I was born in a poor village in the Northeastern part of Thailand. When I was a kid, everything was fun and easy. But when the TV came, many people came to the village, and they said, “You are poor, you need to chase success in your life. You need to go to Bangkok to pursue success in your life.” So I felt bad, I felt poor. I needed to go to Bangkok.
When I went to Bangkok, it was not very fun. You need to learn, study a lot, and work very hard to get success. I worked very hard, at least eight hours per day, but all I could eat was just a bowl of noodles per meal, or some simple fried rice dish. The place where I stayed was very bad, a small room where many people slept. It was very hot. I started to question a lot. When I work hard, why is my life so hard? It must be something wrong because I produce a lot of things, but I cannot get enough.
I tried to learn, I tried to study in the university. It’s very hard to learn in university because it’s very boring. When I looked at subjects in the university, in every faculty, most of them had destructive knowledge. There’s no productive knowledge in university for me. If you learn to be an architect or engineer, that means you ruin more. The more these people work, the more the mountains will be destroyed. The good land in the Chao Praya Basin will be covered with concrete more and more. We destroy more. If we go to agriculture faculty or something like that, that means we learn how to poison the land and the water and learn to destroy everything.
I felt like everything we do is so complicated, so hard. We just make everything hard. Life was so hard and I felt disappointed. I started to think about why I had to be in Bangkok. I thought about when I was a kid, nobody worked eight hours per day. Everybody worked two hours, two months a year, planting rice one month and harvesting the rice another month. The rest is free time, ten months of free time. That’s why people have so many festivals in Thailand; every month they have a festival. Because they have so much free time. Even now in Laos, if you go to Laos, people take a nap after lunch. And after they wake up, they just gossip: “How’s your son-in-law? How’s your wife? Your daughter-in-law?” People have a lot of time, and because they have a lot of time, they have time to be with themselves. When they have time to be with themselves, they have time to understand themselves. When they understand themselves, they can see what they want in their life. Many people see that they want happiness, they want love, they want to enjoy their life. So people see a lot of beauty in their life, and they express that beauty in many ways. Some people by carving the handle of their knife very beautifully, others by weaving baskets very nicely. But now, nobody does that. Nobody can do something like that. People use plastic everywhere. So I felt like there was something wrong. I couldn’t live this way anymore.
I decided to quit university and went back home. When I went back home, I started to live like I remembered, like when I was a kid. I started to work two months a year. I got four tons of rice. My whole family, six people, we eat less than half a ton per year. So we can sell some rice. I dug two ponds, two fish ponds. We have fish to eat all year round. I started a small garden, less than half an acre. I spend 15 minutes per day taking care of the garden. I have more than 30 varieties of vegetables in the garden. Six people cannot eat all of it. We have a surplus to sell in the market, so we can make some income too.
I felt like it was easy. Why did I have to be in Bangkok for seven years, working hard and not having enough to eat, but here, only working two months a year and 15 minutes per day, I can feed six people? That’s easy. And before, I thought that stupid people like me, who never got good grades in school, couldn’t have a house. People who were cleverer than me, who were number one in the class every year, they get a good job, but they need to work more than 30 years to have a house. But me, who couldn’t finish university, how could I have a house? Hopeless for people who have low education, like me.
But then I started to do earth building. It’s so easy. I spent two hours per day, from 5 o’clock in the morning until 7 o’clock in the morning, two hours per day. And in three months, I got a house. And another friend, who was the most clever in the class, he spent three months to build his house too. But he had to be in debt. He had to pay for his debt for 30 years. So compared to him, I have 29 years and 10 months of free time. So I feel that life is so easy. I never thought I could build a house as easy as that. And I keep building a house every year, at least one house every year. Now, I have no money, but I have many houses. My problem is in which house I will sleep tonight. So a house is not a problem, anybody can build a house. Kids, 13 years old, at the school, they make bricks together, they make a house. After one month, they have a library. The kids can make a house, a very old nun can build a hut for herself. Many people can build a house. So it’s easy. If you don’t believe me, try it if somebody wants to have a house.
And then, the next thing is clothing. I felt like I was poor, like I wasn’t handsome. I tried to dress like somebody else, like a movie star, to make myself look good, look better. I spent one month saving money to buy a pair of jeans. When I wore them, I turned left, I turned right, looked in the mirror. Every time I looked, I was the same person. The most expensive pants cannot change my life. I felt like I was so crazy. Why did I have to buy them? Spend one month to have a pair of pants. It didn’t change me. I started to think more about that. Why do we need to follow fashion? Because when we follow fashion, we never catch up with it, because we follow it. So, don’t follow it, just stay here. Use what you have.
After that, until now, 20 years, I have never bought any clothes. All the clothes I have are leftovers from people. When people come to visit me, and when they leave, they leave a lot of clothes there. So I have tons of clothes now. And when people see me wearing very old clothes, they give me more clothes. So my problem is, I need to give clothes to people very often. It’s so easy. When I stopped buying clothes, I felt like it wasn’t only clothes; it was about something else in my life. What I learned is that when I buy something, I think about if I buy it because I like it or because I need it. So if I buy it because I like it, that means I’m wrong. So I feel more free when I think like this.
And the last thing is, when I get sick, what will I do? I really worried in the beginning because then I had no money. But I started to contemplate more. Normally, sickness is a normal thing, it’s not a bad thing. Sickness is something to remind us that we did something wrong in our lives, that’s why we got sick. So when I get sick, I need to stop and come back to myself. Think about what I did wrong. I learned how to use water to heal myself, how to use earth to heal myself, and I learned how to use basic knowledge to heal myself.
Now that I rely on myself in these four things, I feel like life is very easy. I feel something like freedom, I feel free. I don’t worry about anything much, I have less fear, I can do whatever I want in my life. Before, I had a lot of fear, I could not do anything. But now I feel very free, like I’m a unique person on this Earth, nobody like me, I don’t need to make myself like anybody else. I’m the number one. Things like this make it easy, very light.
After that, I started to think that when I was in Bangkok, I felt very dark in my life. I started to think that many people maybe thought like me at the time. So we started a place called “Pun Pun” in Chiang Mai. The main aim is just saving seed, to collect seed because seed is food, food is life. If there is no seed, no life. No seed, no freedom. No seed, no happiness. Because your life depends on somebody else, because you have no food. So it’s very important to save seed. That’s why we focus on saving seed. That’s the main thing in Pun Pun.
The second thing is it is a learning center. We want to have a center for ourselves to learn how to make life easy. Because we were taught to make life complicated and
hard all the time. How can we make it easy? It’s easy, but we don’t know how to make it easy anymore because we always make it complicated. Now, we start to learn and learn to be together. We were taught to disconnect ourselves from everything else, to be independent so we can rely on money only. We don’t need to rely on each other. But now, to be happy, we need to come back, to connect to ourselves again, to connect to other people, to connect our mind and body together again, so we can be happy.
Life is easy. From the beginning until now, what I learned is the four basic needs: food, house, clothes, and medicine must be cheap and easy for everybody. That’s civilization. But if you make these four things hard and very hard for many people to get, that’s uncivilized. Now when we look everywhere around us, everything is so hard to get. I feel like now is the most uncivilized era of humans on this Earth. We have so many people who finish university, we have so many universities on the Earth, we have so many clever people on this Earth, but life is harder and harder. We make it hard for whom? We work hard for whom right now? I feel like it’s wrong, it’s not normal.
I just want to come back to normal, to be a normal person, to be equal to animals. The birds make a nest in one or two days. The rats dig a hole in one night. But clever humans like us spend 30 years to have a house, and many people can’t believe that they can have a house in this life. That’s wrong. Why do we destroy our spirit? Why do we destroy our ability that much? So I feel that it’s enough for me to live in the normal way, in the abnormal way.
So now I try to be normal. But people look at me as the abnormal one. A crazy person. But I don’t care because it’s not my fault. It’s their fault; they think like that. My life is easy and light now. That’s enough for me. People can think whatever they want. I cannot manage anything outside myself. What I can do is change my mind, manage my mind. Now, my mind is light and easy, that’s enough.
If anybody wants to have a choice, you can have a choice. The choice to be easy or to be hard, it depends on you.