The Spirit of the Empire and the Manufacturing of Tyrant-Slaves

The empire is lying. We are not slaves. The Creator is not a sadistic tyrant, our Ancestors love us and support us, and we are not slaves.

A personal thought

I am starting with the punchline. This story is a love song for my Ancestors. It is an ode to them.

Here is why. I have been living all my life as a bit of an outsider. Kinda awkward, kinda seeing things that others maybe didn’t see the same way. In the process of understanding myself and why I do things the way I do, I spent years thinking about my upbringing, my culture, my people, what they’ve gone through, their strength, their tears, the abuses, the pain.

It was the deified pain of the Russian culture that made me flee. It was the Russian “gloom as a standard of life” that made America an alluring home. I couldn’t take the gloom. Foreigners say, “Tolstoy this, Dostoyevsky that”—and I was very deeply into both of them as a teen (and Nabokov, too)—but jeez, the amount of “ordinary” and “expected” pain! (Life is full of irony, and once I came here, I found more pain in America than I’d ever experienced back home, but that’s a story for another day.)

Bottom line: It was the obsession of “noble martyrdom” that was driving me crazy. I couldn’t stand it. I objected to it on ideological and sensory grounds. I rebelled against it. I made a “little dogma” out of my rebellion! And this is how I lived my life, rebelling against mandatory pain. And then some time ago, something came to me that changed my entire life. I realized that I was only looking at the visible layer of reality, while things are much deeper and much more beautiful. I realized that the souls who lived on Earth as my Ancestors were engaged in God-endorsed evolution and getting things done, not in taking meaningless pain. The abuses they incurred weren’t weakness. There was heaven’s meaning in what they went through. All is healable. All gets healed. And they are looking at me, waiting for me to remember that they want me to have God-endorsed joy.

Interlude

I am a Russian American. I was born in Moscow and lived most of my adult life in the States. I think I know what it feels like to see the sole of the boot. I have also tasted a literal boot when I encountered a sex trafficker in Southern China, and he chose to beat me for several hours as others watched—but that’s a whole other story. That ugly plot is also connected to the spirit of the empire domination but still, it’s a story for another day. And that story comes with a prayer that the man who chose to beat me for several hours and tried to kidnap me is in a place where he can’t hurt anyone anymore.

My first empire

My first empire was of course the Russian empire, disguised as the USSR. Rural warmth and branded communist propaganda … the birch trees …. the patriotic songs ... the idea that everything good in life—including the beauty of the Russian land and the purity of people’s hearts—was owed, somehow, to the communist ideals!

That was my childhood. There was a popular song about the freedom of the people in the Motherland (Lyrics: “The Motherland is vast… it has lots of forests, fields, and brooks, and I don’t know of any other country in the world where the man can breathe as freely as the man breathes here….”) Then there was a mandatory, nation-wide first-grade reading exercise that went, “MY-NE-RABY, RABY-NE-MY” (“WE-ARE-NOT-SLAVES, SLAVE-ARE-NOT-US”). The idea was that we, the citizens of the Soviet Union, aka the honored workers and peasants, were all happy and free—while the American people living under capitalism were slaves. That is my interpretation of it anyway.

Wings growing inward. The boot, internalized

My people have suffered a lot. It’s been centuries. It’s been centuries of tyrannical rulers, forced reforms, wars, slavery, serfdom, and other shapes of the boot.

And so—the way I feel what happened—the people internalized “not knowing” how to get from under the boot. People learned to minimize pain by shrinking themselves. They learned to shrink parts of themselves so as not to cause additional pain—the pain that they would feel potentially if they tried to get from under the boot. And because the suppression of pain takes energy, and numbing one’s senses takes energy, too (i.e. it is “work”), spending energy on curbing one’s joy became “respected and noble work.”

When they had kids, they wanted to pass what they knew—and what they knew was how to contain themselves and how to make the hiding of their wings hurt the least. That is what they wanted their kids to know.

And so they said to their kids, "Don't dream too big. Don’t dream outside the norm! Life is hard. If you try to fly, someone will attack and burn your wings because in our unjust world, wings are not allowed. I love you, my baby, I love you so much, I don't want you to be eaten, so please hide your wings like I did. please, I beg you, hide your wings."

But the wings had to go somewhere!

And so, as the people were getting older, the wings were growing inward and interfering with their bodies, and they felt helpless and cried for their children to obey their rules and not do any illegitimate flying because they didn’t have the additional energy to worry about their children taking dangerous flight. They were already in pain! And they needed their children right there.

And this is how the parents and other loving adults became—to their own babies—the tyrant of a very confusing kind. This is how the parents—while trying their absolute loving best—became the empire.

They didn’t know they were the empire. They didn’t mean to be the empire. They had so much love that they would probably get mad if you told them they were the empire. By they were, in a way, the hurting-in-the-moment, love-bringing messengers of the empire.

A confusing mix and a Trojan horse

A human being can handle a lot of things when the things are clear. A human being can do loving things with the family, and a human being can do away with the foes.

But when the empire—the machine, the thief—comes in disguise, when it sneaks in and tries to cut the wings off through a wounded parent, or teacher, or partner, or friend, it’s a mighty Trojan horse.

And that is what the empire does. It tries to manufacture effective tyrant-slaves who pass the broken energy patterns on—from a place of fear, anger, pain, and love.

By the way, I am using the word “empire” kind of loosely, I could use any word: mob rule, the spirit of domination, tyranny, the machine—all those words refer to the same unfree energy pattern, to the same essential yoke.

Bitten by the empire: a wounded elder, an elder in self-defense

Something that was put in front of my face a lot in the course of my life—in different ways—is wounded elders, hurting elders, elders acting on the internal need to hiss and scare the juniors off their vulnerable spots. Elders in self-defense. I have not quite found an answer to that question other than if I am lucky to become a proper elder, I aim very strongly to find a whole way in each situation, to be so strong that there is no danger of indignity, to be so calm that I only apply self-defense when there is a true call for self-defense. I recognize that this is a high challenge, and I pray that my experience of being on the receiving end of this very confusing situation will alchemize into doing something different, something that makes healing easier, backward and forward—so yes, my changes start with me.

As a kid, it is from the wounded elders that I learned about pain and love. I felt them. It was the suffering of the wounded elders that pulled me into empathy—empathy for a suffering elder—which is how I first understood love as a child.

The generation of my grandparents was a strong generation, a harsh generation, a “get it done” generation, a “shoot ‘em bastards” generation, a generation that was lied to, used by the state with no mercy, and then thrown under the bus by the same state. The nation went to bed with praises of “communism” on its media lips, and woke up in the morning praising “capitalism,” leaving the elders’ sacred and sacrifices behind. In their old age, their values were all but devalued, and they were left with their aging and aching bodies—and with their spouses, kids and grandkids. Relatives and relationships (and resentment over the loss of real or perceived power) was the only thing they had left at the end of the day. An observer of long arcs by nature, it was not lost on me.

Elders, bitten by different empires, expressing a “hard self-defense” mode came up later in my life as well—each for their own reason, coming from their own internals and their own unique circumstance. The defense mode in the elders whom I had a heart for hurt me. I struggled with it. I didn’t quite understand.

And I still don’t have answers other than praying for wisdom, confidence, calmness, and the best understanding of love. We invoke the love and the clarity, we do our part with love and happy humility (which to me is the same thing as happy confidence in one’s goodness and lovability), and the Spirit clears the road and brings the solutions to make things whole .

The relationship between tyranny and pain

I believe that behind every choice that invokes the energy of tyranny, there is great pain (and it’s tough to deal with it and it’s not our job to fix it if the only accepted fix is retiring our wings.)

Yes, I believe that behind every choice that invokes the energy of tyranny, there is a great unresolved pain. I believe that it’s true even for the people who chose to cross over to the side of deliberate theft and rape—but that is a separate conversation, we are not talking about cold-blooded thieves and rapists here. We are talking about acts of tyranny expressed by the well-intended souls. We are talking about the people who are hurting and loving and accidentally siding with the empire.

Frequency of the empire

It is almost as if, once the empire bites a person, the perception falls off its healthy love, and the person goes on high alert and moves to the frequency of the empire.

The quest for freedom starts on the inside

I think here what the healing looks like.

Me, as me, in the first person, taking charge of where I am and moving myself completely off the frequency of the empire. Not just intellectually (which is not hard because the empire sucks) but on the cellular level. I am just not interested in the frequency of the empire. It exists, it exists as a learning experience, perhaps, but I don’t have to dance my life there.

At the same time, when good people act from a place of being bitten by the empire, it is helpful to have kindness about it and a realistic idea about whether at a given moment they are in a position to help me or teach me or support me on the terms that make sense to me—or not.

This can change, this is not set in stone, but it’s good to have a realistic idea. And if it’s not clear, we have our hearts that can pray to know.

All of this is our soul’s work. Soul’s work is never an algorithm—and it’s not an algorithm because we are co-creators of God’s universe and not anyone’s slaves. Our true nature, the way I feel it, is not of slaves.

Working on our inner coolness (which is helpful during the times of peace and during the times of war) is something that is within our power. We are not tyrants because we are not slaves.

We are not slaves to begin with, even if the empire is prancing around with big sharp teeth. We have no obligation to help the empire. We don’t need to perform acts of tyranny on anyone to free ourselves. We were born to be free. We are not slaves. All that is behind us now. We are not slaves.

Here is my beautiful grandfather.

And here is a heart prayer I recorded the other day.

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