Its an analogy I’ve used many (many) times before but I’ll say it again…theres’s nothing like the human body to serve as a model of learning for our world at large. For instance, take a virus – take this virus – Epstein Barr. It is so wily, so very very clever at surviving and ensuring its own longevity and a life set-up in all the conditions that suit it that it is the only virus equipped to LIVE and then to THRIVE inside the very cells designed to neutralise it; the B-cells, which are (normally) the bad-ass boys of the immune system, guardians of our good health to the last. You have to admire it!

Here’s an extract from a very interesting article on the Simmaron Research website, under the heading ‘An admiring look at a virus’ (bear with me on this, its worth it):

In some ways you’ve really got to give it up to Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV). EBV just happens to be the only virus known to survive in B-cells. In fact, EBV doesn’t just survive in B-cells, they are its home. Somehow B-cells have managed to thrive survive in the very cells that are designed to attack them. That takes a special kind of viral hutzpah.

Every time EBV infects a B-cell it tells it to reproduce and when the cell does, EBV inserts itself into the B-cell’s ‘germinal center’ where it will reside, largely untouched, for the rest of the B-cells life. Every time the B-cell replicates, EBV hijacks its reproductive machinery to produce more EBV virions.

Because B-cells aren’t long-lived and because EBV can’t replicate in them when they’re pumping out antibodies, EBV has found ways to keep B-cells alive and in a state of latency for longer and longer periods of time.

EBV has found ways in induce B-cells to undergo what’s called ‘clonal’ expansion in which B-cells produce EBV infected clones of themselves. One way EBV does this is by tricking the immune system to believe a pathogen is present, thereby causing it to ramp up B-cell production.
Keeping the immune system on high alert, though, can cause problems. Think of our missile defense system. If it’s on high alert the risk of a catastrophic mistake increases greatly, and here is where Pender and his hypothesis comes in. ( See more of this interesting article HERE)

The analogy, to me, is so apparent in a week when I have closely examined what makes fear so rife in our world, what supports it and keeps it alive, whose interests does it serve, why (and by whom) are we perpetually kept on such ‘high alert’ for some sort of imminent disaster? When you see fear as a virus – suddenly – everything slots into place. This virus is pedaled to humanity in such an apparently innocuous way that we believe it is the result of some accidental, outside thing attacking us but, really, it comes from the inside, is living so deeply inside our own cells that we are – in a very real way – creating it within, with our vibration, our expectations, our thoughts. Wherever it first came from, whatever the source of that initial ‘infection’, one thing is quite clear to me…that, since that time, it has lived within us at the cellular level. All it took were a few ‘dark’ circumstances for it to get a foot-hold and, since that time, it has piggy backed the very mechanisms that might once have been the guardians of our lighter-thinking, the built-in ‘immunity’ of our highest vibration, which has been brought down to its level.

Then, oh so cleverly, the virus made it easier for itself to spread by instigating the cloning process…no longer necessary for everyone to experience real and imminent danger in order to live a fear-filled life because we are all being cloned in that fundamental reality from birth now. Through our parenting, our culture, our religions, our media, our most fundamental belief systems, we are a-chock with fear almost before we have said our first words and so the very antibody-guardian that we once were to our own wellbeing – wearing the deep knowledge that everything is alright, really, like a suit of glowing armour – is paralysed at the very nucleus, disarmed by ourselves. Instead of reacting to the one thing deserving of reaction – fear – we are on high-alert reaction to absolutely everything else. By policing the fear-virus’s world for it, jumping at our very shadows, we do its dirty work, become the unwitting guardians of the status quo of fear that it depends upon. This happens because we are now so convinced the world is a malevolent place, that everything is out to get us, that everything is evil and “going wrong” that we are in a permanent state of high alert and, at the very first hint of trouble, we agree to having all the exits sealed, our own remaining liberties stripped away to “safeguard us” further. Yes, sometimes that state of high-alert backfires a little on the ‘virus’ and – like the article suggests – the likelihood of a catastrophic mistake, one of those moments when things become so heated that the very survival of everyone seems to hang in the balance, becomes more likely…but apparently that is a risk it is prepared to take to serve its own long term power-game.

Never have I seen these virus-like mechanisms of our world more clearly than over these past few days since I identified EBV in my body. Ive seen it play out as the paralysing fear ‘switched on’ with a flip of a button wired up to our very cells at the media coverage of the terrorist atrocities in Paris. I’ve witnessed it in my own ‘automatic’ responses to a breast issue that – that croaking inner voice of fear would have be believe – I ‘must’ get checked out for cancer before its too late. I’ve seen it presented as overwhelm and hopelessness dressed up as a variety of outside circumstances that have ‘come up’ for people close to me this week, taken as a ‘sign’ that all is messed-up and lost when, actually, it is no such thing. Because a virus thrives on that kind of ‘foregone conclusion’.

Yet, I now sense, we are well past the point of foregone conclusions and never has the world been a more surprising, or uplifting, place to live in than it has been these last few days, in spite of everything. Through the cracks I detect, not more rubble and dust but, light seeping through, everywhere I look. Yes, it has felt incredibly, incredibly, dark and yet that darkness has only aided the light in showing up – very brightly indeed.

Somehow, I suspect, a deep bow of admiration to all the fear-viruses in the world is called for at this juncture – far more so than any heavy-handed ‘guns’ (literal or figurative) to obliterate whatever it is. To do the latter would be to stoop to its level, an eye for an eye making everyone blind. We have to take our hat off and admit “boy, you were good, so clever, you had us jumping out of our skin thinking there was this thing that was going wrong on the outside when, really, it was an inside job, we enabled you to do this”. How? Because we created the optimum circumstances for fear to thrive and so it did – you can’t blame it  – but really, its all solvable (healable) from within.

We do this when we say “thanks but no thanks” to all the parasitical fears that have lodged deep inside for so long, perpetuating a separation age when we forgot we are all the same, when we recognise we are standing beside sisters and brothers, that it has all been a very, very, clever game that taught us such a lot, that anything going drastically wrong is a cry for attention, a cry of pain, not an excuse to meet like with like. Fear begets fear and our world of cancer and terrorist threats generates, only, more of the same while we fight so desperately on the outside yet forget to look to why these things found such a home in our world in the first place, what fed them and bent over backwards to sustain them. What is the pain-cry of that virus asking us to give our attention to, really, and how can we heal that from a place of love…always love-inspired, not retaliation. Like the part when the crazy music stops and all the lights come on, when we get to see all the beer and peanuts spilled on the floor and recognise all the faces of  the people we have been anonymously bashing against in the dark for so long, now it is time to get real in the light of love and heal this crazy-wonderful world.

Related articles:

I’ve continued to develop this theme through a series of posts which work together in so many ways across varying levels of exploration –

Fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue – are they Epstein Barr?

Blasting love into all the darkest places

Healing all the bullies, inside and out

Marianne Williamson quote from Willowcreek Signs on Etsy