Letter #22 Who am I? How does Life Work?
Feel the ocean of infinite space inside your own mind and heart. (Varkala in Kerala, India)
Dear Friend
Do you ever ask yourself, ‘Who am I?’
If not, then get started straight away. Perhaps you gained insights during the last week by doing the task from the last letter?
I am confident to assert that pretty much all (but not all) problems, pains and suffering we experience come about from an ignorance of who we really, truly are.
And if we don’t know who we are, how can we know how life works?
Ignorance really is not conducive to health and wellbeing, certainly not in our troubled times. If we are not confident of who we are, and how life works, then we will allow others—who themselves don’t know who they are, nor how life works—to negatively impact on our life.
We saw in 2020 that this will include an insane and tyrannical effort to mandate medications upon us. This is an evil violation of the human spirit, the human essence, and what it is to be human. It shows just how far mainstream human society has fallen into its journey of self-destruction.
If we want to protect ourselves and protect and promote life, then we need to know who we are. Non-negotiable. If we want to regularly experience fun, joy, peace, camaraderie and love, and if we want to approach our daily life with confidence and courage, then there is no choice: learn who you are.
How are you going to do that?
You can reread last week’s letter, Letter #21, and remind yourself that Philip was noticing his own inner voice inside his own mind, chattering away and distracting him from his focus on the sound of the falling water. If he could see his own inner voice, then this must mean he is NOT his inner voice: I am NOT my inner voice. Okay, so who am I then?
And if you didn’t do the task, do it! I would even go as far to say that all the tasks in my Letters are more important than everything else I write. Why? Because they’re getting you to DO the learning for you.
You need to create time and space, on a regular and consistent basis, to inquire, discover and learn for yourself by your own innate intelligence (which our schools did their best to suppress). This is doing self-inquiry, it is taking time out to reflect upon your life, you, your mind, the things that happen to you, your past, cause and effect, and all the rest of it.
One of my quotes I used to use with my teacher students, in helping them to better understand their own teaching practice, is:
‘Observe others and learn about yourself, observe yourself and learn about others.’
Be aware that the moment you judge what you see or hear, you have stopped observing, your inner voice has taken charge. Just like mine kept on removing the falling water sound from my consciousness, I was no longer observing it. I wanted to listen to the water, IT wanted me to listen to it.
In your regular slots of time and space you can reflect more upon what it is you observe about the human being. And remember, your mind is the centre of the universe for you in your own experience of life. Knowing the mind is knowing you. Your mind is everything, so you really oughta understand it!
Now, upcoming is an extract from my book, from the chapter called “Who am I? Who are you?”. This tale will give you a good insight into how I began to unravel the mysteries of being human for myself, and to learn exactly who it is that I am. And because I know who I am, I know who you are!
Doing Hammock Time
Reading Task
What is ‘doing hammock time’ a metaphor for?
As you read through my tale, consider these important words, and how they might relate to answering our central question, “Who am I?”:
environment — time and space — nature — mindfulness — observation — reflection
How might you create a similar situation for yourself in your context of your life? How might you begin the regular practice of doing inner work? Are you prepared to write down what you observe and reflect? How will reading this tale inspire you to set something up in your own life for doing this inner work?
The tale
I’d like to tell you how it is that I managed to seriously advance my understandings of the mind in general and my own mind. My accidental new life that happened to me in 1991 instigated a whole chain of events, including my love of one particular activity, which is not your ordinary western human pastime. This activity blew my mind open and lit it up. I became a hopeless addict…
During the entire 1990s living in Thailand, I became highly skilled and practised in the activity of doing hammock time, gaining hundreds if not thousands of hours of practice under my belt. If it were a martial art, I’d be a black belt. Said hammock would be on the veranda of my spartan eight bucks a night wooden bungalow, always right on the edge of the white sand beach of a beautiful bay or cozy cove, and looking straight out at the emerald green sea, sparkling under a deep blue sky and tropical sun. The waves were usually about two millimetres in height. Palm trees were everywhere, bulging with coconuts, and my bungalow would be set amidst a heavenly tropical garden within the resort’s grounds. Back in the 90s the tourist explosion was yet to hit Thailand, there were no mobile phones or internet, and usually the beaches were empty, save the odd person walking along it, or an occasional fisherman in his longtail boat chugging his way across the bay.
Mostly speaking, doing hammock time involved four kinds of cognitive engagement. Two were more relaxing, taking-it-all-in receptive modes, and two were more reflective and productive modes…
I would observe the world of nature busy doing its stuff, doing what it does because that’s what it does, and this was better than any movie to me. Picture each of the following, all vying for my attention: fluttering butterflies of all colours, gigantic bees buzzing all over, hovering and zooming dragonflies, scurrying red-headed green-bodied lizards on the sand, lots of birdsong, intermittent bursts of cacophonous cicada screeching, which would smash the silence to bits, a mesmerising ocean and sky view, and much else to dance its way into my senses; I was hypnotised… it was stamped ‘heaven on earth’. I could watch it all day. And I did, day after day after day. Without knowing it at the time I was doing heaps of meditation on my hammock. I just marvelled at this scene, allowing the mind to wonder and wander as it so chose. Time stood still and I was absolutely connected to the grid of life; the only problem I used to have was what I would choose for my next meal.
Whenever the urge took me, I would reach for my Walkman (if you’re a youthful reader, I hope you know this was the precursor to iPods and the like!) and listen to my reggae music. Reggae music in this peaceful mode of life further plugged me directly into the universe.
When I felt cognitively active and productive, I would take a break from the movie of the natural world and either concoct up new, exciting and challenging learning tasks and activities for my English students back in Bangkok (I still have my notebooks full of such stuff), or I would go deep into my mind, and investigate and reflect upon the nature of life and the human mind. It’s where I did lots of inner work on myself, and certainly observing nature at close quarters, and for such long periods of time, helped me work things out for myself. I learned much from simply observing other creatures going about their business, all working and interrelating in a sort of giant web of harmony. The insect world and the singing birds didn’t seem to have any problems, so why did we humans have so many?
Crucially, looking back, doing hammock time afforded me the time and space, in a very beautiful place, to reflect upon life, to explore it, to watch it, to learn from it. I used to think of it also as doing ‘alone-time’, not lonely, far from it - in this mode of living I absolutely did not want to talk to anybody!
And sometimes in my hammock reflections, I would explore why politics was like it is, why all the wars, inequity and corruption, and how things might be solved. Over the years, many answers and possible answers to this, and anything else I might ponder upon, came to me.
I was not yet investigating the spiritual books but, looking back, my island trips and doing hammock time were a deeply spiritual time for me. I looked outwards to a real-life heaven, and perhaps this helped me find the heaven within me. Which was the outside, within! I had always been taught that heaven was not in this world, not in this life, that one could get some pleasures along the way, but that deep happiness and contentment in one’s life was not possible, not to be expected, just a dream… well, my scientific observations of my own life, and life going on around me, proved to me otherwise.
I might add that I tremendously loved my job teaching university students and working adults back in Bangkok, so I really was a deeply content person in that magical decade which preceded the explosion in technology and media. I lived in a one room apartment in Bangkok, had one key, one ATM bank card, and one bill per month, no TV, no computer. I was supremely happy with life, and only recall getting one cold and one other health ailment (which electrolyte salts solved in short order) throughout the 90s.
When I consciously began my spiritual investigations near the end of the decade and through into the early 00s, the spiritual books I was reading were telling me things I had learned on my hammock, and it was immensely exciting to realise others were writing about things I had been discovering for myself. Sometimes they were declaring this or that to be a truth, but my experiences ran counter to what I was reading, leading me to some challenges to solve. I especially saw the media talking about a world I was increasingly seeing for myself to be a different world, as if the media world was a parallel but opposite universe to the one I was in.
That is just a small glimpse into why it is I am writing a book like this. In fact, without me realising it, the 90s were me planting the seeds of this book.
~~~~~~~
Post-reading task
What can your own ‘doing hammock time’ activity of being mindful be?
Where will you do it?
When will you start? Will it be nightly? Every morning? Every weekend? One weekend out into the countryside somewhere each month? A mix?
I will continue with this theme in next week’s letter. The tasks are to get you doing the necessary work, but undoubtedly we can get help by hearing what others have learned on their own journey. Which is why I’m writing these Letters of course!
Due to the unique life that I had somehow created for myself in the 90s, I had years of doing my hammock time which most Western people will not have. But by me distilling the understandings I’ve gained for myself from all my own investigations, I can help shorten the process for you!
That’s why I wrote my book, to get it all down into one central space for others to be guided by. If you’ve got this far with me during 2024 with all the Letters, then firstly well done (!), and secondly if you’ve not got yourself a copy of my book yet, then what are you waiting for?!
Have yourself a sterling week!
All the best, Philip
