A Reflection on Sovereignty, Power and the Return to True Nature

Consider, for a moment, the Highland Clearances. Between 1750 and 1860, across the mountains and glens of Scotland, an entire people were removed from land they had inhabited for thousands of years. Not by conquest in the battlefield sense. Not by plague or famine alone. But by legal instrument. By the signature of landlords who had reframed ancient communal tenure as private property, and by the systematic dismantling of a way of life so rooted in place, in kinship and in the rhythms of the natural world, that to remove the people from the land was, in the deepest sense, to remove them from themselves. They were not simply made homeless. They were made into a different kind of human being: dependent, displaced and stripped of the sovereign relationship with the Earth that had defined their identity for generations. The tragedy of the Clearances is not only historical. It is a template. It is what the removal of sovereignty looks like when it is carried out efficiently, legally and with the full apparatus of civilised authority behind it. And it is still happening. The geography has changed. The instruments have been refined. But the intention is the same.

If all human activity stopped tomorrow, suddenly the world would be very quiet. A great stillness would descend. Only the heartbeat of the Earth and the rhythms of nature would continue. They would be in harmony: the Way of things, the dharma, the natural order flowing from true nature.
What we have today is far from that natural order. Everything is human made: busy, greedy, driven by the lust for power and domination. A bloodthirsty desire for technocratic domination of the natural order: a so-called new world order.

The remedy is a return to a Natural World Order, not a New World Order: a return to a sovereign way of life, not the life of a slave. A slave to a human created system, dominated by a few within a global Cabal: a self-elected secret elite, a society unto themselves, who presume to decide everything for the world. It is this select few who are determining the shape of everything that is now unfolding. Their strategy, as in a game of chess, is to take the opponent’s king. Their plan is to remove your natural sovereignty: your freedom is their opponent, the piece they move against. These self-selected few act as kings of the world, dominating the chessboard. To them it is all a game of power. The real suffering of human life is inconsequential. The weight and significance of your life means nothing to them.

And yet this is not new. Every empire in human history has operated by the same mechanism. Rome did not simply conquer territories; it dismantled indigenous legal, spiritual and communal structures and replaced them with Roman ones. The British Empire did not simply occupy lands; it systematically delegitimised the sovereignty of the peoples it encountered, reframing their relationship to land, to spirit and to one another as primitive, as superstition, as something to be civilised out of existence. The mechanism is always the same. First, convince the people that their innate authority is not real. Second, replace it with a system of authority that requires their dependence. Third, make that dependence feel like freedom. What is new in our time is only the scale and the sophistication. The digital infrastructure of surveillance, the financialisation of every aspect of human life, the colonisation of attention itself: these are the Clearances of the interior. They do not remove you from your land. They remove you from your self.

So in this game of chess, the counter move is not to play by their rules. You do not take their king by mirroring their strategy of domination. You step off the board. A player who refuses the game cannot be checkmated. The remedy unfolds across every square of the board, yes, but it begins with the single most disruptive move available: the withdrawal of your consent, your complicity, your surrendered sovereignty. Starve the game of its pieces and the board becomes meaningless.

How, you might ask? What is the counter strategy? How does one prevent one’s freedom from being taken, one’s innate sovereignty: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual? By standing in one’s freedom, across every domain and every plane of human reality, asserting one’s natural sovereign rights: spiritual, mental, emotional and physical. A new world order born to serve the many: one that truly benefits all beings and the Earth itself, where sovereign creativity thrives and the desire to dominate is starved, not the people.

Here the great contemplative traditions converge. Not as abstract philosophy, but as living maps of this precise territory. In the Pratyabhijna tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, the root problem of human suffering is described as anava mala: the contraction of consciousness into the belief that it is small, limited and dependent. The entire tradition is oriented toward a single recognition, called pratyabhijna: the recognition of one’s own true nature as the unconditioned ground of all experience. Not a belief to be adopted. Not a doctrine to be accepted. A direct seeing. In the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the same recognition is called rigpa: pure awareness knowing itself, prior to the movements of thought, prior to the constructed self, prior to the game and its board.

Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth century Christian mystic, called it the ground of the soul, the Grunt: a depth in the human person so intimate, so prior to all conditioned identity, that it cannot be owned, controlled or colonised by any external power whatsoever. These traditions did not arrive at this convergence by talking to one another. They arrived at it by looking, with rigorous honesty, at the nature of consciousness itself. What they found was the same thing. At the deepest level of what you are, you have never been a subject of any kingdom but your own.

A tidal wave of global sovereignty that starts within. Physical sovereignty originates in spiritual sovereignty. That is why this is both a physical and, ultimately, a spiritual warfare. Your physical sovereignty is easily removed, but your spiritual sovereignty you have to give away. Ultimately, you are more powerful than you have been told, educated or permitted to be.
This is perhaps the most radical claim in this reflection and it deserves to be sat with rather than passed over. You have to give your spiritual sovereignty away. It cannot be taken. Not by a government, not by a corporation, not by a surveillance apparatus of any sophistication. The only instrument powerful enough to remove your spiritual sovereignty is your own belief that it has already been removed. This is precisely why the system requires your consent, your internalised unworthiness, your trained smallness.

The Highland crofter who believed the landlord’s framing, that the land belonged to the landlord, that the crofter’s ancient relationship to it was merely a privilege to be revoked, was already cleared before the eviction notice arrived. The clearing happened first in consciousness. It always does. Which means the return must happen there first as well.
When the time comes that your spiritual sovereignty, your innate spiritual freedom, is being challenged under life-threatening conditions, when your light, like a candle flame, faces extinction, then you will know the internal luminous nature of consciousness, your true nature. In that recognition, you will have remembered your true and natural sovereignty on Earth.
So what does this look like, not in the abstract, not in some imagined future, but today, in the ordinary hours of an ordinary life?

On the physical plane it begins with the simplest acts of reclamation. Growing something, however small. Choosing silence over noise. Stepping outside and placing your feet on the ground. Withdrawing your attention, even briefly, from the systems designed to capture and monetise it. Each of these acts, however modest, is a declaration. It says: I am not only a consumer, a unit of productivity, a node in a network. I am a living being in relationship with the Earth and that relationship is sovereign.

On the emotional plane it means learning to notice, without immediately reacting, the fear and the anger that the system is very deliberately designed to produce in you. The Buddha understood this with absolute clarity. He said that holding onto anger is like carrying a hot coal in the hand with the intention of throwing it at someone else. The only person being burned is you. Anger, when it arises from a sense of violated sovereignty, is understandable, even righteous in its origin. But it must be felt, recognised and released, not acted from. To act from anger is to hand your sovereignty to the very force that provoked it.

On the mental plane it means cultivating discernment. The capacity to see clearly what is true, what is manufactured, what is fear and what is fact. It means reading widely and deeply. Sitting with difficulty and complexity rather than reaching for the comfort of a simple story. Asking, always: who benefits from my believing this? Holding your own conclusions lightly, not from weakness but from the strength of genuine inquiry.

On the spiritual plane it means returning, daily, to the ground that has never been cleared. Whatever your tradition, whatever your practice, the movement is always the same: from the noise of the constructed self back to the awareness that holds it. Even five minutes of genuine stillness, of simply sitting and allowing everything to be as it is, is an act of profound sovereignty. It is a refusal to be wholly defined by the urgent, the reactive and the manufactured.

And underlying all of these planes, binding them together, is the quality your true nature already is and always has been: peace. Not the peace of passivity or defeat. Not the peace of having surrendered. But the peace that the Kashmir Shaivite masters called the natural vibration of consciousness itself: the Spanda, the pulse at the heart of all arising. When all human activity stops and the Earth breathes again, when the rivers run clear and the birds return and the silence descends, what remains is not emptiness. It is that peace. It was always there, beneath the noise. It is what you are made of.

This is why the return to sovereignty must be a peaceful one. Not because peace is weakness, but because peace is the only ground strong enough to build anything real upon. A sovereignty born from rage mirrors the very domination it seeks to dismantle. A sovereignty rooted in peace, in the clear recognition of one’s true nature, is unassailable. You cannot fight what does not resist you. You cannot colonise what has already come home to itself.

So return. Not once, not dramatically, but daily, quietly, persistently. Return to the body. Return to the breath. Return to the Earth beneath your feet. Return to the awareness that has never left. That is the revolution that cannot be legislated against, surveilled, financialised or cleared. It begins in the stillness, it moves as a tidal wave and it ends, as all things end and begin, in peace.

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© Hosshin Ananda​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​