Letter #28: A Spiritual Revolution for the Healing of Humankind
A great place for doing some spiritual development on yourself!
Dear Friend
Did you miss me last week?! Big apologies for my no-show.
I had the last two of nine training sessions over the last three months to prepare for and navigate, and a lot of other things that came up during that week.
I’m fully back in action this week, though. And I want to take a ‘bigger picture’ view for this week’s Letter.
A Spiritual Revolution
It is only through A Spiritual Revolution that human beings can get off this path of collective and ever-more rapid self-destruction that our human world seems hellbent on achieving.
When the whole human family is in such disarray, and when so many individual human beings are struggling with their whole health and wellbeing—in body mind and spirit—we must accept that we’ve lost our way and lost the plot.
Especially in the West.
When we are poisoning our foods, our medicines, our air, our rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, our soil and land, our skies, our bodies, our minds, the whole web of life, and the very planet which gave birth to us, which gave us the miracle of our life, we are in trouble.
Deep and dire mire we are in.
Up a rancid and smelly old creek without, seemingly, a paddle in sight.
Ostriches with heads in sand, chickens without heads, elephants in rooms.
And it’s not okay, and it’s not ‘just the way it is’, and it’s not a case of ‘there's nothing I can do, I’m just one small person’.
Everything in life is transient, evolving, developing, moving; it is only in death that things stop changing. But that’s not strictly true, for even in death things are regenerating, as bodies decompose and decay leading to a new cycle of life.
From Wikipedia:
The expression "elephant in the room" is a metaphorical idiom in English for an important or enormous topic, question, or controversial issue that is obvious or that everyone knows about but no one mentions or wants to discuss because it makes at least some of them uncomfortable and is personally, socially, or politically embarrassing, controversial, inflammatory, or dangerous.
Well, as you probably realise by now, I’m not an elephant in the room at all, I’ve been speaking about uncomfortable and controversial topics almost my entire adult life, and I have no concern over me possibly feeling embarrassed. I can’t recall the last time I felt this way; I don’t care what others think of what I say or do, I care about life and promoting and enhancing it.
And for human beings that means speaking out, listening, observing, reflecting, understanding and evolving. It means taking care of our own health and wellbeing so that we can help, mentor and inspire others do the same.
Till the day we die. Evolution is for life!
I said ‘up the creek and seemingly without a paddle in sight’, but there most certainly is a paddle, a golden paddle that enables its user to sail into a glorious pristine fresh delicious beautiful body of water!
It’s called A Spiritual Revolution.
A Gigantic Misunderstanding and its Solution
I wanted in this Letter to clearly elucidate what a spiritual revolution is. I usually write it as A Spiritual Revolution, using capital letters to underline its status as a unique brand, concept and framework for practical action, underpinned by theoretical understanding, that any individual human being can take to completely transform their life, health and relationships… all you need is intention and action.
As you’ve perhaps noticed, my website, my YouTube Channel, one of my Facebook pages, and my first published book are all called A Spiritual Revolution. Well, my book has the longer title of Menu For A Spiritual Revolution: Health Harmony & Happiness, but A Spiritual Revolution is what I’m promoting as THE solution to all ills!
And I don’t mean a resolution for a temporary period of time (the best we will ever get from politics, if we are super lucky), I’m talking a real transformative solution because, when one looks in-depth into the human condition as I have, it becomes apparent that we all live based off a gigantic misunderstanding that then colours the rest of our life.
This misunderstanding is that we are separate creatures, separate beings, cast asunder into a threatening, dangerous, dog-eats-dog world where we are battling each other for limited resources.
Ironically, the human world has indeed become dangerous and threatening, but only as a consequence of divisive human activity arising from this devastating misunderstanding.
The planet birthed us, and we are inextricably interconnected and interdependent on Mother Earth and her whole web of life. So when we poison the air we poison our own lungs, when we poison the land and soil we poison our own flesh and bones, and when we poison the waterways we poison our own blood.
If we breathe clean air, drink clean natural water, and eat naturally-grown foods, we live with tremendous health and wellbeing. This needs self-knowledge, and this means we must embark up on self-inquiry because our schooling supressed all of this from us.
The words revolution and spiritual are both evocative words, which have various connotations, making the actual meaning of the phrase a spiritual revolution even more confusing perhaps. Let’s investigate just what ASR is through a series of statements that I have collated in my notebooks.
What is A Spiritual Revolution and What Does it Do?
A Spiritual Revolution is an empowering and exciting journey of self-inquiry into the inner world of your heart and mind to discover the real true you, and in so doing, how life works.
With this newfound understanding you now consciously cultivate a lifestyle which brings you health, harmony and happiness. On occasion when you become unbalanced and stressed, you know how to get harmony back into your life.
A Spiritual Revolution is a revolution of the individual by the individual for the individual, with attendant benefits for the whole human family and our world. It is whole person development done by you.
It’s got nothing to do with overthrowing anybody or any government! It’s about the healing of humankind through the empowerment of individual human beings everywhere. See Letter #25 for the discussion on empowerment and disempowerment.
Many things happen along the way.
ASR is you taking steps to align yourself with nature: your own unique nature, your human nature, and the nature of life on our planet; school systems antagonise and suppress our nature
ASR asks you to unblock your mind, unlock your heart and unleash your spirit to share your uniqueness in unity with all your fellow human beings (5Us)
In so doing you activate and cultivate your inner authority thereby allowing your human essence to act as your navigator on your life’s journey from hereon in (See Letter #26 for a discussion on this)
You bring healing to your mind, body and soul, to your mental, emotional, psychological, and physical health, leading to your spiritual emancipation and ongoing spiritual growth and development
You live with curiosity, creativity, compassion, connection, camaraderie and confidence (6Cs)
You learn how to live in an optimal state of health, harmony and happiness, finding yourself motivated from within to contribute to the healing of humankind (5Hs)
You become an intelligent integrated interconnected individual (4Is)
You approach life proactively, positively, peacefully and with purpose and passion (5Ps)
Your journey of self-inquiry leads to self-discovery >> self-knowledge >> self-empowerment >> self-confidence >> self-growth >> continuous evolution
You learn how to use your conscious mind to learn about the ways of the ego, and to tame and temper the propensity of the ego-driven subconscious mind to harm yourself and others; you discover your ego, how it works, and how it came to be what it is
You recondition your subconscious mind so that your ego loses its dominance over you
ASR empowers and enables you to ‘Be the change you wish to see in the world’, as Mahatma Gandhi urged us to do
ASR trains us to learn how our human mind works by observing ourself, and by observing others
You become a spiritual warrior, encapsulated in this maxim for life: “Cause no harm, accept no shit”
Self-awareness, self-belief, self-confidence, self-determination and self-esteem replace self-consciousness, self-doubt, self-sabotage and self-loathing
ASR is all about you taking charge of your own life, health, destiny and relationships; you become a leader for you, and this makes you a natural mentor and motivator for others to empower themselves in kind
A Spiritual Revolution is the bridge between the old., limited, stressed you into the transformed, unlimited, infinite, harmonious you
The focus now is on enjoying life through being creative, productive and reflective
And just so much more, but hopefully you’ve got the picture now!
A final word on the times we live in
I consider that we live in truly scary, yet simultaneously exciting, times, with a tremendous opportunity for humankind—meaning all ordinary human beings—to rise up and liberate ourselves from the suppressed version of who we all are. And we have been kept down for what is most likely centuries, certainly all the decades of my own life.
Many people would like to express themselves and speak out (this is an innate aspect of being human), but fear the consequences, and that’s a natural human feeling. But, I feel that it’s more scary to not speak up and to not share one’s deepest thoughts and feelings with our fellow humans.
When we suppress ourselves, we are not living in a way aligned with nature and the whole web of life. This makes us stressed, fearful, frustrated, powerless, divisive, and we end up in conflicts with those we love, befriend and live with, saying and doing things that we end up regretting, leading to feelings of guilt and shame and self-loathing.
That’s no good at all.
It arises from ‘keeping quiet’, from storing bad energy inside us, from bottling things up, keeping things down, deep within our being and consciousness. We are a live exploding volcano in-the-waiting. Or, should we not explode, we get to our deathbed and find we are filled with regrets for what we did not do or say.
And now it’s all too late to change our ways.
This is why we all need, as individuals, to embark on our own healing journey to empower ourselves and transform our whole way of life. This is not to lose anything good, only to lose bad stuff! Fear only can exist in us through inaction, through suppressing ourselves.
When you are the the real true you, there is nothing to fear.
But even better, if you can embark upon your individual journey of self-inquiry and self-discovery through collaborating with fellow like-minded, open-hearted human beings, then your self-empowerment will go through the roof!
That’s what I’m currently setting up, workshops and live learning courses (online, and in-person here in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand) to bring to adults the core skills, knowledge and confidence we all need to realise, actualise and manifest all our glorious potential, leading to us loving our own life and sharing our talents with others to help them do the same.
Expressing yourself, having discussions, doing research…. this is our liberation, and then the world may still be scary, but now we walk with confidence and talk with courage. Others will be inspired by your example.
We just need to develop and master our learning and communication skills that school systems the world over blocked us from learning.
It’s why we struggle with our health and our relationships, and therefore why there is so much emotional and psychological suffering.
Everybody needs a spiritual revolution. No, sorry, correction, everybody needs A Spiritual Revolution.
All the best
Philip
