Letter #37: Love, Spirituality, Freedom & Soul
A cool cat chilling with Buddha!
Dear Friend
Well, I have to confess that there will be no ordinary Letter this week as such, primarily because we have just had no ordinary week...
Floods!
We’ve had relentless rain this wet season, and September is always the wettest month. After seeing some rather terrible flooding happening in neighbouring provinces a couple of weeks ago, it became the turn of Chiang Mai to have its own flooding last week.
As I write it seems we personally are in the clear, albeit one more big storm due. The places that were flooded last week are now mostly cleaned up and back to normal. The big worry we all faced last week was the news that the big dam north of the city was 105% full! Until now I didn’t know you could have more than 100% capacity in anything!
We were apparently on the cusp of it going into an emergency spillway which then releases into the big River Ping which runs along the valley floor (Chiang Mai is surrounded by mountains). Since this had just burst its banks in various places, the whole province faced what might have been disastrous floods. However, somehow they were able to manage delaying the release of water, and the weather Gods stopped raining on us and we’ve now had a few days of dry sunny weather. They were able to release water during this time.
This saved many of us! Our own house is never supposed to flood, but with development always going on, and trees being chopped down to make way for new housing projects and so on, the past is never a guarantee for today.
During the weekend, in preparation for the upcoming storm and before we were out of danger, my wife and I went to the local temple to get a whole load of free sandbags. We shoveled sand into 36 bags, and I lifted them into the boot of the car and did four separate runs to transport them back to our house, each time lifting them out of the car. After this I then put them against our back and front doors. This meant that on that Saturday morning I shifted about 2.5 tonnes of sand! I guess it was good exercise.
Once this storm has cleared, then I have to shift them all over again!
I have also been busy doing various things to get my big Academy project up and running, and so here I am without any semblance of a Letter for you. However, I have been doing writing elsewhere, and so I thought I’d copy a couple of pieces here into our Letter for this week. I will choose ones that give you some delicious cognitive foods for thought! I’m also going to answer some of the questions I posed for you last week in Letter #36.
Food for Thought
“Compare yourself to others and give away your power. Compare your today self to your past self to empower yourself.”
“Virtue signalling, seeking validation from others, looking for praise, people-pleasing, trying to be 'normal' will enslave me and ensure I can never by the real me.
In fact, I will likely not even know who the real me is.
Being virtuous, making myself valid for me, looking to praise somebody, pleasing myself by my own actions towards others, and never trying to be 'normal' will mean I am a free human being because I am focused on being the real me, and not causing harm to others.
Take your pick!”
“Human life is not about ideology! It is about relationships! So if you want to destroy one of them for the other, choose wisely!”
“Definition of Irony:
If you are holding back from a fear of rejection by others, you have rejected yourself.”
Put that in your pipe and smoke it!
Answering the Questions
And to finish with, I’m going to share my own (brief) answers to the some of the questions I offered you to ask yourself from last week.
Who am I? What am I?
Beyond the obvious answer of my name and basic identity that we all have as a member of society, this question of ‘Who am I?’ has vexed philosophers down the ages. I have two different ways of expressing the same answer. I cover this question and a full exploration of it in two different chapters of my book.
I think it’s essential for us to know who and what we are if we desire to live in good health in what is a really toxic human world. We cannot accidentally have wellness, we have to work at it constantly. But unless we know who and what we are, we can’t really be proactive in protecting and promoting our health and wellness, because who or what are we protecting?!
I even take it to be true that all our problems and conflicts stem from not knowing who the true “I” is. Knowing and understanding this is an essential part of any proper transformation we may bring into our life.
Who am I? What am I?
Same as you: 3DH5DL.
That is my formula from many years ago, and the first half of my book leads up to this. But I’ll share a bit with you now.
It stands for 3 Dimensions of Health and 5 Dimensions of Life. The 3 are physical health, mental health and spiritual health. The 5 are my body, my ego-mind, my intelligence-mind, my soul and the external environment around me, in the whole world, and in the universe.
Yes, two minds! I’ll let you dwell upon that - or you can get my book; as I say, I write a whole chapter on this. I can’t guarantee this is true, but it definitively lets me understand my mind, the human mind, the human condition and our human potential. I have found nobody in my frequent discussions over the years who can show me I’m wrong, and nor have I been able to refute it myself, and I do try.
But here are some interesting phrases in the English language that we use:
“I can’t make my mind up.” [So who is ‘I’, the possessor of this mind??]
“I was torn between two minds?” [Two minds! And again, who is the ‘I’ who is outside both?]
I consider the ego-mind as being linked to my body, and the intelligence-mind as being linked to my soul, and all conflicts within me and between me and others arise from the ego-mind taking control over the intelligence-mind. However, once we are aware of the soul and its counterpart mind, this gives us the keys to our liberation from being controlled by our ego-mind.
The other way of expressing this is that the coming together of my inner environment (IE) and the external environment (EE)—demarcated by my skin—is the real true me. Of course, my IE is my body, two minds and soul, while the EE is of course everything outside of my skin, from my wife to you to the whole world to Jupiter to all the far-flung galaxies.
But all that I perceive outside of me is perceived inside of me. Yes, my mum and dad created me, but our planet created us all too…
We can say that IE + EE = Me.
One last thing to say here for now: these dimensions can be conceptualised as separate entities in our thinking mind, but in reality they work as an integrated interconnected holistic whole. Therefore, if you want good health and wellness, you need a healthy mind, a healthy body and a healthy soul, and together they give you a health YOU!
Interestingly, if you focus on making your body healthier, then this ups the health of your mind and soul, and the same happens if you work on any of the dimensions. Focus on feeding them all nutritiously and Voila!
What is my purpose? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here?
My purpose in life is to be a rebel educator and to train and inspire adults and adolescents to educate and empower themselves.
The meaning of my life is to contribute positively to the overall evolution of all humankind. I must therefore always be evolving in my own life, and this means I must have a growth mindset.
I am here to have as much fun and to learn as much as I can throughout my whole life, and to help others do the same.
What does freedom mean? Spirituality? Love? Soul? Cognitive dissonance?
Freedom is the state of doing whatever I want whenever I want so long as I cause no harm to myself or others in my actions. Freedom is not a constant state of feeling, but something we should aspire to as much as possible. A lot depends on how many expectations, desires and fears you have. More than a few, and you will find it very hard to experience any kind of freedom, and then it’s all about seeking pleasures which over time lead to addictions and harmful habits.
Spirituality is the way of life we experience when we are in alignment with nature: our own nature, human nature, and the laws of nature. When all your dimensions combine in harmony!
Love is unconditional, and flows out of us and back into us when we are absent of fear, hatred, resentment, stress, conflict, division, separation. It is our natural state which the school and societal systems have done their best to stamp out of us. Notice that all those negative emotions and ways are all mind-based, psychological. A peaceful conflict-free mind tiggers our spiritual and human essence, and allows love, an energy force, to flow in and out of us.
It’s one thing to love another, and if we can do that, then we allow ourselves to be loved and to be loveable.
Love is the greatest freedom, because hatred and resentment are like emotional cancers that keep on eating away at us.
Soul is our connectivity with God, the universal intelligence, cosmic consciousness, the whole galactic caboodle, call it what you will. It is our CONNECTION, and makes us human. Without it, or with it being hidden from us, we will always struggle.
Cognitive dissonance is a clash between your ego-mind and your intelligence-mind. I think I’ll write more on this next week.
And there you have it!
That’s this week’s Letter complete. Hope you have a great rest of the week.
Till the next time
Philip
