Chapter 1: Welcome to Your Spiritual Revolution

‘Be the change you want to see in the world.’
~ attributed to Mahatma Gandhi

‘I never let my schooling interfere with my education.’ ~ Mark Twain

Brothers, sisters, friends, citizens, this book is a call to arms. Humanity has committed a dreadful crime against itself and against Mother Earth. It is surely time for us - all individual human beings - to wrest the initiative and solve our existential crisis. Not by overthrowing or fighting anybody, but by empowering ourselves and transforming our lives one by one into the beautiful, miraculous, individual, interconnected human beings that we were born to be. 

And never let anyone tell you we are not worthy to be such beings.

We live in turbulent tempestuous times, times characterised by massive change, yet marked by political weakness, corporate corruption, and unfit for purpose education and healthcare systems. Oh, and a downright disrespect for our environments.

We are well and truly up shit creek without a paddle in sight. 

As human beings, on a global scale and collectively speaking, we treat our planet as if it’s our personal and limitless resource to be exploited as we see fit. Yet it is the source and provider of all life, without which we would be high and dry and without even a rancid old creek for our sins. What on Mother’s Earth do we think we are doing? 

This book says ‘enough!’ Enough of all our wars, poverty and injustice, enough of the corporate mindset that seeks to control and dominate us all. Its mantra is that ‘enough is never enough’, always more it seeks, inexorably marching like a gigantic swarm of locusts devouring all in its path; and it will take us all to oblivion if we don’t stop it. We are already halfway there, perhaps closer.

And focusing on our own individual lives, I wonder if you have observed the sad and ailing state of the physical, psychological and spiritual health that marks the lot of so many of us human beings all over the world, and which is ever more keenly seen in the developed nations? Does technological and material progress carry a horrible sting in the tail?

It’s hardly surprising we’re sick, lost and unhappy, and psychologically floating around in that creek, because if we, as indeed we do, pollute and poison the very air, waterways and land of Mother Earth that gives us all life… from which we breathe, drink, eat and derive our sustenance… then it stands to perfect reason that we are polluting and poisoning our own lungs, our own bloodstreams, and our own flesh and bones. Trash our planet, trash our bodies. And sick bodies lead to unhappy minds. But hey, we directly pollute our minds too, and as for our souls and spiritual essence… virtually out of mainstream society sight, nowhere to be seen nor heard from. 

Our own inner ecosystems mirror the external ones. Both are in a mess.

Now, you may be wondering, nothing is new, we all know this, we know our world and our human family are struggling due to the crimes we have committed against it and ourselves, but what can you and I do about it? We are mere individuals, we can’t change the world, we can’t fix its ills, there’s nearly eight billion other people out there. And in any case, it’s the job of the governments and corporations to manage things, and they are to blame, right?

Maybe, and they both certainly have to step up to the plate, but you and me can’t control or stop them. You can, however, control your own life. You have the temple of your body, the miraculous magic of your mind, and the spiritual protection of your soul you can nurture. It’s time for you to heal the only person you can heal in life: yourself. It’s time to come home, to reveal your immense beauty to yourself. Yet, as my experience vividly tells me, the more one heals oneself, the more one can bring inspiration to other people’s lives. If you carry energy and enthusiasm around with you then you naturally emanate it, and this is hardly going to cause other people a problem!

And by healing your own inner ecosystem you cannot help but improve the health of our planet at the same time. When we focus first on ourselves, we empower ourselves and in this way we can and will easily help take care of our beautiful Gaia.

That’s what this book is about, and that is what spiritual revolution is about. Life is about what we can do, not what we can’t do; and it’s about conscious gratitude for what we have got rather than subconsciously taking it for granted or bemoaning what we don’t have. So many people arrive at their deathbed and then think what they could have done, how they could have lived, and wonder why they didn’t. But by then of course it’s just too late.

I can’t doesn’t mean that, it means I won’t. You can, but will you? 

Will you?!

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Spiritual revolution is my proposed answer to all the aforementioned problems - for individual human beings, for humanity, and for the natural world. Its premise is that we heal ourselves first and this will automatically add to the collective pot of positive energy for use by all others. Our focus must be on changing what we can, not what we can’t. The idea is we that can’t change the world directly, but we can change our own outlook, mindset and actions in positive ways, and in this way, we can contribute to a better world.

It is a revolution of the individual, by the individual, for the individual. It’s purely a one-man or one-woman personal affair, with the onus on the revolutionary to do all their own work, but with some super useful guidance from me, simply because I’m in a good position to be that guide and am writing it down here. 

And you, my friend, are that individual! You’ve found the book, you’ve found a navigator, and wherever you already are on your journey is your personal starting point for this revolutionary journey that is now up and running. 

I’ve done mine and I happily and loudly declare that I am a spiritual warrior, a soul adventurer, and a sovereign human being who celebrates and reveres the sanctity of life. I am tuned in, switched on and plugged into the life grid of Mother Earth, and I’m connected to the cosmic consciousness and the very life force of the universe. I journey along in my life on my personal wellness wagon, traversing and navigating all the physical and psychological landscapes and challenges that come my way. I fall off it sometimes, for life does not always go according to plan or desire, but I’m usually able to get back on it in pretty short order. And I stay on it for longer periods of time these days. I have found that exchanging negative thought patterns and harmful habits for good habits and a spiritual outlook on life, and practise practise practise, is the key.

Now, I’m an educator, an accidental but proper educator, and I have always loved writing, so I wanted to write for all fellow citizens the full and complete guide for conducting one’s own spiritual revolution. I want to share with you my own journey and understandings, and provide you with the means and framework for you to become your own spiritual warrior. 

And the emphasis is on ‘guide’ for it’s your revolution and you will be doing all the work, I am merely here as a navigator for you. I am nobody special, just an ordinary human being, and anything I can do, so can anybody else; a successful spiritual revolution awaits anybody who desires positive changes in their life.

What I have done, though, is thousands of hours of research and reflection upon all the important matters of what it means to be a human being, and in this way, I feel I can help speed up your own progress. 

We are talking only about activating and utilising what is our birthright as a human being, but which I say society has repressed in us: the force of intuitive intelligence. All you have to do is reveal your inner intelligence to yourself and bam, you’re up and running and won’t look back. This is our central work here, helping you to fully activate, embrace and act upon your innate intelligence.

What I feel I can do that many others might struggle with, thanks to my line of work, is collate the whole caboodle into one resource and help others to empower and transform themselves. Education is my work, and my life. My teaching style is to facilitate learning to take place - your learning, by yourself. When we commit to being learners in life, things begin to magically happen and fall into place.

From all my observations and reflections, I conceive that millions of spiritual revolutions conducted by individual human beings all over the world is our only way of finding a paddle to row ourselves out of that smelly old rancid creek we’re collectively mired in, and into a beautiful clean fresh river where all around us heavenly sights delight and melodic sounds abound.

Many have begun the journey, for even in the midst of all these troubles, human consciousness, spirituality and intelligence is on the rise. Wherever you are at in your own station of life, I invite you to step aboard and journey into the real and true you. 

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But what exactly is this revolution, what does it do, what do we get, how do we do it? 

I suggest, when all is said and done, the deepest yearning and highest objective of all human beings is to be healthy and happy. ‘I just want be happy’ is always the crux of it, and that’s not so easy if we aren’t healthy. They go hand in hand. How it is done we may not care, but to feel happy and to experience good health is to give us the real sense of freedom that a human desires and deserves. With good health and a content mind, we can achieve anything we are motivated to.

Yet, happiness, and certainly good health, is rather elusive for so many people in our modern frenetic world, and for me the reason is simple. We live in a material world where possessions are the objective, but you can’t go out and buy happiness or fill up your tank with it. No, first we must ensure certain conditions in our life prevail, and only then will good health and happiness reveal themselves to us. This is your spiritual revolution: learning what those conditions are, how to put them into place, how to maintain them, and how to get them back when things have gone awry. My book navigates you through all of this.

In life we can be discouraged and disempowered, or we can be encouraged and empowered. My reflections tell me we got too much of the former and not enough of the latter in our formative years. Unless we proactively set about empowering ourselves, we may never really recover. In these pages I shall emphatically show you the way to empowering and motivating yourself to sail into a pristine lagoon of magic!

Spiritual revolution turns things around in our life, we find out who we are, how life works, and we become skilled livers of life. My book seeks to help you do this in just the time it takes you to read it. Then you can continue spiritually evolving at a somewhat more sedate pace.

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My contention is that stress is the single cause of just about all ill-health, unhappiness, procrastination and spiritual emptiness. I have read this in a few places in my research and it makes full sense to me based on my experiences in life. It’s just that there are so many ways to stress ourselves, not just mentally but physically too - for example through poor posture, poor food choices, too much sedentary living, lack of movement and exercise and so on. Our body and mind are designed to deal with stress, it’s part of the whole mechanism of living, but in our modern world humanity has created an uber-stressful experience for ourselves in multiple ways. It comes at us like bees to a honeypot, but without any sweetness.

And this is why so much sickness, disease and unhappiness are to be found in so many communities and nations. We live with inner conflict in ourselves, which leads to conflict between us.

There are many kinds of stress - for example nutritional, psychological and environmental - and they weaken us in mind, body and spirit. Sometimes we know we’re stressed, but often we don’t realise it, and it gradually builds up inside of us, one day erupting like a long, apparently but it turns out not, dormant volcano. 

When we feel and become overly stressed, we look any which way we can to alleviate it, and this is where your alcohol, drugs, and comfort foods come in. They give us temporary pleasure and help us forget our stressful world for a while, only for it to come back the next day because we never sought out, nor addressed, the root causes of our stress. 

This is our grand human mistake: we ignore the laws of nature because we were educated that way, eschewing the life lessons that an understanding of karma and karmic law offer us, which in plain English is that every effect has a cause, and every sowing leads to a reaping. Every action leads to a reaction, this is simple energy mechanics in action. We try to numb our negative feelings and emotions, and we take pills for aches, constipation and myriad other bodily ailments. Instead of using our stressful state of being to investigate the causes and then make changes to reduce and get rid of the stressors, we simply carry on. If external conditions don’t change, then we are building up future problems inside our being like a ticking time bomb.

And, before you know it, we have developed harmful habits and addictions which further exacerbate the stress to our body and mind, depleting our spirit, robbing us of our essence, and we are caught up in a vicious cycle from which there can seem no escape. Often, as time goes by, we need more and more of our ‘drug’ because its pleasurable effects become weaker and wear off faster. Our body has got used to our source of pleasure, and so demands more of it. The cycle gets ever more vicious.

Small hits of pleasure sandwiched by much physical and emotional unhappiness become our lot, and happiness and sound health have now long since become a distant dream. Our relationships suffer, life gets ever harder, we see doctors more often than friends, and then one day the biggie comes along, a diabetes, a cancer, you know the score. 

All because we ignored the cast iron law of nature: out of your action comes a related reaction. Spiritual revolutionaries very much learn to live according to karmic law for you will have to be super lucky indeed in this spiritually warped world to accidentally live happily and with wellbeing. 

You may have reflected that both the original stress and our subsequent addictions arise from our relationship and interaction with the world outside of us. Either our interactions with the external environment are harmonious to our being or they bring us stress. Our starting point in our journey out of this physiological, psychological and spiritual mess, is to address stress and its root causes, and that means becoming aware of all our interactions and relationships with the world out there beyond our skin. We need to understand not just the stressors out there, but also our own reactions which will be based on acceptance or resistance.

Verily so, stress is the big enemy! 

I should note that on occasion we get stressed for our protection. If you suddenly come across a big dangerous animal - in the jungle, in the Australian seas, in a bar on a Friday night - your body is immediately flooded with adrenaline and is most certainly stressed. But your body has reacted this way to send extra strength into your limbs so you can fight the beast or get the hell out of the scene at a rapid pace of knots. 

However, if this bodily reaction happens frequently, and however small the trigger, then this is the cause of our troubles, health-wise. All those hormones are running riot, our body overheats and becomes tense, and our mind is overtaken by negative energy. And if we are in a virtual constant state of stress, well, that’s when our health can spiral downhill. Pain, emotional distress, negative feelings… they are our body’s message to make changes to our life. But are we listening? Often we are not, nobody taught us, and we pop that pill, drink that bottle, snort that line, and so on. 

The last word on stress for now is that physical stress leads to mental stress, and mental or emotional stress leads to physical stress, and in this state of being our spiritual essence is chased right out of town. Mind and body are intimately linked, contrary to the orthodox views of western medical science and thinking. Just reflect upon your own life and you can verify this law of nature. 

One of the quickest ways out of mental stress is to clean up one’s diet. Eat whole foods, avoid corporation-made foods and drinks, and just see how your body and mind feel after a week or two. Start right now why don’t you?? No sense in hanging around, this is your revolution, act quick! This is the simplest yet best diet to support your wellbeing in body and in mind. Once you’ve successfully changed over to this diet then you can refine things further. You can read about all of this in the final section of the book.

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The opposite state of being stressed is being in balance, in harmony. You feel balanced within your being; your mind and body are stress-free and both are in fine working order, your soul is alive and dancing, and you are living harmoniously with the people and world around you. It is by spending most of your time in harmony that you create the conditions which allow happiness and good health to flourish. Harmony is your key, my friend. But harmony just does not come to us on a plate. We literally have to work to get it. There’s no escaping this, one simply must do the hard yards to get the rewards. We are going to learn that wellness and wellbeing is a way of life, a consciously chosen lifestyle, which requires our ongoing commitment forevermore until the janitor from heaven arrives for our collection.

The only way is through intelligent living, and in fact my definition of intelligence is ‘the ability to live harmoniously with the world around us’. And if the world around us is going to pot then we need to get seriously intelligent, but we can do it, we are human and we have huge reservoirs of resources inside our minds and hearts. But it must be a conscious thing.

Intelligent people seek harmony because they know that good health and contentment and joy come out of it. Academic intelligence, or intellect, is quite another thing, and no indicator of good health at all. Trouble is, in our schooling they focused on academia and ignored the crucial stuff. Know the stuff in books they said, but be ignorant of how to live happily, healthily, harmoniously. Bad deal! I say let’s have both.

Harmony, then, arises within us from our intelligent interactions with the world out there, and that means in all our relationships - from food to ideas, from people to the environment, and everything in between. Nothing exists in isolation, all is interlinked and interdependent, and it’s all energy flow. Energy flows into you, and it flows out of you back into the world. Harmonious energy flow between you and life out there means health and happiness, inner peace and contentment, joy and fun for you. And all life on Mother Earth will love you for it.

The key to ensuring we live intelligently is becoming consciously aware of all our relationships, whereupon we are now able to make informed changes to any that are not serving us well. It may be we need to temporarily choose stress, to resist something or somebody out there (an injustice, bullying behaviour), but at least we do it with conscious choice and because we feel such resistance will return us to harmony. ‘No pain no gain’ comes to mind.

So there you have it, less stress, more harmony, and Bob’s your uncle (hey Steve!), all will be tickety-boo in your life. I call our active pursuit of it the ‘Triple-H lifestyle’: living with health, harmony and happiness. Each of the three Hs lead to the other two, it is a holistic triple-H. I ask you what objective for our daily life could possibly be more important?? 

Our journey together in this book all relates to learning how to pursue, achieve and maintain the 3Hs. And when lost, to retrieve.

Challenging times and problems will still come knocking on your door for sure, such are the vagaries and vicissitudes of life, but you will have the wherewithal and skills to navigate yourself through the challenges, and to solve problems in short order. You will have created your own personal wellness wagon to journey upon for the rest of your life. Just one book will do it. You get the full compendium, the total guide, the full course dinner!

Your work then, my friend, is all about learning how to bring harmony into your relationships and your life, keeping it, and being able to recover it when it’s temporarily lost. My work, in these here pages, is to take you on a guided and fun discovery to do just that, to be your navigator and to facilitate you in your journey. The key word is learning - and only you can do it. I can guide, but you have to learn for yourself, hence the personal nature of the spiritual revolution; we each of us must conduct our own. But there is a problem… 

… and that is, until we do our own inner work, we are not very good learners.

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If we’d had an education worth its name this book would be redundant, so would all the tens of thousands of diet books and self-improvement books. You will discover that my views, as an educator of educators, are not very complimentary about the state of mainstream education systems in our human world. And I don’t mean to knock teachers at all, they have a hard job; I knock the system. A feature of spiritual living in my view is that we do our level best to not blame anybody, rather to just seek out what is broken or crumbling, and then fix it.

There are only really two ways to effect change in, or modify, people’s and society’s behaviour: education and law. That we have tens or hundreds of thousands of laws to govern our behaviour strongly suggests our education has gone wildly wrong.

The fundamental flaw in education systems nearly everywhere - I know Finland to be a noble exception, as are some individual schools dotted around the world - is that the teachers were taught to teach, they do not facilitate and develop in us the skill of learning; that is, they teach stuff to the kids, they don’t teach the kids how to learn the stuff. This handicaps us all right from the off. We sit at our desks for 12 years being taught, being told, being spoken at, being tested, being silent, complying, behaving, memorising… this is our lot. And 12 years is a very long time for a young human being. I argue later in the book that it near about breaks us.

This absolutely is not learning, nothing to do with it! Being human can be tough, and to successfully navigate our way through life we need, as well as useful knowledge, skills, and we need plenty of them, especially cognitive skills such as learning, communicating and problem-solving.

But we get none of that during our schooling.

We can embark upon our own spiritual revolution to rectify this terrible mistake.

To skilfully acquire all those skills we must first learn the mother of all skills: how to learn. And they never trained us how to do this, insanity!! As a teacher, I know the most important attribute I need is the ability to learn for myself, and never to stop doing so. If I, the teacher, can’t learn properly how can I teach properly? If we citizens can’t learn, how can we learn to live properly?

Look at these key words, which by the end of the book will be a friendly feature of your mental landscape: learning, discerning, intelligence, integrity, authenticity, understanding, happiness, inner calm, attention, awareness, observation, reflection, conscious living. We shall find that the last one is the engine room of your revolution and brings all the others into action.

Their common denominator? None of them can be taught to you, none of them can be handed over to you, you cannot get them from anybody else, you have to make them happen yourself, they come from within you. Others can help point us in the right direction, but only if we are willing, able and ready to learn ourselves; I read it once, ‘when you are ready to learn a teacher will appear’.

Facts, knowledge, and information are of course super useful in their own right, yes, but the real stuff of life - intelligence and harmonious living - comes from within us, and since the schools didn’t empower us to be skilled learners, we shall have to do it ourselves. Spiritual revolution is in many ways a revolution of learning through self-education to make up for what we didn’t get, to liberate ourselves from what I call our ‘conditioned ignorance’.

My mission as an educator has always been to empower all my students, many of them teachers, by helping them develop themselves into highly skilled learners. Once we can learn properly, we can do anything we want in life. If you ever had a really good teacher, I can tell you it will have been because she or he was a skilled learner themselves.

Learning is an art, a science, a dimension even. If there was one thing I was brought into life for by the universe, it seems to me, it was to help people learn and develop themselves into autonomous citizens. Autonomy is your absolute passport to experiencing as much freedom as an individual human being can get for themselves, and by freedom I mean having good health to pursue and realise your dreams.

My effort here is to transfer my classroom work into this book, and help you become a super skilled learner. My objective for the chapters in the Starters section is to pique your curiosity and activate your digestive juices, to get you thinking about some of the core issues we shall discuss in the Main Courses section, and in general help you get your mind to be fully open and attentive for the learning journey ahead of you. 

Real learning comes from hearing about the story and the storyteller because no story, no life, exists without the experiencer. I will share with you many anecdotes from my experiences in my own spiritual revolution to better illustrate to you my truths and understandings. The intention is smooth your path to your own truths and understandings.

Only by us individual citizens doing inner work on ourselves can we begin to turn things around at the global level for our whole human family and Mother Earth alike. It makes the impossible possible. Nobody can change the world, but they can change their world, and ultimately speaking that will change the world.

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There are many ideas of what it means to be spiritual, to live spiritually, and I shall close this chapter with one of my own. 

Spirituality combines living for today with an intention to cause no harm to oneself or to others. It is a recognition that we are an interconnected part of the whole (world and universe), and that we represent the whole, and therefore to harm others is to harm oneself. The act of this recognition is to unleash a revolution in the noticer’s life - it is ‘flicking the switch of awareness’ and is a single act of revolution within an evolution already begun. Once you have flicked this switch, everything becomes clearer.

Awareness comes from conscious living, and this book is all about developing one’s conscious living. I bid you a warm welcome to our journey together, drive well and enjoy the scenery!