Earth Rebels Session 4 - Rebellion Against Empire

The time has come, to finally talk about what we are up against, the Enemy of humankind. We call it Empire, a complex web of cultural forces that do their best to suppress us and maintain the business as usual approach. In this session, we will find inspiration in the many non-violent movements that have taken place on Earth as well as from the nordic mythos of Ragnarök. And we will spark the spirit of the Earth Rebel!

Transcript

About 10,

000 years ago,

Something happened that changed the course of human evolution.

Instead of living as tribes in small groups,

We came together in huge civilizations.

A lot of things happened here.

And it is here,

In these early civilizations,

We find the birth of religions,

Of patriarchy,

Of nation-states,

Agriculture.

This is also where science was born,

And it is at this point in history our great enemy was born as well.

Yes,

The enemy of humankind.

We don't have time anymore to simply accept everything that goes on in the world,

Or in our own mind.

We need to become warriors now.

Lives depend on it,

Because the enemy of greed,

Of competition and of domination is smothering the earth.

It is time to grow our inner strength,

What Gandhi called soul force,

Satyagraha.

Let us begin by looking at what could have been the first tree-huggers on earth.

In India,

In the 18th century,

Villagers from the Bishnoi community,

500 miles southwest of Vireni,

Faced an impossible ordeal.

The local king,

Or Mahayaradhra,

Had sent soldiers to the village to cut down the surrounding forests for the construction of a new palace.

For the villagers of the Bishnoi faith,

The trees were holy and not to be touched.

To stop the soldiers,

The villagers held the hands of each other around the trees and hugged them,

Preventing the soldiers to get through with their axes.

The situation escalated and the soldiers began killing the villagers.

And villagers from nearby communities who heard about the killings came to their help and a council was set up to determine what they should do.

The villagers decided to stick with their non-violent protection and kept sending more and more volunteers to hug the trees.

In the beginning they only sent their elderly,

But when the king started blaming the villagers to only send their useless members,

They started sending young men,

Women and even children who were all killed by the soldiers.

Shocked by the perseverance of their passive resistance,

The king ordered the soldiers to withdraw after over 300 villagers had been killed.

He then personally traveled to the village to apologize and made a decree that the trees surrounding the village would never be cut and the center for the massacre became a destination for an annual pilgrimage for all Bishnoi.

This story of the king sending out soldiers to destroy the natural world has been playing out throughout history and continues even to this day.

Today instead of kings sending orders to soldiers to cut down trees for a new palace,

We have bankers,

CEOs and politicians sending orders to cut down forests,

To dig for oil and excavate mountains leaving destruction in their wake.

Why does it continue like this?

We have had revolutions.

We have changed our religions and nations many times over,

But this pattern has prevailed.

Or rather we have kept it alive.

Our culture has kept it alive.

Our culture that fosters us into obedient citizens with its wide range of forces at its disposal to keep us in place.

Natural forces like norms,

Stereotypes,

Prejudice,

Laws and social rules.

We should get a degree,

Get a good job,

Marry,

Have children,

Get a house,

Work,

Retire.

We shouldn't get any crazy ideas.

We shouldn't try to change the system or care too much of others.

This is what we are taught.

It's been the same since we had monarchies.

We have had this culture of service to the state and obedience to the laws.

For thousands of years we have been taught to obey the authorities who know better than us.

This obedience has been rewarded with torture and death.

In the old days,

Before any empires,

The authority used to be the elders of a tribe who might actually have known a lot more than us.

Then 10,

000 years ago it shifted.

Instead we began to follow the authorities of priesthood and royalty.

The authority of the king,

The emperor.

We did this for so long that we became too obedient for our own good and for the good of the planet.

Today our emperors have become political leaders,

Company CEOs and shareholders.

And our priests have become scientists.

And we have a scientific authority overtaking the religious authority.

Instead of being told by the priests who are interpreting their holy scriptures on what is good and bad for us,

Today we have our scientists interpreting experiments and randomized controlled trials on what is good and bad for us.

Studies to show what we should eat,

How we should raise our kids,

Our school system,

And so much more.

Even though this is an incredible upgrade on so many levels,

It still has its obvious flaws.

The more bereaved we are from our inner authority,

Our inner sense of trust in our own experience,

The easier it is to control us by the cultural forces keeping the old empire in place.

What if your gut and taste can actually tell you what is really good for your body?

Or your heart can tell you what is the right course of action?

It is time to awaken the spirit of the rebel.

Your inner sense might tell you it's wrong to keep consuming,

To keep living the way you do.

But you will have to find your own inner authority to dare to break through the cultural forces doing their very best to tie you into this lifestyle.

One aspect where these cultural forces express themselves is in our rigged economy.

Our economy today is a game that we have collectively created with horrible rules.

Why would you make such a game that the poor keeps getting poorer and the rich getting even richer?

The answer is of course that the rich get richer.

Our economy has been designed by people with their own short-sighted winnings in mind,

Instead of having the good of the planet and all beings in mind.

I mean,

How can our housing system get so crazy that most of the middle class are expected to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars simply to buy a home to live in?

And how can our culture around work get so crazy that we produce goods tens or a hundred times more effectively than a hundred years ago,

But without the similar hundred-fold rise in salaries or decrease in working hours?

If you ask yourself,

Who decided that we should work for 40,

50 or even 60 hours per week?

I mean who decided that this particular number,

Be it 40 in your country or 50 or 70,

Is the perfect number?

And that five weeks of vacation is the optimal number to let us recover from the stresses of our workloads?

Nobody decided this.

The system sucks as much as it can from us.

Forty hours as we have in Sweden is a result of a decade of union work,

The working class uniting themselves for better working agreements.

All of this madness we see around us can only continue to exist because we are not resisting it.

As long as we accept it,

It will continue.

As long as we accept this samsara of politics,

Of crazy economics and injustices,

It will continue its cyclical existence forever.

This is what the tree-huggers knew.

Any danger to the living earth,

To our trees,

Must be held back at any cost,

Even at the cost of our own lives.

The tree that symbol life is known as Yggdrasil in the old Nordic stories.

And Ragnarok,

The prophetic last battle between good and evil,

Was taking place at that tree of life.

In Ragnarok,

The gods of Asgard protect the tree with their own life against the forces of darkness.

Giants,

Black elves,

Fallen gods,

A huge snake and the fenris wolf.

Today's giants are the global corporations.

These black elves are our psychopathic leaders,

Lacking empathy and compassion,

Driven only by greed.

And the Asgard fought because they,

Like our Indian tree-huggers,

Knew that if the tree of life gets cut down,

The village will die.

Without the trees surrounding the villages,

The ecosystem would slowly collapse and they would no longer have the rain and water needed for their crops.

And likewise,

Without the rainforests,

Without the northern spruce forests or the bees or the whales or the butterflies,

Our ecosystems will collapse here on earth.

Today,

This battle is happening everywhere.

Everywhere,

The empire of oil,

Greed and numbness comes with its foul stench of corruption.

Yes,

We do have an enemy in this world,

But learning from our foreigners and the successful non-violent revolutions on earth the past decades,

We must always remember that the most potent enemy is in ourself.

Because our judgments and violence will not take us to the new era.

Our violent revolutions in the past only put new masters on top of the pyramid of power,

Just like in Soviet China or North Korea.

What we need to fight this enemy is love,

The strong confident love of the heart of a rebel.

Our true weapons are not guns,

But flowers.

Nothing scares the empire as when we,

As a collective,

Stop obeying and playing this rigged game.

This is what we realized in the 70s,

The flower-power generation that rose in the west and made ripples all across the world.

Ripples of peace and love.

But what happened with the hippies?

Why did the destruction not just continue but even increase as we saw the rise of individualism and corporate globalization?

I'm going to suggest that the movement died because of a lack of vision.

Just like how today's climate movement will die unless something changes.

The hippies knew that our way of living is harmful.

It's short-sighted and brings havoc and suffering across the globe.

Their protests eventually worked and the US pulled back their invasion from Vietnam.

But then what?

What was the hippie vision besides stopping the war?

And what is our vision today if we only protest against climate destruction?

What happens to our movement when the new laws are in place?

Will we go back into being an obedient citizen again,

Living in this rigged economy and all of these rigged systems?

As the climate movement merges with the movement for economic justice and we make a stand together,

United in our vision,

I don't think the movement will ever take us all the way to true freedom as a people.

After the end of the Vietnam War,

Most hippies got children and succumbed slowly to the comforts and cultural forces of obedience to the state and empire.

But when a flower blooms,

It can produce seeds.

And when you push these seeds down into the ground,

They will rise again,

Only even stronger this time.

And this is where we are now.

And where best to find inspiration on how to rebel against the empire than in the hearts of the people whose ancestors have been resisting it throughout history,

In the hearts of the natives of the Americas,

Africa,

Australia,

And their endless struggles against oppressing nations,

Claiming their land as their own.

Struggles that continue today with the freedom movement in the United States spearheaded by Martin Luther King,

The nonviolent rebellion in India with Gandhi,

And the fight against apartheid in South Africa.

Just a few years ago,

This same battle expressed itself as Standing Rock,

Where many Native American tribes came together to protest with civil disobedience against the oil pipeline that was about to be constructed across their ancestral lands and under the Missouri River.

This struggle,

This modern-day Ragnarok,

Is going on every day on earth,

Right now at mass protests against the Elende Gelende coal mine in Germany and the recent global protests outside parliaments by students.

Beside all these demonstrations,

We also need a vision,

A vision that unite us as one family,

Stewards of the earth,

Taking care of each other and the limited amount of land,

Water,

And resources that are available for us,

Sharing,

Creating,

Enjoying,

Playing,

Living a good life together in balance with earth and all beings here.

I'm going to ask a lot of you now.

I'm going to ask you to find your own vision.

How does Paradise Earth look like for you?

And how can you bring more of this rebellious spirit into your own life?

Where are your battles where you can take a stand for goodness,

Using all of the beautiful tools of nonviolent resistance that our collective wisdom has gathered over the past decades?

How can you resist the empire and the oppressive mind with your soul force,

Your satyagraha?

And how can you protect the tree of life from the raging fires of Ragnarok?

These are the questions I leave you with today.

And in the next session,

We're going to go even deeper and feel the living earth to find some answers.

Reviews

Namaste 🙏🏼
Thank you 💕

We need to level the Pyramid, Redistribution of Wealth, No more Billionaires. The 1% is a cancer upon this Earth & all Lives. Excellent talk, however, even the best intended revolution attracts ego maniacs that feed on power, so we must proceed wisely & with love. The human race needs to evolve.