By DailyFT Harmony page team
Colombo, May 23: In this world we have shaped today to be what it is, there still are human species who continue to live in the arms of nature, away from the centre of the ‘developed’ world.
One such community is the Kogi, the indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia who take seriously the duty they have inherited from thousands of generations to protect the mother we have all forgotten about; this earth.
The Kogi as a tribe fled to the high mountains to escape the Spanish colonizers who arrived in present-day Colombia in the 15th century and they have withstood attempts at religious conversion.
With much difficulty they have preserved their nature-based rites and rituals which they consider vital to carry out their mandate as healers and protectors of the earth.
They have been trying to warn the world of the impending disaster if we continued to treat the earth like we do. Even at the distance the Kogi are in, they have confronted the damage being done in the name of ‘development’ as their nature-sacred sites have been turned into arid farmland or concrete structures built upon these sites.
Lately, as of 2014, they too have been affected by landslides that have begun to occur even within the locations they live in.
The Kogi are not guilty of shunning their duty. They did their utmost. Twice they shed the nature-based isolation that is so important for them, to warn us of looming disease and disaster because we have cut and nailed and dug at the spinal cord of the earth and set off an imbalance which has tipped reactions such as floods, earthquakes, landslides and drought which we have now come to be immune to.
Warning to their ‘younger brother’
It is in 1989 that the Kogi first sounded their warning to their ‘younger brother’ as they call modern man. They appealed to the world to stop damaging the earth. In 1989 they warned of all the climatic abnormalities we have seen increasing over the past years. They also warned of new diseases that will take over the world which they said is caused by man changing the balance of the earth.
They allowed journalist Alan Ereira to make the BBC documentary – ‘From the Heart of the World: Elder Brother’s Warning’, just so the ‘Younger Brother’ would listen and understand as the Kogi, the Elder Brother, explained the heart and mind of nature and their own role.
Because Younger Brother, neither listened nor understood, again, in 2012, they summoned the same journalist struck by the fear of the truth they saw happening to the human race.
This time the leaders of the Kogi, the nature based spiritualists, called the Mamos, tried to take modern man into the very mind of the earth, called Aluna. They traveled to London to speak with scientists there. What they were talking about could be described as geomancy in modern parlance; the study of earth energies comprising both its physical and energetic aspects.
They showed how disturbances made by man to one location of the earth; say the top of a mountain, would affect another, far away, in the heart of the ocean. With the use of gold and black thread they tried to show the basic truth of connectivity and oneness of the fate that binds all of the earth and the well-being of all its creatures. The documentary made of this attempt is titled ‘Aluna (the Great Mother)’.
The spiritual leaders of the Kogi, the Mamos, go through stringent training in dark caves for years before they could connect with the water spirit which will guide them to the deepest mysteries of this earth. But they are helpless if some younger brothers, in their arrogance of so-called superior modern science do not listen to them.
In this documentary, pointing to the forests that surround them, the Kogi emphasize; “If this that you see were to dry up, you Younger Brothers would also die.”
Throughout the documentary we can see the exasperation of the Mamos as they confront ‘educated’ representatives of modern man; some who see their truth and some who don’t. The 2012 documentary is their mission to show how the inner body and the mind and consciousness of mother earth is being tortured by man to the point of no return.
The Kogi had painstakingly tried to show some of the core pressure points of the earth; we can call them the veins and arteries, and how these are connected through diverse species of trees and diverse creatures, which if made extinct, would mean the extinction of humans.
In one section of the documentary the Mamos, utterly fatigued by a non understanding scientist asks how it would be if someone spiked a rod into his body. To the Kogi as it is to many other indigenous people, the earth is a living, breathing entity who will return in kind to how it is treated.
We are today living out the prediction of the Kogi and the least that we could do now, each one of us, is to restore unto nature its due and try to reverse in whatever way we can the death of this earth.
It is too late but we have only this planet so we have no option.
References:
The Aluna documentary directed by Alan Ereira.
https://www.earth-speaks.net/post/2017/04/15/aluna-the-mind-in-nature
https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/10509
(Next week we hope to carry an in-depth understanding of the Kogi nature based spiritual values and beliefs which had been preserved despite attempts by the Spanish colonizers to convert them to Christianity In the weeks to come the Harmony page will continue to feature the importance of the wisdom of diverse indigenous tribes across the world, including the Veddha community in Sri Lanka, in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic that has crippled life as we knew it.)
