2025 #3: Who are You? Part 2
Rustic scene from northern Thailand in the rainy season
Dear Friend
Well guess what?! In important and great news for all my subscribers, readers of my Letters, and all who are interested in personal development, self-reflection and spiritual self-growth, this coming week sees in the New Year in China, and that means the Year of the Snake is upon us.
Why is this good news for us?
Because in Chinese astrology, the snake symbolises inner reflection, transformation and wisdom - just what our mission is in these Unleash Your Spirit Letters. A Spiritual Revolution is all about doing inner work on ourselves… so that we fully learn who we are… so that we can consciously reset our mindset to support our transformation instead of hindering our evolution and growth… so that we can align ourselves with our true nature…. so that we can live GOOD!
This is the direct, and only, route towards your optimal health, harmony and happiness (and, by extension, the healing of humankind). By building your foundational pillars of strength and thereby empowering yourself, you open up a pathway towards living with creativity, productivity, self-confidence, and, most importantly, to discover and pursue your unique purpose in life.
This is literally our central business together, and most especially for this year, the year that my Academy launches itself… sometimes the universe really does get its timing right!
So how about this for synchronicity:
astrologically speaking in China we can confidently say that 2025 is the year of transformation and renewal
politically speaking in the USA, we can confidently say that 2025 marks a year of transformation (whether you like Donald Trump or not, he is all about change, and we already see and feel a different kind of psychological environment), and America is hugely influential on the rest of the world, for good or bad
and in terms of educating and empowering yourself to become the best possible version of yourself so that you can live with purpose, passion and peace, I will confidently say that 2025 marks a year of transformation too, as my Academy for A Spiritual Revolution opens up to offer live workshops and courses for the most cutting edge, most transformational, most self-empowering learning experience on the planet… haha, no beating about the bush there!
The Year of the Snake tells us it’s time to let go of the past and embrace new opportunities… and you all did that last year by aligning yourself with these Letters. My mission is making this a journey that brings great enjoyment, insight and reward to those who engage in change.
We will always do well to remember that our school systems, the world over, disempower us - blocking us from developing the skills we most need for navigating life, namely the learning and communication skills. When we lack the skill, know-how and confidence to make transformative change to our lives, to evolve, to grow, in these current times of rapid change to the human world, then we are stuffed.
It is this disempowerment that makes us resist or fear making change, or to find any old excuse to not make changes and to stay in what we perceive to be our ‘comfort zone’, even though this comfort zone often means addictions, harmful habits and behaviours, emotional enslavement to external triggers, and much else that does not serve our wellbeing at all.
It does, however, keep our conditioned and suppressed ego happy, and in this week’s Letter we begin to unravel just what the ego is. Knowing and understanding the ways of your ego is the heart of spiritual ascension. I will say from my experience and research that we are living spiritually when we have put ourselves in charge of our own ego. And this ego is part of who we are, so let’s investigate more.
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Today’s book extracts come from my own book Menu For A Spiritual Revolution: Health Harmony & Happiness. This is the complete guide to personal development, self-reflection and spiritual growth, with tasks throughout the book to help you put into practice the ideas, insights and information that you are reading about.
Be sure to have read Part 1 (Letter 2025 #2) to make complete sense of this week’s Letter. That said, all eternal truths and sharing of insights and understandings should stand on their own. But in any case, let’s revisit the questions we were posing in the last Letter to better understand ourself, our mind and the web of life on this planet.
Who are you? What are you? Why are you here? What is the purpose of life for human beings? What is your purpose in life? What does ‘being healthy’ mean in practice? Who or what is it that needs to be healthy?
We then read extracts from The Chakra Handbook, which told us about four different energy bodies - can you remember them?! (ethereal, astral/emotional, mental, spiritual) At the end of the reading I gave you a Post-Reading Task, which included a revisit to the above guiding questions.
Task
Spend a few minutes recalling what your thoughts were in reflecting upon these questions from last week’s Letter. If you wrote them down in your notebook, reread them before reading on.
One of the key understandings from The Chakra Handbook extracts that I hope you took away was that each body pervades into the other bodies, making them all interdependent. While we can conceive of these different ‘components’ separately, in the laws of nature they all work interconnectedly and holistically as one whole.
Today, from my own investigations into, reflections upon, and understandings of life, over many years, I will present to you five dimensions to who you are, who I am, who all human beings are. Regarding the health questions, I will present three dimensions of health. As you read about them, consider how they match, or differ from, the four energy bodies from last week.
Who are you? What are you? When you have insight and understanding of the answers to these questions, all the other questions become answerable for you in your own unique context of life. To reiterate, I have posited that the root cause of all the troubles and ills in our human world is not knowing who we are. Fix the root cause—know thyself!—and most problems and troubles simply melt away.
Who are you? What are you?
With a drum roll…
you are… 3DH5DL, that’s who —and what—you are!
So am I, so is every single human being in our world. Okay, we can all go home now!
Let’s dig into my book, and these extracts come from chapter 14, ‘3DH5DL: A Formula and Framework for Understanding Life’. Please note that IE refers to internal environment and EE refers to external environment.
“3DH5DL stands for three dimensions of health and five dimensions to life.
While we are identifying these different dimensions for our purposes of understanding, the working reality of life is that they don’t exist separately, they integrate and operate as holistic wholes. But, just as we can break down a machine into all its separate parts to understand what each part does, so that we may better understand how the whole machine works, so we will do the same with our own self and life itself.
The three interconnecting dimensions of health operating within your body are physical health, psychological health and spiritual health, which relate to your body, mind and soul respectively.
Your overall level of health, and sense of wellness or illness that you feel within your body and mind, is indicative of how well your body, mind and soul are functioning as a whole. We’ve said that our own internal environment ‘feeds’ off the external environment, and in turn our IE produces back out into the EE; that is, input and output of energy flowing back and forth between us and the external environment we live in.
If positive input comes into the body then this boosts not only your physical health but also your psychological and spiritual health, on account of all three working synchronistically and interdependently. Similarly, positive mental input will boost your physical and spiritual health as well as your psychological health, and nutritious soul food from nature will boost your physical and psychological health, as well as feed your spiritual wellbeing. On the flip side, negative energy of any kind coming in will affect all three dimensions in a negative manner.
Clearly, then, we see that our sense of wellbeing is dependent upon all types of incoming energy whether of a physical, mental or spiritual nature. To the extent we can actively choose our energy sources is the level of freedom we have to promote, or attack, our overall health.
Presumably, nobody would willingly choose to attack their own health, but everybody can see the health woes facing so many of humanity’s members, and therefore there must be other forces which influence our choices.
One major influence is ignorance - we cause ourselves harm without realising or understanding what we are doing. Another is addictions, which can be very hard to give up despite us knowing that they cause us harm. My view is that if our schooling did a proper job we’d not enter the world ignorant of health matters, we’d have a much more positive and supportive society and community to live in, and addictions may well never get off the ground in the first place. And, dear reader, prevention is so much easier than cure!
The five interconnecting dimensions of life are body, emind, imind, soul and external environment. (I’ll get to the distinction between the two minds in a mo.) Therefore, what I’m saying is that you are 5DL, I am 5DL, each individual human being on the planet is 5DL. This is who we are, an amalgamation of five dimensions which operate holistically and interdependently within the physical boundary of our body.
Previously we’ve talked about the nature of life being that everything in our world and universe is interconnected and interdependent. We said that within the boundary of our skin were the body, mind and soul which were interlinked and constituted our internal environment, yet with the external environment coming into us in the form of energy input we said we were in fact an interdependent and interconnected blend of IE + EE. We are physically made of stuff from the outer world, mentally made of information and ideas from the world out there, and spiritually made of the cosmic consciousness of the universe. That means four dimensions within us, and I mean mind, body, soul, and EE, since the structure of our entity and being is made of the EE, and it comes into us as a source of energy and sustenance to keep our life going. Remember, IE + EE = me!
But to really understand how life works, to fully understand who we are, and to really understand the root source of all our conflicts and inner unhappiness, we must take it to be that we have two minds.”
Post-Reading Task
Do this task before reading my own comments on the extract.
Do you like my formula 3DH5DL? Do you find it useful to better understand your life and health? What happens if you apply it to events and experiences from your own life, and to prior understandings you’ve developed?
What do you think the emind and imind are? Do you feel it’s a good call to say that we have, in effect, two minds?
‘I was torn between two minds’
Look at these common phrases in English, and consider their deeper meaning.
‘I was torn between two minds.’
>> Two minds??! And if “I” was unable to choose from two different minds, then who am “I”?
‘I couldn’t make my mind up.’
>> If it’s my mind, then I possess this mind, it is in my possession. So, who is the “I” that has ownership of their mind, and what is this mind?
‘My mind is made up.’
>> Whose mind? Who made your mind up?
In these three examples of colloquial English, if we take the words literally, then we can say this: You are not your mind. I am not my mind. So, if we are not our mind, what or who are we??
Well, last week we learned from the world of chakras that we have four energy bodies that comprise our whole being/entity. And this week I’m saying to you that you have five dimensions that comprise your being/entity, including two minds, namely the emind and imind.
For me, with my formula 3DH5DL, it makes perfect sense to read things like “I was torn between two minds”, or “I can’t make my mind up”.
The mind, and the soul, are invisible and always have been. Yet it is through these two invisible entities that we feel, think, speak, act, react and behave. Which more or less sums up the whole unfolding of human life.
We sort of assume that the mind is housed in the physical entity of the brain and that the soul is housed in the physical entity of the heart. But what is undeniable is that we are human beings who spend pretty much all of our life experiencing feelings and thoughts, which we know come from the heart and mind.
So, we are an amalgamation of five different ‘portions’ to who we are, but first consider this: we are intelligent integrated interconnected individuals. The most important understanding in my view is that we are a series of identifiable ‘components’ that make up our whole entity/being, and that they all work holistically and interdependently.
We live in a connected world, and yet our psyches have been programmed to believe we are all separate from each other. When I say we are intelligent integrated interconnected individuals, this tells us that we have our own unique being, yet we are all as one in a holistic whole.
The following five dimensions all operate as one interconnected whole, but we can talk about them separately:
body - your physical being.
ego-mind (emind) - the part of your mind that generates emotions and feelings, and thoughts that come to you, rather than you concentrating on doing something yourself and thinking how best to do this thing. When you hate or resent other people it’s not you being hateful or resentful, it is your emind that is doing the hating and resenting and this emind, this voice, is just one-fifth of you, it is NOT you! It is your emind that is programmed and conditioned during its upbringing and nurture process.
intelligence-mind (imind) - when you are in the conscious moment, aware of now and aware of what is happening around you and aware of what is happening inside you (feelings, thoughts, emotions), this is your imind in action, and uppermost, keeping your emind quiet. When you are observing, noticing, realising, being aware, reflecting, attentively listening, consciously learning, you are in imind mode - your imind is switched on and your emind is temporarily quiet, made that way by the concentration of your imind. Your imind connects you to your soul, and your imind has no negative feelings towards anyone, only towards actions which harm or destroy.
[Hope you’re still with me. Please feel free to email me and ask me any questions you have!]
soul - your soul makes you whole. In modern, materially-developed societies, the soul has often been pushed out of the picture, and this is when one human being, or a all human beings, become self-destructive, because it is your soul that gives you moral guidance, and a conscience, and knowing the right thing to do, and the courage for doing it. Through the imind we access the soul, and bring about our awareness of our soul.
It is the battle between emind and imind which is at the heart of all human behaviour.
external environment - is everything in the world and universe beyond your skin. Your skin is the demarcation between your inner world and the whole world around you. This world flows into you through energy waves held in foods, creams, and informational input (visual, auditory, smell, touch), and energy and physical stuff (eg in sweat, poop) flows out of you into the world. Including of course everything you say and do, which comes from the energy you got from that same world around you! In the way I look at things, I am in the external environment and the external environment is in me, so therefore “I” includes the external environment. This is a huge discussion in itself, what this ‘environment’ actually means practically.
When we understand and accept that the world around us is in fact a part of us, not separate to us, we will begin to see a very different world, and we will go through a lot of transformation. After all, if the world around you IS you (or an integral part of you), then every time you hate somebody you are actually hating yourself….
(Have a ponder on THAT!!)
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I have a task for you, to directly discover for yourself your own emind and imind. Once you can see both of them, you have opened the door to all the treasures within you that you were born with, but which the society slammed shut on us!
Most crucially—whether we really do have an ego-mind and an intelligence-mind, or we have just the one mind, or even several minds—we are wanting to understand our mind, or our minds, because that is to understand life, and understanding shines the light on ignorance and ignorance in this day and age is downright dangerous if not deadly!
Since your mind is the centre of the universe for you, it will do you well to understand this phenomenon, and this phenomenal mindblowing entity that can fit the whole universe inside of itself!
So I’m going to leave you with this task, as you doing this for yourself will bring you more understanding than 10,000 of my words or any explanation I can come up with. It’s a notoriously slippery thing to be writing about how it works! Much better to see things for yourself, as it is you who has to derive your own understandings. Remember, knowledge can be handed over from person to person, but understanding is your own personal responsibility. Knowledge is external, understanding internal.
Next week we will be focusing on the mind, through the filter of the ancient ‘science of life’ that is Ayurveda, from the Indian sages thousands of years ago.
Task
Whether you think this task is meditation, mindfulness, neither of those, some other word, matters not. We don’t want to reduce the experience into language. The purpose of this task is for you to experience and notice things for yourself, to raise your own awareness of what goes on in your mind, to learn and understand things from your own first-hand endeavours.
There are three stages to the task:
planning: identify a time and space to do the task, and choose where you’ll do it
doing it: go to this place and do the task
reflection time: at this place - don’t wait to do this somewhere else, that will only invite memory decay; now reflect upon the doing of the task.
The task itself should be for 30 minutes as a minimum, but do longer if you can. Reflection time is extra.
I always recommend the place you choose to do this task to be either in nature (in the city this can be a park), or somewhere like a cafe or eatery where you can sit down for at least half an hour. In nature you want to be comfortable sitting down. It could be in your own garden. It should be distraction-free: don’t choose a cafe where you will bump into friends who will want to talk to you. You need half an hour of being silent, and then some time after that to reflect.
The task is simple. You get to your place and get comfortable sitting down. Then you resolve to do no thinking; just sit and watch, listen to, notice, observe everything going on around you. You also need to notice and observe anything going on in your mind.
Remember, the objective in this half an hour is to watch the world go by while not thinking about anything. Whatever happens during this half hour or so is not right or wrong, it is just to be observed and noticed by you. At the end, reflect upon the experience, in particular what was going on in your mind and senses.
I am late this week getting the Letter out, so I will come back to this task the Letter after the next Letter. That ensures you get time to do the task before reading my comments on it.
However, when you do your reflecting after the task, please think about our discussion of the various energy bodies you read about last week, and about my distinction between the ego-mind and the intelligence-mind in this Letter. I will ask you one question now, before you do the task, and it’s for you to answer after you’ve done the task, and during your reflection time.
The question is this: Can you use your mind to observe your mind in action?
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That’s it for this week. I do apologise for being late, winter in Chiang Mai is when lots of friends from various countries come here to visit me! Well, it’s a great place for a holiday, but I’m here too! So I’ve been busy spending time with them all. I hope to get the next Letter off to you on Saturday, which is in just three days!
All the best
Philip
