2025 #1: Are You Ready for an Adventure of Learning?!
A new dawn, a new year, a new you…
Dear Friend
I wish you a stupendous New Year!
Let’s make 2025 a brilliant year for ourselves and for humankind. It’s OUR efforts that count, because we can’t be anybody else but ourselves. It’s all in how you C life: allow yourself to live with curiosity, courage, compassion and confidence by simply choosing to do so.
If you think courage and confidence are more difficult, then focus first on being curious about the world and people around you, and focus on being compassionate for all human beings… because in today’s world it’s quite the struggle for so many of us and we all need compassion and understanding. Compassion and curiosity will naturally trigger courage and confidence. But if you carry compassion for others, then guess what? You are carrying the energy of compassion inside your own being. That can only be a good thing.
C your way to a better life!
In this first Letter for 2025 I want to share with you what the content of this year’s Letters will be, how I will deliver the content, and the framework and format of each Letter. All in all I can confidently state that to find all this elsewhere means you’ll have to find another needle in the haystack…!
So, hold onto this needle tightly!
Delivering a new kind of Letter!
First of all, my new ‘posting’ day for each week’s Letter is Saturday. I also hope to be much more streamlined in my work this year, so it should always come to you on Saturday. Anybody west of Thailand will find the Letter in their inbox upon waking up and getting online.
I am also going to offer each Letter on my YouTube channel, probably on the Mondays. I will record each Letter onto a video and post that up.
So…
It’s a new year and I have a new format and approach I will be adopting for these Letters in 2025. I want to make them better fit the way I do education in my classrooms. I could write reams on that, but I will share one key foundation to what I consider to be empowering education, which for me is the only antidote to the disempowering education that school systems are still perpetuating.
Dreadful education got us into our collective mess, and only a motivating and rewarding education can get us out of it.
And that makes perfect, obvious sense: if an education is disempowering us, we need a different kind of education to empower us, to rid ourselves of the negative consequences of the first (so-called) education. Since it is rotten schooling that disempowers 99% of humankind, we need a life-affirmative education to undo the damage and to empower ourselves.
It means parents, teachers, educators, leaders, and all world helpers and lovers of life need an education that trains them how to educate and empower themselves before they can empower the children and each other. I look at empowerment as a baton of goodness to be passed on from one to another. Empowerment comes from the right mindset and making certain key skills central to one’s life.
Here is the very basis for my approach to empowering education, which I use for both adults and adolescents. I am more recently discovering that it also works for younger children. But my main experience is with ages 16 and up.
My mantra goes like this:
I don’t bring you the answers, I bring you questions for you to find your own answers. Then I share my own answers for my students and we then see how they compare.
The italics are important.
My questions are important.
When I train teachers I tell them that asking ‘pertinent’ questions is a core skill they need to practise and develop. I hear so many questions being asked of politicians and public figures, and by media people, which are off-point, disrespectful, divisive, useless and so on. The quality of our answers, and our understanding of life, is dependent upon the quality of our questions.
And that means asking ourselves questions as well as others.
I should point out that questions are discouraged and frowned upon in schools. Children soon learn there’s a price to pay for asking questions, and so they stop. That is the end of any chance of quality learning.
And this usually means it shuts us down from asking ourselves questions. This is a serious blockage to learning. And learning is the #1 skill we human beings need to lead a healthy, rewarding life.
For you to find your own answers on topic X or issue Y during 2025, I am asking you in the Letters to reflect upon your own experiences in life, your own understandings, your own know-how and existing knowledge, your own contemplations, and to then express them to others. I will bring you questions designed to raise your awareness of what you know and what you don’t know.
This is the fundamental basis and starting point of true, transformative and empowering human education. You, as an adult, will likely be immensely surprised to find out just how much you know and how intelligent you naturally are! But best of all, you will spot the gaps in your knowledge, and then seek out understandings to fill the gaps. This is the basis for self-growth, and for aligning yourself with your true nature. This is your empowering, your flowering, your transformation, your healing, the healing of the human world.
For this kind of education to work in my classrooms means that I have started out with all new groups by ensuring I have created an emotionally supportive and mutually respectful environment in the classroom. In this heart-friendly space, everybody feels free to express themselves, articulate their understandings and explore life without fear of being made to feel bad or stupid for their ideas and thoughts. Furthermore, everybody discovers they are keen to listen and learn from each other.
It is heart-centred learning. We are human feelings just as much as we are human beings, and if our feelings are negative we will struggle to learn anything at all.
What this means is that I’m offering an education that asks students to lean on their own experiences of life so far, and to compare their understandings and perspectives with those of their peers, and myself.
This runs counter to the way we are brought up and ‘educated’. We are told to downplay our own role in life, to never ‘boast’, to not talk about ourselves, to listen to the experts and to find all the important knowledge from the books and from others, not ourselves. We always refer and defer to others, and assume they know better than we.
In this way, and many other ways, we are denied any real chance of self-exploration, and hence we are suppressed from even finding out who we really are.
It’s tragic education.
My mission is to promote magic education.
Your own mind is your own centre of the universe. If you don’t know your mind, you don’t know the universe. And in today’s world ignorance does not reward us, it punishes us. You must know about your own mind, who you are and how life works. This is our whole objective for 2025; more on this content below.
But to sum up so far, what does all this mean?
It means that with each Letter you will find questions and/or tasks to accompany the reading. Don’t dodge the questions and tasks! The time you spend on them will amply reward you.
They are designed to get you thinking and reflecting, and to raise your own awareness of just how much you already know, but which our rotten schooling and society have tried so hard to hide from us. They are designed to help you promote your own self, and your sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-belief. From such a basis we take more actions, we express ourselves more freely and without fear of consequences, and in this way we learn more, and all of this means one beautiful thing: you live with self-confidence.
And that is the game changer.
Doing hammock time: the Human Condition
For pretty much my entire life, and consciously so since I accidentally emigrated to Thailand in 1991, I have been studying what we might call the ‘human condition’, and with it our ‘human potential’. After my travel money ran out, I became an English teacher in Bangkok and now found myself effectively living in Thailand. At some point in time I realised I was not going back to England to live, and had emigrated!
It was such a different culture and society to my home nation of England. I had been squarely taken out of the British society box of conformity and uniformity (which I had always done my best to disobey and be different from anyway!) and now I found myself consciously noticing almost everything about Thailand and Thai people because so much of it was new to me.
This then led to me reflecting upon my home culture and society, and in this way I began to learn so much about human life in general. Now I could see things in my own country of upbringing that I had never seen before (outside the box looking in brings a different perspective to being inside the box looking out), and I was constantly learning about my new culture and all its perspectives - many of them Buddhist, and suiting me very well thank you.
During the 1990s, as an avid learner and reader, and as a travel nut, the most magical decade of my life unfolded. Typically I managed four holidays every year to the tropical islands of Thailand - before mass tourism begun. It was heaven. I loved my job, I loved my holidays, which to me were me keeping my travel adventure well alive.
A huge part of my holidays on these beaches was spent on a hammock on my beachside bungalow, looking out at the white sand beaches and, usually, looking westward towards sunsets each evening. Back in those pre-internet days, on the islands I went to hammocks were a key feature of your bungalow.
I estimate I spent thousands of hours of doing hammock time.
It was on my hammock that I really began to explore who I am, how my mind works, who we human beings are, why and how we can be so beautiful yet so brutal, how humanity can produce a Buddha and a Hitler, a Martin Luther King and a Stalin, a JFK and a Mao, and so much more. It was the perfect place for diving deep into what it means to be human.
In short I explored the human condition, and naturally out of that came an exploration of our potential. One example: I could see with my own eyes how Thai people in general had so much less than British people, yet they lived their life with so much more laughter, smiles and happiness, and far fewer problems and conflicts. It increasingly told me that most problems back Western nations are unnecessary.
I began to seriously understand the power of our mind to destroy ourselves, as well as others, or to liberate ourselves and help others liberate themselves. I view my mind as the centre of the universe for me, and your mind as the centre of the universe for you.
I observed, read, listened, noticed, I explored, contemplated, learned, understood, misunderstood, refined, reflected, explored more… a long spiritual evolution and journey of self-growth!
Who we are, why we are like this, who we can be, and how we can become who we ought to be, was my focus all the time.
It’s why I wrote my book.
It’s why I’ve built my academy to radically transform the way education is done.
It’s why I’m writing these Letters.
2025 Letters and their content
So, this is all to say that the content this year will be focused on the human condition and our human potential.
Ayurveda is very clear: you are a microcosm of the universe and the universe is the macrocosm of you. All is interconnected. Learn about the ‘bigger picture’ and you learn about yourself, learn about yourself and you learn about the bigger picture of the whole world and universe.
That’s why I’m promoting self-inquiry, and why I’m going to be bringing you lots of pertinent questions for you to firmly find yourself on your own proactive path of self-inquiry during 2025.
This is the result of all my own explorations too, and it’s why I loved Ayurveda so much when found it back in 2008 (I told the story in the first few Letters of 2024). We will certainly be focussing on Ayurveda during the upcoming year.
So, exploring the human condition is really just about exploring anything from our human world that helps us understand the world and ourselves and our own mind better. When we see our struggles and conflicts and stresses for what they are, we begin to see what we are capable of, and this is part of our human potential. Seeing ourselves without blinkers may at first be alarming to some, but until we can do this we cannot achieve any level of empowerment or transformation or liberation.
The crucial thing about discovering our potential is to then make certain we don’t sit on it a moment longer. We must now actualise and manifest it. My book helps you do that, but above all my courses I’m offering this year—where you study live with me and several like-minded fellow human beings—will bring you the opportunity to practise and master your learning and communication skills, in collaboration with your classmates.
I take the learning and communication skills to be the ‘Mother and Father of all Skills’: the skilled learner and the skilled communicator (you cannot be one or the other, they come together) is going to be a tremendous energy force of good for themselves and the whole world out there. We will be the healing of humankind.
That is our objective.
So, you may find yourself, in any one Letter, reading about diet, health, philosophy, psychology, your body, holistic health, leadership, spirituality, geo-politics (to deny politics is to deny a portion of life, is to deny full understanding of who we are), language and communication, learning and education, problems and solutions, separation and connection, and so much more.
The whole caboodle of human life, in fact!
The format of the 2025 Letters
I think this is the exciting thing!
I said I wanted to make this year’s Letters more aligned with how I do education in my classroom.
This means me selecting an extract (of varying lengths) from relevant, interesting, motivating, discussion-worthy books, and presenting it to you in each Letter. Perhaps more than one extract. With the extract/s will come a couple of questions for your reflection and to raise your awareness of the topic or issue before you read. I will then also add my own commentary and thoughts relating to the chosen extract.
I have a multitude of brilliant books on my bookshelf from which to choose, and this will also include extracts from my own book from time to time!
Most of you will find each week’s Letter in your inbox upon waking up on Saturday mornings, giving you the whole weekend to read and learn. I suggest as you open the Letter, you then choose a slot of time during the weekend when you can focus on the reading and thinking, and avoid distractions for the duration.
Important information #1
Here is an idea that I really recommend you try and incorporate… share the reading and questions with a friend who you can meet in-person, on a video call, or on the phone. Do the questions together, read the Letter, and then compare your thoughts after the reading. You could copy and paste the Letter to your friend, or, better still, ask them to sign up to receive the Letters directly themselves. Share this link with them, and from there they can sign up: https://www.aspiritualrevolution.com/letters
Important information #2
Early in the year I will let you know how you can join my new Club for Spiritual Revolutionaries. I still need to think about the logistics for it, but in essence there will be a monthly Zoom video lesson, and this will bring you the opportunity to discuss the content from one or more of the Letters in small groups, and we will also do a video lesson too. In this way you get to practise your listening, speaking, thinking and learning skills, while advancing your own self-knowledge. It will carry a small fee for each lesson.
So that wraps up this first Letter for 2025.
We start the new format next weekend. Find a friend, get them to sign up and do all the Letters each week with your friend. Best of all, make it a breakfast, brunch, lunch, or afternoon tea date every Saturday or Sunday, and learn together! Think of somebody now, and contact them right now and get it done before you can forget or lose momentum to do it! If you can make it a group of three, then this is even more perfect. Over to you…
See you next Saturday, and I have a corker lined up for you to get us started on our learning adventure together for the next 50 weeks or so. Make it a super year, why don’t you?!
All the best
Philip
