Original subtitles

When we're kids, we say that one day we'll explore the world.

Then we grow up and we forget our childhood dreams.

But for some reason, a friend and I were compelled to follow this dream.

This is the story we're about to tell you.

Kamea Meah presents

A movie made with no producer and no additives or preservatives

with the support of internet surfers everywhere.

That summer, I had gone to visit Marc in New York.

I hadn't seen him in 10 years,

and we had almost nothing in common.

I had just made a movie about water in India

and he was working in marketing,

trying to convince Americans to buy expensive bottled water.

But we hit it off like in the good old days,

playing in his grandmother's garden.

But this time, our playground? ... was Central Park.

In New York we lived the high life:

Top restaurants, clubs, a flat on Wall Street.

Marc was living the American Dream that everyone wants.

But he seemed out of place in that superficial world.

Before leaving, I gave him a bunch of documentaries to shake him up a bit,

the kind they show at night when you're asleep.

I was happy in my Manhattan 'bubble'. I had landed the job of my dreams.

I had no intention of watching Nathanael's movies!

But life called me to order.

One day, shooting hoops in the hallway I slipped and broke my foot.

I was stuck in bed,

so I ended up watching all those documentaries.

A child dies from hunger every 6 seconds while he could be fed

50000 living species disappear each year

97% of the economy is virtual and does not produce any wealth

85 people hold as much wealth as do 3.5 billion people.

I have to admit it was hard to go back to work after that,

especially as the financial crisis hit at that time.

That day, the whole world realized that the greed of a handful of people

was jeopardizing everyone's future.

I was sure the system was incapable of solving the problems it had created.

Selling water in New York, I was part of the problem.

But what could I do about it?

I was afraid I might become cynical or depressed.

So I decided to go looking for the answers to my questions,

with no idea what I was getting into.

Please keep your seat belt fastened while seated in case of turbulence.

A Quest for Meaning

At that time, I was presenting my film in New Delhi.

Marc turned up out of the blue.

He wanted to make a documentary about change.

A vast subject!

But watching him,

I thought surely we could build a project around him

and his eagerness to understand. So I started filming.

The earth can fulfill the needs of all,

but not the greed of one man alone.

After traveling for several days we met Anand,

an inventor of agricultural tools

that make life easier for farmers in the fields.

Anand and his wife provided tools for several ashrams.

Not a company quoted on the Stock Exchange!

But these collective work centers we’re revitalizing the local economy,

which had suffered after the closing of the mines.

Kodak style!

Yeah, perfect!

Looks quite professional.

Our visit to Anand and Prema made us want to know more

about Gandhi and his views on economics.

So we enrolled in a seminar called Gandhi and Globalization

organized by Dr. Vandana Shiva.

She had succeeded in having several multinationals sentenced

at the court in The Hague.

I had seen her in Nathanael's documentaries

and I was eager to meet her.

The second speaker at the seminar was Satish Kumar.

In his youth he had participated in Gandhi's agricultural reform

and had then done a 12000 km pilgrimage against the atomic bomb.

What really made me think during this seminar

was learning that the simple act of exchanging seeds was now illegal.

Here, as elsewhere,

major seed firms had got a law passed prohibiting the use of local seeds.

They had then put hybrid seeds and GMOs on the market,

making farmers dependent on the fertilizers and pesticides they sell.

Since the passing of this bill,

more than 250,000 Indian farmers have gone into debt and committed suicide.

"Go from being a consumer to being a creator-producer."

At that point I realized I had no idea how to make anything with my hands

and I didn't even know how nature works.

But suddenly, working in the fields or molding clay

seemed much more gratifying than filling out Excel spreadsheets

to please my boss!

Until then,

I had always hated preachy environmental politics.

But meeting people who were fighting for the respect of life

and for the dignity of the weak,

that was different.

They weren't in it for personal gain, or fame and fortune.

And I soon discovered why.

Like Gandhi, their actions were guided by strong spiritual values.

The idea behind my trip with Nathanael

had been to make a movie about alternative lifestyles.

But in a few days,

these people had changed my entire perception of the world,

the economy,

nature, and even my idea of progress.

Without even knowing it, they had reformatted my hard disk.

I definitely hadn't understood all about Eastern spirituality

or Gandhi's vision of economics.

But suddenly,

Western society's superiority complex seemed absolutely absurd.

We've been blinded by progress and technology.

We've lost sight of what's important.

The man who wants to learn must read first,

then travel, and rectify what he's learnt.

We should put this shot in the film, just for the heck of it, you know...

When we got back,

we holed up to watch the interview footage.

I had also been surprised by the stories we'd heard.

The men and women we had met we’re tackling the root of the problem.

For them, it's impossible to resolve today's crises

without questioning the materialistic mentality

that created them.

Some people in France

have reached the same conclusion, such as Pierre Rabhi.

This philosopher-turned-farmer

has transformed some rocky land in the Cevennes

into a natural oasis and organic farm.

"I was 20 years old, and Modernity seemed to be a fraud."

Well, I was 29 when that happened to me!

It took me a bit longer.

Modernity is supposed to liberate human beings, but in fact

we see exactly what modernity does to human beings.

From kindergarten to university we're locked indoors.

Then, everyone works in an office cubicle.

For fun we go to another sort of cubicle.

We get there in a 'moving cubicle' and end up in our final cubicle: A coffin.

As a life experience, it's not very liberating!

We spend a large part of our lives

confined in tiny spaces.

Once in a while, we go skiing to get a bit of fresh air.

Then in the summer, we sunbathe to get some air,

to have a bit of contact with life.

I think it's terrible!

Now I'm not judging anyone.

This is my own personal grievance with the great deception of Modernity,

which claims to be improving the human condition

but is in fact destroying it

and pillaging the planet.

And as a result of that realization,

my wife Michelle and I decided

not to accept that model of life.

What that means

is looking for a way out of this groundless existence that people have

and this disconnection from the real foundation of life.

The real foundation of life is in nature.

We ourselves are nature.

So we turned to organic farming,

which for me was like a rite of initiation.

Since I began on this path,

I have learned to observe life.

Observation leads us to recognize the power of life

and indeed the mystery of life.

Take a tomato seed, for example; a tiny, insignificant seed.

You put it in the ground and it gives you kilos of tomatoes!

Something has happened here.

There is a kind of intelligence in the world.

The seed doesn't have a brain

but there is an intelligence orchestrating all of this,

orchestrating this symphony, this harmonization of it all.

The problem is that we're disconnected from that intelligence.

We've chosen a mechanistic intelligence instead, based on reason.

We proclaim ourselves to be the best,

the masters, the dominators, the owners of life.

But it's not as if the elephants and dolphins have voted on it!

We've simply decided this ourselves.

So we're really in the dark.

For Pierre Rabhi, it's this separation of man from nature

that has led us to 'commodify' our world.

We went to see sociologist and philosopher Frédéric Lenoir

to understand how all this came about.

Man was separated from nature very long ago.

The turning point was the shift from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic,

the shift away from a nomadic society

of hunter-gatherers who lived as part of nature.

They believed in spirits and invisible forces

that they had to be in harmony with.

They respected nature.

While hunting, a man would pray for the soul of his prey

and believed that in doing so he was making an offering to nature.

All of this changed when man became sedentary in the Neolithic.

Man separated himself from nature to go live in villages, then towns,

and he began to dominate nature.

From that moment onwards, we went from harmony with nature

to the domination of it.

Nature was seen as a means to serve the needs of the city,

to provide it with natural resources.

During this process, over several millennia,

reason became more important to Man than intuition,

and other qualities, like the heart

and the way our bodies connect us to nature.

Reason became overly dominant.

This led to the separation of Man from the world he lives in.

Later, during the Judeo-Christian age,

Man developed an extreme form of rationalization

in which nature was no longer an enchanted garden,

but rather a place that Man could use and dominate, as Genesis says,

and progressively pillage.

Descartes made this ideology almost sacrosanct with his famous phrase:

"Man must become the master of Nature."

The world is seen as an inert mechanism

that Man can make use of.

It is the total domination of the mind and of reason over nature.

Today we can see the limits

of this way of thinking.

The disastrous consequences on the environment,

the fact that Westerners have lost touch with their bodies,

have problems handling their emotions etc.

So people want to rediscover

that harmony with their bodies and with nature.

At that point, my goal was not so much to reconnect with my body and nature,

but rather to reconnect with the work place

and the world of business.

The hail shows that Nature is annoyed.

Nature is not happy.

Not happy at all.

We've really screwed up, guys!

My old employer was offering me a position

in Sustainable Development.

If I hadn't met all those people, I'd have accepted.

But accepting would make me feel I were denying everything they'd said.

The truth was, I wasn't sure of anything anymore.

We had started down a certain path.

It was difficult to stop there.

We wanted to learn more about the disconnect between man and nature,

body and spirit.

So we decided to go to Central America

to see the keepers of the old civilizations

and their vision of the world.

The earth does not belong to man, it's man that belongs to the earth.

In southern Mexico we met Dr. Navarro, who told us about

the great civilizations of Central America.

After warning us about scams involving shamans and psychotropic drugs,

he insisted that we meet Tenoch,

a healer who helps the indigenous communities

preserve their traditions.

This is more the age of alienation than the age of crisis.

Those people have changed our minds

and put our senses to sleep.

When the tsunami hit,

not one animal died: They all ran to the mountains.

They knew what was coming.

Why didn't man know? Well, he was watching TV!

We've lost the ability to observe

and to foresee events through observation.

Change is coming, that's very obvious, and it's coming strongly.

This is why we have to start changing our way of thinking

and begin vibrating at a higher frequency.

- How do we change the way we think? - To change our way of thinking,

stop thinking about what we don't want.

Your mind doesn't know if you want the things you are thinking about or not.

By thinking of something, you make it manifest.

So all we have to do is change our negative thoughts

to positive thoughts.

If we don't want war, we have to stop thinking about war.

We have to think about peace.

If we don't want disease, we have to stop thinking about disease.

We have to think about health.

Think about what you want to happen in the world,

in your life, in your actions, and in your words.

The change that is coming begins with us.

We have to start by changing ourselves,

so we can embrace the change when it comes.

We have to set an example

with our words and our actions.

Don't harm others. Be real, be honest.

Be who you really are.

Don't hide behind masks or...

...or facades, you know?

When you enter the Temazcal, you undress, right?

You bare not only your body, but also your soul, your essence.

According to Tenoch, our civilization is undergoing profound change,

brought about by the transformation of each individual.

This was all a bit abstract for us,

so Tenoch sent us to see his friend Marzo,

who was organizing a Temazcal ceremony that week.

It's a kind of Mexican sauna meant to purify the body and the mind.

We decided to give it a try.

We can't turn up like Conquistadors.

We should stop filming for now.

But if he's connected he knows we're coming.

He'll be expecting us.

Modern man

separates himself

when...

when he loses sight of the fact

that he is one with everything,

that his very Self is an integral part of the whole cosmos.

If Man has no cosmic identity, he turns into a robot,

a mechanical being,

a being that...

does things without thinking

and acts out of habit.

Man won't last much longer like this.

No one could.

The end result of all this is madness.

People just go crazy.

We know that our strength does not lie in military arms

or in scientific progress,

but rather...

in the respect and love we show to our Mother Earth.

This is why we believe in ceremonies.

The Temazcal is like a place of communion,

a bath of purification.

A place where

we transform all our emotions

and leave behind whatever we don't want.

We come out like a new born.

The Temazcal is a gift from life.

A gift of love.

Our experience in the Temazcal was surprising, to say the least.

It was at least 70°C in that hut.

I couldn't leave.

To stay inside, I had to let myself go

and cling to the cool earth in order to breathe.

As we listened to the chanting, painful episodes of my life surfaced.

I had to face my fears

and all those 'deals' we make with ourselves

that keep us from being whole.

It was like a deep, internal cleansing.

Nathanael and I left that hut feeling calm and joyful.

We're not just bodies living a spiritual experience.

We are actually spiritual beings living a human experience,

a material experience.

- Thank you so much. - You're welcome, my brother.

After our stay in Chiapas,

I started asking myself some strange questions about my true identity

and how the universe works.

According to Eastern philosophies and indigenous traditions,

it's a bit like 'Matrix'.

The reality that surrounds us is an illusion

perceived by our five senses

and decoded by our brain.

The body would be merely a vehicle

allowing the soul to experience the material world.

By this point, our film was totally going off the rails!

But this theme of self-awareness was too exciting for us to stop exploring.

So we went to see a mystic,

to ask her our questions about the nature of reality.

Welcome to the documentary 'Plan B'!

Ladies and gentlemen, broadcasting all the way from Lake Atitlan!

You think that's good?

I should speak in Spanish, not English, right?

- Or in English? - Better in Spanish, no?

Yes, because my English is really bad!

The thing is, we see only one side of Creation.

This is a characteristic of human beings.

We see only what is visible. Let's put it like that.

But there's a whole other side that is invisible,

that can only be seen with the eyes of the soul.

You have to open your heart and open your mind

in order to allow this level of perception.

There are spiritual paths,

therapies, yoga, meditation,

and many other things there to help us awaken to a more subtle reality.

For example, this lake:

If we come to the lake early in the morning

we can see the bottom.

Why? Because the lake is totally calm,

so you can see the bottom very easily.

What if you come in the afternoon?

There are waves on the water that prevent you from seeing the bottom.

What do we see when we apply this example to human beings?

Our minds are full of thoughts:

'Should I do this? Should I do that? '

'Maybe I should. Maybe not. Should I stay? Should I go? '

This endless blah-blah-blah in your mind, right?

This happens to us all.

Meditation is there to reduce this endless blah-blah-blah

and calm the mind,

so that you can experience the state of silence that is inside you.

We are all one. There is no division.

What happens is that human beings see things in fragments.

When we enter the dimension of time and space, everything gets divided.

We see the past, present and future.

We see one person and another then we divide everything.

The only thing that really exists is Unity.

But we are not aware of it.

We stopped for a while to see what was behind this blah-blah of the mind.

We took up meditation,

fasting, and yoga —

and some of those yoga postures were painful!

But with a bit of practice,

we managed to observe all those

uncontrollable thoughts that poison our lives.

Getting off automatic pilot and staying in the present moment,

without judgment or expectations.

The ocean contains many drops.

If we take a drop of water out of the ocean,

each one contains the same elements

as the open ocean.

The ocean is the universal mind we sometimes call 'God',

or 'Energy'.

Inside every person, there is some of this divine element.

Inside you, and him, and me. Inside all of us. You see?

Our mission is to unify ourselves with this divine element.

When we arrived in San Francisco

we left our bags at Liat's place, whom we'd met in Guatemala.

With our very rational way of thinking

we needed to compare the teachings of the ancient sages

with a scientific understanding of the world.

So we went to a conference in the area

to meet the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan

and ask him some questions.

Science may be able to explain the world,

but it will never be able to give it meaning.

Twentieth-century science

has only just discovered, or rediscovered,

what Buddhism has been telling us for 2500 years,

namely the concept of interdependence.

Everything is connected.

Science has taught us since the 1950s

that we're all made of star dust; we're children of the stars.

In fact, all the atoms in our bodies

are made from the nuclear reactions of the stars.

If it weren't for the stars, we wouldn't even exist.

So we're interdependent with the stars and the cosmos.

There's another kind of interdependence

that has been shown to us by quantum mechanics,

the physics of the infinitely small.

This concept states that if two particles have interacted,

even if you separate them by two million light years

they will still remember having interacted.

What you do to one particle affects the other instantly

with no communication of information between them.

This means reality has to be seen as a global entity,

rather than a local entity, you see.

So once again this means that we're all connected to one another,

that everything is interdependent.

The conclusion I draw from this is that

Science is not the only way to observe reality.

There are other windows onto reality,

such as spirituality, in this case Buddhism.

I think the great sages such as Christ or the Buddha,

who saw things common mortals don't see, have much to teach us.

And great poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, they too

tell us a great deal about reality.

So I think

it's arrogant to say Science alone can give us access to reality.

Perfect, thank you so much.

If Science confirms that we are all interdependent,

then destruction of the environment, wars and famines

seem even more absurd.

Not far from San Francisco, the Institute of Noetic Sciences

has studied human consciousness for the past 40 years.

Cassandra Vieten, the Director of the Institute,

introduced us to a whole new perspective.

Listening to Cassandra in the woods,

I realized the beliefs I had built my life on

had collapsed during this journey.

New theories had replaced them,

like the gut feeling that the world is more than just physical,

or that chasing money and status blinds us to what is really important.

The problem was that these new beliefs

were out of sync with the world around me.

We're surrounded by messages inciting us to consume and pollute.

I was becoming a bit schizophrenic!

It was time to see a specialist.

So we made an appointment with Dr. Bruce Lipton

to understand how collective beliefs take shape.

All of the activists, shamans, and scientists we had met

had spoken of the dawn of a new civilization,

conscious of its interdependence

and more in harmony with life.

The Derwaes family that we had met in India

had already begun creating this new civilization.

In a 400m2 garden,

right in the middle of Los Angeles,

they produce three tonnes of organic fruit and vegetables a year

joyfully and with positivity.

You don't need a pair of Gucci sunglasses

to enjoy a beautiful sunset.

That's what really makes you happy.

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come.

When Marc and I returned to France,

we were sure that a change was taking place.

All over the planet, citizens we’re aspiring to create a new world.

But then the momentum stalled, the revolutions were stifled,

and the feeling of discontent resumed.

We wondered what was stopping this new page from turning.

Our friends leading regular lives thought we were dreamers.

We had no professional aspirations,

and no one to produce our film.

We felt a bit out of touch.

We dug a bit deeper

and finally understood what was stopping that page from turning.

On Terre à Terre, the environmental program,

we're exploring the links between ecology and politics

with Hervé Kempf, journalist for the newspaper Le Monde and writer.

Democracy is in such a degraded state

that we need to ask ourselves

if we haven't slipped into a kind of oligarchy

in which a handful of people determine the fate of the entire population

on fundamental issues.

The oligarchs are democratic between themselves,

they deliberate between themselves,

but once the decision is made

and they've adopted their belief system and value code,

they put them into play.

Because of course they control most of the mass media.

They own the main TV channels, big newspapers and radio stations.

The trouble is that these values they hold

are completely incompatible with the fundamental problem we're faced with,

namely the worldwide environmental crisis.

Capitalism has had its day.

It's an old system

that has outlived its glory days.

Its dynamism and energy had many positive aspects,

it would be absurd to deny that,

but it has passed its prime now, like other systems before it.

It's rotting, falling apart, collapsing.

So the way I see it,

we're in a period of historic transition.

We are moving into a new age, a new phase of history.

But will we succeed in creating a form of post-capitalism

that is ecological and fair,

that is preoccupied with the freedom and dignity of human beings,

that can build a new relationship

between our now-united human society and the biosphere?

Or will we end up with a totalitarian post-capitalist regime,

in which the oligarchy becomes more and more authoritarian,

enforcing its will violently?

That's the big question and I don't know...

I can't say which direction it will take.

Should I put this sentence in the section before?

- That's totally kick-ass! - Yeah, that's not bad.

They'll understand that you've been conditioned.

For Hervé Kempf,

the rise of finance and multinationals has taken its toll on democracy.

Instead of addressing real issues, like environmental destruction

and unequal distribution of wealth,

the experts in the media continue repeating the same three messages:

1. Neo-liberalism is the best system there is.

There is no other alternative.

2. The world is in trouble but there's nothing you can do to change it.

Leave it to the experts.

3. Growth and technology will solve all of humanity's problems.

Consume and have fun. Everything is under control.

We had to go back to our interview footage

to find what might help to unblock this transition.

We're too dependent on political parties and so on,

these kinds of 'clans' that exist today.

But politics today isn't in sync with the reality of the world,

not at all.

We've been trying to keep this mess going for a very long time now,

desperately trying to support a system that's dead.

It's already dead.

It can't provide work for everyone, it can no longer...

It's already dead and yet we insist on keeping it alive.

Meanwhile, civil society is finding innovative new alternatives.

But to innovate, we have to abandon those fundamental ideologies

based on unlimited profit and unlimited growth.

We have to give that up.

If we create this new civilization -

what I call the 'moderation civilization',

the elegance of moderation -

then we have a future.

The planet's resources are bountiful.

Look at the abundance in my garden. Sometimes it's even too much!

So Nature isn't the problem here.

Everything we need for a new world is right here,

but this new world will never arrive

if we don't give up the ideology that underpinned the old world.

That's all I can say about it.

We don't call it the 'fight against violence'.

We can't touch the aggressors if we 'fight against violence'.

There's no one to fight.

We prefer a 'good treatment campaign'.

Let go of our old ways of seeing things,

step outside the box,

find new solutions based on new values.

That's the way of Mariane Sébastien, whom we met at a forum.

For 20 years now,

she has been working with marginalized people in Bolivia,

combining personal development with entrepreneurial programs.

This approach has created a society

based on non-violence among the poorest social classes.

- Shall I sit here? - Sure, there's fine.

There's a lot to be done.

We need people to witness the fact that anything is possible, right now.

You don't need to have read all the books

or developed all the theories on global warming.

Love is what warms us. That's our internal climate.

Let love do the work!

When you think about it,

all that time spent making dramatic assessments of the situation,

that takes a lot of time, I can tell you.

How much time has been spent actually putting solutions into action

or doing things that transform the world immediately?

When you live with children who die

— and kids dying is not how things are supposed to be —

or with people who have been exploited in the mines for generations,

the only thing that matters is joy.

All that matters is laughter.

If I had not laughed and sung with hundreds of prisoners,

or people living on the streets in Bolivia,

Voix Libres would not exist.

So...

it's not down to me, because laughter

and love are in each person's heart,

waiting to be uncovered.

Life has wrapped our hearts in a soggy piece of paper

and the fire can't catch.

A developmental specialist once told me he'd never seen

an NGO or a charity

that bases all of its programs on interiority.

For me, outer development cannot exist without inner development,

so let's stop and give people alternatives.

Let's transform people, unlock their potential,

so they have self-confidence and feel like worthwhile human beings.

- Perfect, we have to keep that. - Of course, you can keep that.

All over the world, ordinary people are changing their internal software.

Their actions are guided by feelings of altruism and sharing.

Like the immune system of our diseased society,

they're living proof that a simpler world is well on the way.

This is why we have to unite, like we're uniting today.

For the first time ever, people are here from all five continents

and from all races.

Indigenous peoples,

peasants

and city folk.

This is my message to the world, all the way from the Amazon.

Thank you.

We had everything we needed for the film.

For the editing, we went to stay with some friends

who were renovating a barn in Southern France.

So his conclusion is that competition is killing us, in fact.

We can finish with that.

So that's the end of the first part.

So if we build a whole new system and its institutions

on these values and this perception of the world,

on this relationship to the world,

we create a different world.

After all this, I felt much richer on the inside,

but that didn't matter much to my bank manager.

My parents were starting to worry.

And there was a huge, gaping hole in my resumé.

For my part, I was starting to wonder

how to find a job with meaning.

So we went to ask

my orientation counselor, Satish Kumar,

who teaches at Schumacher College in England.

When I ran away from New York to make this film,

I wanted to change the world,

but the world has changed me.

During our trip meeting human beings,

rediscovering nature,

and decolonizing my mind,

I found some answers to my questions.

But most of all, I found joy.

If I learned one thing from all these encounters,

it's that to make a better world

we have to change our vision,

but for this change to happen, we all have to evolve and grow,

because the real revolution is on the inside.

Produced by Kamea Meah and 963 Co-Producers

Distributed by Kamea Meah and by spectators everywhere

Traduction: Sandra Laville, Le Joli Mai, Véronique marine Lathuillière