Letter #42: 5 Steps to Heaven
So let’s be a skilled journey-maker! Photo taken at Foreign Correspondents Club, Cambodia
Dear Friend
Exploring, reflecting upon, and understanding the ‘Bigger Picture’ is essential for anybody in today’s tumultuous times who wishes to empower themselves and transform their fortunes… by taking charge of their own life, health and destiny.
Understanding leads to taking responsibility for oneself leads to liberation from one’s schooled conditioning.
This exploration—which we each have to personally do; you cannot get somebody else to do it for you—is the essential bedrock to the learning process we need to undertake to empower ourselves:
What is the current state of all humankind, what are the problems it faces, what are the root causes, and what is the solution?
And by solution we don’t mean stop-gap measures, plasters on wounds, resolutions; these are all pretend solutions or temporary pain-relieving measures.
No, the solution we are interested in is a one-way street out of a problem!
The reason we have so many problems, stresses, pain, suffering in our modern lives, and the reason why we seem unable to find our own solutions, is because our psyches - our subconscious driving forces - believe that we are separate beings, on our own in a hostile world. Thus we have been disempowered by being disconnected in our minds and our hearts.
This is actually devastating for the whole human family.
This erroneous belief is a terrible wolf dressed up in sheep’s clothing. We are not separate. We are individuals yes, but we are interconnected and interdependent individuals. Everything in your life is about relationships: your relationship with yourself, with your fellow human beings, with Mother Nature herself, and with all your beliefs about life (which often masquerade as truths and facts).
And life is the flow of energy, connecting the source of some energy with the destination it goes to. It is this flow that creates our relationships.
When we understand this connectivity (via energy flow) deeply in our heart and mind, then we begin to see how hatred, resentment, anger, and all the rest of these harmful emotions first and foremost hurt ourselves.
By blaming others for our woes, by directing hatred, resentment or anger at others, we are harbouring and holding the energy forces of hatred, resentment or anger within our own mind and body, within our own consciousness and being.
And why would we knowingly do that?!
Once we do consciously understand this, now comes the real part of the challenge: making whatever changes we need to make to our subconscious minds in order to, once and for all, get hatred, resentment and anger out of our lives.
Undeniably we have been conditioned to be the way we are, conditioned by the nurturing process we received while children. And, as we get in our schooling, so it continues in the media when we are adults.
Central to this conditioning is the idea and mental construct that we are separate from each other. This has led to all the division, conflict, cruelty and monstrosities that can be seen throughout the human world.
Especially since the start of 2020.
(Why did this ‘covid’ thing just happen to come to us in the year 2020? After all twenty-twenty means clear and incisive vision…?? Is the universe sending us a message here?!)
In our information-saturated internet times, this division within our families and societies has become so clear that now we can, with this newfound awareness, begin the journey to recreate and recalibrate our relationships based on love, respect, trust and empathy. I argue that NO human being wants to live in state of almost perpetual conflict and stress! We only do so because of the way we have been ‘taught’. It’s not human nature, it’s human nurture.
Personally speaking, hatred completely left my life during 2002-03 which was a two-year period in my life when I did my major spiritual investigations into life. I never really hated much anyway, but in the first part of my adulthood I certainly held a lot of hatred and anger towards the powerful people in our world who commit brutal crimes that maim and murder other human beings. I also deeply hated the mainstream media!
Anger and frustration, which come naturally to an Aries person, of which I am one, have not entirely left my life, but super rare really, and when they do come to me, I can quickly recover my inner harmony. I see the anger that might arise in me immediately, and this noticing of it takes its power away.
But I had already done a whole load of inner work on myself during the 90s, mainly on my hammock in the almost-deserted beaches of tropical Thai isles of pre-internet times. I know I’ve written about this in past Letters. But I love it: so much of what I have learned about being human was done while swinging on a hammock on the veranda of my beachside bungalow! I found it to be the perfect environment to deeply explore my own mind and what it means to be human, and why we do what we do, and what our grand potential is.
This is where A Spiritual Revolution comes in. It’s a specific framework, process and guide I have developed for all individual human beings to acquire the skills, self-knowledge and self-belief they need to turn their life right around.
IKUI
A Spiritual Revolution takes each individual person on a journey of IKUI: from ignorance to knowledge to understanding to intelligence. And by intelligence I don’t mean being academically proficient, I mean living one’s life holistically and in harmony with the whole web of life beyond our skin, and within our skin. Ignorance, then, is not knowing how to live holistically and in balance.
IKUI can apply to any aspect of life, but for us right now I’m meaning our relationship with the Bigger Picture: what we discover to be true for humankind we can then use to inquire into what is true for our own personal life in our own personal context of life.
IKUI means
actively seeking out knowledge of the Bigger Picture
applying this knowledge to our own life to give it a full sense of meaning
deriving personal understanding of ourselves, and our world, out of this meaning
and then proactively making various changes to our own life so that we can practise healthy new ways until we make them healthy new habits; at the same time we become aware of, and undo (or unlearn), our harmful habits which do not serve ourselves or any form of life.
Since the human being is a social creature, we experience life entirely based on the relationships we have formed with others, and within ourself. And relationships are all about communication and being skilled in listening and speaking, observing and reflecting. As well as listening attentively and compassionately to everybody else we come across, this also means listening in the same way to our own body and mental inner talk, and expressing ourselves without fear or nastiness.
It’s all about cultivating the skill of using your mind to navigate the relationships in your life. The more skilled you are, the more agreeable or sensational your life will be!
That is why knowledge, while being an essential first step, is not the be all and end all, no not at all: we must become skilled in acquiring it and sharing it so that we actually USE it to guide us in life, and to enhance our experience of this life of ours.
We need to practise, develop and master our learning, listening, speaking, social interaction, research, and thinking skills, and we need to do this because our schools (at least 99% of them) systematically suppressed any efforts we made to become skilled in these foundational, essential human skills.
Schools actively block children from developing themselves as cool, happy, healthy human beings by blocking them from developing their learning and communication skills, and therefore blocking them from developing strong, healthy relationships with others, as well as within their own mind and heart.
Unsurprisingly this means we are much more prone to self-doubt (and even self-sabotage) than self-confidence and self-belief, and that we think we are not good enough instead of living with the innate sense of self-worth we are born to live with. We also have our innate curiosity and creativity crushed.
Yet another terrible consequence of this anti-human anti-growth anti-education schooling is we don’t really know how our mind, body and soul work. This means we don’t really know who we truly are.
But the times they are a changin’…
I know many people hate Donald Trump, and all of us alive have been given good reason to never trust any politician, but it’s my analysis (from my research over the last eight years) that he is a true leader who will create social and economic conditions for all of us to empower ourselves, should we wish to do so. I have been involved in leadership and teaching leadership for much of my working life and I really find it just about impossible to believe Trump is being anything other than honest and well-intentioned in trying to transform America, and therefore by extension the whole world.
Certainly his message resonates, that he loves his country. We must love ourselves, our family and our nation. If we don’t like our nation, it will transpire we don’t like our family or ourselves. Remember, we are interconnected with and interdependent on each other!
But, Trump or not, it is WE who must do the work. However, he is creating a new cultural and psychological environment which will make our work much easier. I do always reserve the right to be wrong about things! Regardless though, it’s up to each of us to make our own world and the whole world a better place.
A new society first needs a new education
Let me share with you what I have brought to my adult language and communication students for many years, including a dozen years teaching language teachers.
The ‘teaching’ I employ is simple in its methodology: get my students to do almost everything themselves. My work is in guiding them to do this and, crucially, wanting to do this. This means I must create a wonderful learning environment, one that makes everybody feel emotionally supported. From this heart-happy place and space, the mind is open to be cognitively challenged and everybody (yes, no exceptions) will feel tremendously motivated and inspired to do tonnes of good work - both for themselves and the wellbeing of the entire group.
As students are learning whatever knowledge or information is to be learned, they will be simultaneously and constantly practising, developing and mastering their
listening and reading skills, sub-skills and strategies
speaking and writing skills, sub-skills and strategies
self-awareness, observation and reflective thinking skills
social interaction and teamwork skills
by working in pairs and small groups most of the time; in other words, by doing the learning themselves. This is not teaching, so much as it is facilitating and enabling their learning to take place. HUGE BIG difference!
My teacher students will then be able to facilitate their own students to empower themselves with these skills.
It’s a heart-centred education.
It’s a baton of education goodness and liberation!
From the start of 2025 I will be training—live and online—all interested adults and adolescents to put A Spiritual Revolution into their life. In addition to developing the above skills, students will learn:
how language and indoctrination work
how their own mind, body and soul work
how the whole web of life works
how to live with holistic health and wellbeing
and about the ways of practical spiritual living
while constantly practising and mastering their communication and learning skills.
Naturally enough this will also mean students fill their minds and hearts with curiosity, creativity and confidence.
In other words when an adult or adolescent learns with me how to put A Spiritual Revolution into their life, they will acquire the foundational skills, self-knowledge and self-belief they need to be independent learners and sovereign human beings.
Since cultivating health and wellness for ourselves is a continuous aspect of life, just as breathing, eating and sleeping are, the crucial thing students always get from learning with me is lifelong learning skills. That’s the whole premise of the way I do education: motivating, training and empowering my students to be autonomous learners who are now able to take full responsibility for their own life, health and destiny.
You take control of your own FATE, too: your feelings, your actions, your thoughts, and your emotions.
When you know how to learn you know how to live.
No longer is your FATE being determined by corrupted government, media, science, and all the other so-called ‘experts’ in society. Now you are in charge of you.
Let me finish this week’s Letter (sorry for my no-show last week!) by outlining the five steps to the process of A Spiritual Revolution, which you can do for yourself, but which will be so much more rewarding (and with much faster results) with a group of fellow like-minded open-hearted souls.
Step # 1 Situation Analysis
What are the problems, and their root causes, facing humanity in our times? And in your own life?
Step #2 Dreams Aspirations Purpose
What do you want for yourself and for all of humanity? Identifying your purpose and passion and goals, and what you want for the world.
Step #3 Reset Mindset
Consciously adopt an attitude towards, and outlook on, life that supports you in manifesting your dreams and aspirations, instead of them remaining as potential. This step is the essential precursor to making transformational change. This new, consciously-formed, mindset will enable you to embrace step #4 so that you can make step #2 a reality.
(The reason New Year’s resolutions all seem to collapse on February 1st is that this step has not been taken.)
Step #4 Getting a Second Education: Building your Solid 5-Pillar Foundation
Enroll on my upcoming Workshop and Foundation Course and join a group of fellow spiritual revolutionaries and, in collaboration with them, work on your learning, communication and self-leadership skills, gain key self-knowledge of your mind, body and soul, and feel your mind and heart filling up with self-belief.
This knowledge, confidence and three skills represent the five pillars of A Spiritual Revolution.
Step #5 Holistic Health, Spiritual Self-Growth and Lifelong Learning Skills
Your life is now resting on a really strong foundation, and you are now ready to apply everything you learned into your day to day living and lifestyle. The work never stops, so in effect you are repeating step #1-4 over and over again throughout your life. This is now your spiritual evolution, without the ‘R’.
Now you become so much more creative, productive, proactive, reflective, and you will be able to transform all your relationships and be confident and skilled in building new ones, and in setting up new communities.
In this way the healing of humankind is effected.
But there’s more!
At some point during 2025 I will then be offering ‘Building Courses’, more specific to certain roles in life, for example for managers, leaders, teachers, home educators, entrepreneurs, young adults, all kinds of world helpers and natural healers. These will be available to those who have done the Foundation Course.
And I will run my first in-person retreat here in northern Thailand during mid-late 2025, or the following year at the latest. This will be an intensive course in ‘The Art of Leadership’, and will be for two or four weeks. The objective will be for a small group of a dozen or so leaders and educators to become super skilled leaders and trainers of leaders and educators. ‘Skilled’ means being a mentor, a motivator, a facilitator, and somebody who inspires others by their own example and by their vision. Everybody loves a good leader!
(#1 most important skill of a true leader? In my view it’s simple: the listening skill.)
For all of 2025 my workshops and courses will be live and online, with me training participants directly, rather than through video recordings. This is what sets my training programs apart from others because you are doing the learning. All learning experiences are interactive and dynamic.
Anticipate the Workshop to be two sessions held on successive days, and the Foundation Course to be six sessions over five weeks. I will be sending you my ebooklet very soon, which outlines everything in detail, and is essential first reading before joining the workshop. There will be a homework task between the two workshop sessions to practically apply what you learn in session one, and during the five weeks of the Foundation Course there will be regular practical homework tasks too.
None of my students ever let their dog eat their homework, because the homework tasks I set are motivational and really hold you to account to deliver for yourself. One thing I’ve seen a lot of in all the non-live training courses being offered all over the internet is that there is no external accountability to help participants put things into motion and get the momentum up and running.
So, astute mathematicians will have worked out that you can do the Workshop and Foundation Course in under two months. Not a bad investment in time at all considering you will be gaining a toolkit of skills, knowledge and belief to set you up for life!
A political comment to close with
From my personal perspective in life (right or wrong, it’s mine), the events of 2020 ushered in a really terrible dark cloud that has since been hanging over the entire human family all over the world since. I think all human beings, whether they have been aware of it or not, have been negatively affected in varying ways, depending on how much or little research they do in life.
I have heard countless stories of relationships coming apart at the rails. It’s sad.
In recent years I have watched Western politics becoming more and more dismissive of the freedoms we have built for ourselves, but 2020 heralded in a nasty tyrannical streak, and the censorship that arose during that year has been a terrible thing to see.
However, with the election of Donald Trump, for me and many I chew the geopolitical cud, and discuss spiritual living ways, with, I feel this cloud has now lifted. I genuinely feel he is a force for good in our world, and brings strong leadership and good intentions to the table. Strong leaders have vision and are not afraid to make unpopular decisions.
As a leader, and an educator of leaders, I am of no doubt how super important it is for our human world to have good leaders for the benefit of all. Where good leaders are, good things happen; where weak, bullying and controlling leadership (more akin to ruling) exists, so do bad things.
Have a tremendous week!
All the best
Philip
