What is “contagion”? A spiritual view

I consider the book, Contagion Myth, by Sally Morell and Dr. Tom Cowan, the best book for Cultural Creatives from 2019. However the book never answers its own question, “What is contagion?”

To go deeper during lockdown, I went back to Rudolf Steiner, a famous original thinker. During the 1918–1920 pandemic, he had many original ideas about its invisible causes. Yet RS’s take was also not very clear. Still he pointed a way forward. In my own words:

Laughter is contagious. Fear is contagious. Depression is contagious. Optimism can be contagious. In short, as emotions are the strongest reality for humans in Creation now, the most shared, emotions must also be the most “contagious.”

What about beliefs? Aren’t religious beliefs “contagious” from parents to children? What about mental judgements? Isn’t arguing contagious? If one person argues heatedly, their partner is likely to escalate in kind. So mental ideas-beliefs are also contagious. Emotions and beliefs, these are the most contagious. If you want to understand “contagion,” start with these.

Where do microbes fit in? In contagion microbes are likely to play a secondary role, just as they do in physical-material Nature. Microbes universally appear where organic matter is sub-optimal; either, ready for replacement by new growth; or, ready for demolition-recycling. This is the function of microbes, Nature’s demolition experts. They save us from being up to our eyeballs in sick and dead organic material.

Let’s go back to emotions. Unnecessary fear and unnecessary, unworkable beliefs, have been called “stinking thinking” by the educator John-Roger. What if microbes are attracted to our stinking thinking and stinking feeling directly?

More precisely, if a human goes into fear and starts living there, the person loses their contentment and shuts themself off from life-giving mental-emotional sunshine. When a fearful person lowers their frequency to make room for fear, their whole physiology is affected invisibly. “Frequency” is the easy way to talk about this. A fearful person claims a lower frequency.

What did we say microbes were attracted to? Microbes universally appear where organic matter is sub-optimal and ready for replacement or demolition.

What if, in a fear-based pandemic, faulty emotions and beliefs come first. Then the microbes come second?

Comments, questions, alternative views invited.