relationship between human beings and the larger environment.

Epidemics and pandemics are specifically addressed in Ayurvedic texts. What these texts explain is that when the quality of time in a particular area becomes disturbed, then serious difficulties can arise. The quality of time becomes disturbed as a result of the accumulated karmas of the people living in that place.

The COVID-19 pandemic, which affected the entire world, can be understood, in my opinion, less as the specific karmas of people in one particular location and much more as the collected karmas of the human species as a whole.

We as a species have created many unfortunate karmas. We have disturbed other species on this planet. We have polluted the air, the water, and the earth. We have caused suffering among one another through wars, conflicts, and suppression, including the long history of injustice experienced by communities such as African Americans in the United States.

When the accumulated karmas in a particular area, or in the case of a pandemic, throughout the entire world, become too intense, an imbalance develops. That imbalance must somehow return to balance, and one of the ways nature accomplishes this is through disease.

Disease can force human beings to stop, reconsider their actions, and reevaluate the reality in which they live. This creates an important opportunity for all of us to examine what we have been doing and how well we have been aligning ourselves with our environment, with other human beings, with our families, and with the world around us.

This is a moment to reconsider how we are living and how we can change our relationship with reality so that we move forward in a more positive direction and reduce the conditions that lead nature to respond through such events.

I often repeat the advice of my mentor, Vimalananda: it is always better to live with reality because if you do not, reality will come to live with you. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we saw that reality had come to live with us.

This is therefore a time to recognize that we are living with the consequences of our collective actions. We should not simply blame one group, one country, one technology, or one political system. This is a human being problem. All of us, as human beings, need to reconsider what we must do to become genuinely human again and move in a direction that is appropriate not only for our own species, but for all species, for the entire planet, and for life as a whole.

Ayurveda means the science of life. Ayu refers to life itself, and everything that is alive requires attention, respect, and care. This is the time to remember that we are all part of that larger web of life and that our actions must reflect that understanding.