Twelve months · Surin, Thailand · One vow

To transcend yourself is the task asked of every man.

Most men never attempt it. Not because they are weak — because nobody ever asked them to, and because the attempt costs a year they are not sure they can spare.

What
A one-year vow
Where
A village in Surin province, Thailand
When
Not yet fixed — see status
Cost
No fee; your own travel and living costs
Who
Men; cohorts are small
Next step
One email

i. The word

What I mean by transcendent.

I mean God.

Not a denomination, not an argument, not a position I am going to ask you to hold. I mean the thing that every language and every century has reached for and named differently, and gone on reaching for after the name changed. Call it God. Call it the Dhamma. Call it the ground of being, the good, the ultimate, the thing your grandmother prayed to in a language you no longer speak. Men have died for that thing under a hundred names. It does not seem to mind which one you use.

What matters here is the direction. To be human is to point at something beyond yourself — a person, a work, a God — and a man who points at nothing but himself curls inward and calls it freedom.

Whenever the eye sees anything of itself its function is impaired… The normally functioning eye does not see itself, it is rather overlooking itself; likewise man is human to the extent that he overlooks and forgets himself by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love. Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, 3rd ed. (1986)

Frankl called it self-transcendence and put it at the center of what he built. He was a psychiatrist, not a preacher, and he left the ultimate deliberately open — an "open-door policy," in his phrase — so that a man could fill it from his own tradition without being told whose it had to be. That is the position this place takes too.

He was not the first to put it there. Seven centuries earlier Thomas Aquinas wrote that the mind is never satisfied by any particular truth and the will by any particular good — both are ordered beyond themselves by nature, and a human being is made for ecstasy in the plain old sense of the word, ek-stasis, standing outside yourself. Frankl's word and Thomas's are the same word in two languages, and Frankl knew it: in the same book he says his account of love "go[es] back to scholastic or Platonic philosophy." And the open door is open from the other side too. Thomas held that faith stands above reason and is never against it, that no sacrifice of the mind is asked of a believer, and he read Aristotle, Maimonides and Averroes with respect and without polemics. So a secular method and a believing man can share one room without either pretending. That is what happens here. Irenaeus, in the second century, put the whole of it in one sentence: the glory of God is a human being fully alive.

And if the word faith is the one that stops you, here is the only sense of it this year asks for. Faith is not belief in a set of facts. It is the willingness to abide by what your conscience tells you — a definition I take from Jordan Peterson, and one that turns out to have a counterpart twenty-five centuries older: the Buddhist tradition calls the two guardians of the world hiri and ottappa, the inner sense of shame and the dread of doing wrong, and says a world without them would be indistinguishable from a herd. Two traditions with no contact describe a voice inside that informs and does not compel. You do not have to believe anything to hear it. You have to stop drowning it out.

So: what are you pointing at?

Not what would you say at a dinner table. What does your calendar point at? What did you give this year that cost you something?

ii. The invitation

This is for men.

I will say that plainly rather than let you work it out. It is written by a man, for men, about a thing men in particular seem to be failing at right now. That is not a claim that women do not face it. It is a claim that I am not the one to write that version, and I would rather be narrow and useful than broad and vague.

You do not need to be lost to come. Most men who write to me are not in crisis — they are competent, employed, well enough liked, and quietly aware that nothing in their life is pulling them forward. They can describe what they do. They cannot describe what it is for.

Frankl had a name for that. Not depression — an existential vacuum, and he was careful to say it is not an illness: "a man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is a spiritual distress but by no means a mental disease." The hole has a specific shape. Money, comfort and distraction are all the wrong shape to fill it, and he named the two most common wrong shapes himself — the will to money, and the will to pleasure. I know both. I sold both for twenty years.

Frankl even gave it a day of the week: "Sunday neurosis," the depression "which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest" (Man's Search for Meaning, 1963, p. 169). Tom Bilyeu, who co-founded Quest Nutrition and now runs a show that several million men watch, tells his own twenties in one sentence: "I had big dreams, but I couldn't get out of bed" (The Diary of a CEO, February 6, 2019). That is the same hole, seen from the other end of the century, and he climbed out of it by the first of Frankl's roads: a work that was for other people. The men who write to me are rarely in the bed. They are at the desk, on Sunday, with the same question.

Three questions. Answer them honestly and you will know whether to write to me.

When did you last do something difficult that no one made you do?

Who, outside your own household, is better off because you exist?

If this year went exactly as the last one did, and the next ten did too — would that be a life you would choose?

iii. The vow

One year. The teaching runs through all of it.

A retreat ends and you go home the same man. This does not end. It is twelve months in a village in Surin province, in the northeast of Thailand, and the spine of it is simple: you teach English to Isan children who need it, in a village school, for a year. You will be bad at it for a while, in public, in front of people who are depending on you anyway. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the design. Frankl's first two roads to a meaning — by what you make, and by whom you come to know — happen in one classroom at the same time.

It is also a village, and that is not incidental. On October 1, 2026, Emad Mostaque — a mathematician who used to run one of the companies that build the machines, and the man this family of sites follows on AI — was asked, at the end of a long conversation about what the machines will do to work, what a man should actually do. His last answer was to build a stronger community, because the strongest ones come through whatever happens; his own picture of one is his family's village in Bangladesh. Mine is a village in Surin. A year here is a year inside one — a classroom, a temple, a household that is depending on you — and the practice under everything else is to become a man a village can depend on.

Around the teaching, four passages, in this order, each arranged to take something from you that the next one needs gone.

I

The vow

You say out loud, to another person, what you are giving the year to. A vow spoken to yourself is a plan. A vow spoken to a witness is a different object — it can be broken, which is precisely what gives it weight.

What would you be ashamed to have promised and abandoned?

II

The silence

A period of monastic silence in a Thai temple. No phone, no reading, no explaining yourself. Most men discover in the first three days that they have never been alone with their own attention and do not much like the company.

What do you reach for the moment a room goes quiet?

III

The elephants

Three months, after the silence, living and working alongside the mahouts at an elephant camp in Surin, training with them. Surin is the province of elephants; the Kuy people here have kept them for centuries. You will learn what a creature that weighs four tons will and will not do for a man, and why.

And you will test a parable against the real animals. In its best-known telling — Jorge Bucay's "El elefante encadenado," in Déjame que te cuente — a young elephant is tethered to a post it cannot pull out. It learns it cannot. As a full-grown adult it stands beside a post it could walk away from at any moment — and does not. It is not restrained. It is convinced. The Dhammapada, in its chapter on the elephant, has the other one: an elephant "difficult to hold, does not eat a morsel when bound; the elephant longs for the elephant grove." One has given up. One has not. You will be asked which you are.

What post are you standing beside that you stopped testing years ago?

IV

The guiding

In the final months you take responsibility for a man behind you in the same year. Not as an expert. As someone who is one passage further on and remembers the one before it.

Who is behind you right now, and what have you done about it?

What the teaching leaves you with. A year in front of children is a qualification in itself. The year includes a TEFL/TESOL certificate course; the certificate, hours and awarding body are stated in the invitation. It is an outcome of the year, not its purpose.

What this is not. It is not a holiday, a silent-retreat package, a men's weekend, or a route to a visa. It asks for fasting, vigil, silence, unpaid work, and a year away from ordinary life. It is unsuitable for anyone in acute crisis, and it is not treatment for anything.

If you are in genuine distress, what you need is a doctor and people who love you — not a year in a temple. I will tell you that on the call rather than take your year.

iv. The protocols · every day

The daily protocols.

Five things a man does every day of the year, in a village, with no money and nothing to buy: light, sleep, rest, movement and, four days at a time, writing. The card format is borrowed from Huberman Lab's toolkits (2021–2026), with one difference: I grade the evidence; he does not.

The most ordered day I know of belonged to a thirteenth-century friar. Thomas Aquinas began with two masses, one he said and one he attended, then read, taught and wrote almost without a break, dictating to as many as three secretaries at once, with a short sleep in the middle of the day; fifty folio volumes in twenty-five years. Genius, yes — and, in Bishop Barron's phrase, a man of "extraordinary order and discipline." The cards below are smaller than that, on purpose.

Andrew Huberman, a Stanford neuroscientist, made the format popular: a timing, a dose, a fallback and a one-line reason for each step. His written protocols carry no evidence grade, no sample sizes and no species. So each card here adds a grade, and names the study behind it in a line — including when the study turns out to be eight meditation teachers in a brain scanner.

TestedMany studies, pooled in reviews or guidelines, support it, and the size of the effect is known.

PromisingA few small or narrow studies support it. Not proven.

PremiseA plausible mechanism. No study has tested it as an outcome.

  1. iMorning light5–20 min · every morning Promising
  2. iiSleepthe last hour of the day · every night Promising
  3. iiiRest (NSDR)10–20 min · after a bad night or after learning Promising· Premise
  4. ivMovement30 min a day, longer on Sunday Tested
  5. vExpressive writing15–20 min · four sessions Tested

During the silence, the temple's rules come first. Where a card and the abbot disagree, follow the abbot.

Nothing on these cards is medical advice, and nothing on them costs money. Every study is listed in full under the seasons.

Card i · Every morning

Morning light

Time
5–20 minutes
Needs
The outdoors
When
Within an hour of waking
Evidence
Promising

Steps

  1. Within 60 minGo outside. A window does not count. Face the bright part of the sky; never look straight at the sun.
  2. 5–10 minOn a clear morning. Walk, sweep the yard, stand at the gate. No sunglasses; ordinary glasses are fine.
  3. 20 minWhen it is overcast. Huberman's own figure for a cloudy morning drifts between his documents, from 15 to 60 minutes; this card says 20.

Why

Bright light in the early morning raises cortisol, compared with dim light: the conclusion of a 2023 review of twelve studies (Robertson-Dixon et al.).

PromisingEvidence

The study Huberman lists for this, Petrowski et al. (2019), was 23 healthy men in a sleep laboratory: men only. The 2023 review counted 337 people across its twelve studies, 264 of them men, and most of the studies were not adequately blinded. The rise in cortisol is what the review found. The further claims — that the light sets a timer for sleep 14–16 hours later, and the benefits said to follow from that — are mechanism, not tested outcomes.

If you can't…

  • …go out because it is still dark: turn on the brightest light indoors, then go out when the sun is up.
  • …go out at all, ill or in the silence: sit in an open doorway facing the sky.
  • …spare ten minutes: take two. Walk to school the long way tomorrow.

Stop if…

  • the light hurts your eyes. Look lower; never at the sun. If you have an eye condition, ask a doctor first.

Format after Huberman Lab, Using Light for Health (newsletter, January 24, 2023).

Card ii · Every night

Sleep

Time
The last hour of the day
Needs
A cloth for the window
When
Every night, every morning
Evidence
Promising

Steps

  1. On wakingGet up at the same time, within half an hour, seven days a week — after a bad night too.
  2. By noonYour last coffee, tea, cola or energy drink. Huberman's rule is none within 8–10 hours of bed.
  3. Last hourPhone off and out of reach, in another room if you can. A printed book, a conversation, the journal.
  4. Lights outA dark room: a cloth over the window, the lights off, nothing glowing.

Why

Caffeine taken six hours before bed still cut measured sleep by more than an hour (Drake et al. 2013).

PromisingEvidence

Small laboratory studies. Drake et al. (2013): 12 healthy sleepers and 400 mg of caffeine, about two to three cups of coffee, with sleep measured by a monitor at home. Chang et al. (2015): 12 young adults read on a lit screen for four hours before bed, five nights running, against a printed book; their evening melatonin fell by about half, they took about ten minutes longer to fall asleep, and they were sleepier the next morning. I have found no trial of these four steps as a package.

If you can't…

  • …keep the wake time after a vigil: keep it anyway, and take card iii at midday.
  • …stop coffee by noon: move it an hour earlier each week.
  • …be without the phone, because family may call: leave it face down across the room, screen dark.

Stop if…

  • you still lie awake most nights after four weeks of this, or you nod off while teaching or riding a motorbike. That is for a doctor, not a stricter card.

Format after Huberman Lab, Toolkit for Sleep (newsletter, September 20, 2021) and Essentials: Sleep Toolkit (episode, June 11, 2026).

Card iii · When it is needed

Rest (NSDR)

Time
10–20 minutes
Needs
A floor and a mat
When
After a bad night, or straight after learning
Evidence
Promising(rest after learning) · Premise(the rest)

Huberman calls it NSDR, non-sleep deep rest; the older name is yoga nidra. The script below is free and needs nothing.

Steps

  1. 0–2 minLie on your back, arms by your sides, eyes closed. Breathe in through the nose; breathe out slowly, about twice as long.
  2. 2–12 minMove your attention slowly up the body: feet, calves, knees, thighs, hips, belly, chest, hands, arms, shoulders, neck, face. Name each part silently and let it go heavy. Do not move it.
  3. 12–18 minLet the breath be ordinary. When you notice you are thinking, go back to the feet.
  4. Last 2 minOpen your eyes, roll onto one side, sit up slowly.

If a phone is allowed, Huberman Lab's free 10- and 20-minute recordings (hubermanlab.com/nsdr) are the same idea, spoken.

Why

Ten minutes of quiet, eyes-closed rest straight after learning helped people remember more of a story a week later than ten minutes of a spot-the-difference game (Dewar et al. 2012).

Promising· Premise· Evidence

Promising for rest after learning: one laboratory study, and of plain quiet rest, not a script. Premise for the rest. The popular reason, that NSDR raises brain dopamine "by as much as 65%", comes from Kjaer et al. (2002): eight expert meditation teachers, one brain scan each, and no outcome measured. I have found no study showing that it makes up for a lost night.

If you can't…

  • …lie down: sit against a wall and do the same.
  • …stay awake: then you needed sleep. Keep it to 20 minutes.
  • …find ten minutes: do step one for two.

Stop if…

  • lying still with your eyes closed brings back something you cannot hold. Open your eyes, sit up, and tell someone.

Format after Huberman Lab's NSDR page (hubermanlab.com/nsdr), with its free 10-, 20- and 30-minute scripts.

Card iv · Every day

Movement

Time
30 min a day; 60–90 on Sunday
Needs
A floor, a sturdy table or a low branch
When
Every day, in a weekly pattern
Evidence
Tested· the amounts

Steps

  1. Daily · 30 minWalk briskly. To school and back counts. In the heat, go early or late.
  2. Mon, Wed, Fri · 25 minThree rounds, two minutes' rest between. Push: push-ups. Pull: lie under a sturdy table, grip the edge and pull your chest up to it, or do the same from a low branch. Legs: squats, then lunges or step-ups on the temple stairs. End each set with two good repetitions still in you.
  3. Sunday · 60–90 minOne long walk: the field roads to the next village and back.

Why

The World Health Organization recommends 150–300 minutes of moderate activity a week plus strength work on two or more days, and lists lower death rates, better sleep and fewer symptoms of anxiety and depression among the benefits (Bull et al. 2020).

TestedEvidence

Tested for the amounts: they are WHO's 2020 guidelines, built on systematic reviews of outcome studies. This week, about four hours of walking and three strength sessions, meets them. The split itself is mine, and untested.

If you can't…

  • …do a push-up: push against a wall or a table edge, and step your feet back as you get stronger.
  • …walk in the heat: walk in the first hour after waking. It doubles as card i.
  • …manage three rounds: do one. Next week, two.

Stop if…

  • you feel chest pain or pressure, faintness, or breathlessness out of proportion to the effort. Stop, sit, and see a doctor before you go again.
  • in the heat, you get a headache, confusion, or stop sweating. Get into shade and drink water.

Format after Huberman Lab, Foundational Fitness Protocol (newsletter, November 2, 2022), rewritten for no equipment.

Card v · Four days, now and then

Expressive writing

Time
15–20 min, four times
Needs
Paper and a pen
When
Four days running, or once a week for four weeks
Evidence
Tested· small effects

Steps

  1. BeforeFind a place where no one will interrupt you. These pages are not the journal; you may tear them up afterward.
  2. 15–20 minWrite without stopping about the most upsetting experience of your life: what happened, what you felt then and feel now, and how it connects to the rest of your life — your parents, your work, who you are. Ignore spelling. If you run dry, repeat yourself.
  3. Days 2–4The same again. Stay with the same event or go to another.
  4. After · 10 minSit for a while before you go back to people. Expect to feel worse for a time.

Why

Students who wrote about a trauma for 15 minutes on four days made fewer visits to the health center in the months that followed than students who wrote about neutral topics (Pennebaker & Beall 1986).

TestedEvidence

Tested, with modest effects. Pooled studies put the effect at d ≈ 0.47 across 13 studies of healthy people, and d ≈ 0.19 for physical health across 9 studies of clinical groups: real, small, and smaller for people who are already unwell (Baikie & Wilhelm 2005). The same review says the usual immediate effect is a short-term rise in distress.

If you can't…

  • …manage four days in a row: once a week for four weeks.
  • …face the worst thing yet: write about a hard thing you can face.
  • …write during the silence: the abbot decides. It can wait.

Stop if…

  • the distress is still with you days later, or the writing brings back something you cannot hold. Stop, and talk to a person; in Thailand call 1323. This does not replace a doctor or a therapist.

Format after Huberman Lab, A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol (episode, November 20, 2023).

None of these is the point of the year. If they ever start to feel like it, which one would you drop first?

v. The seasons · every month

Which season is this?

Once a month, every man answers one question in his journal. The year here is the Isan year, and the village sets it: the rains come in May or June and you plant; then the green months, when everything grows and everything that eats what grows shows up too; then the harvest, in November; then the dry season — hot, dusty, nothing in the fields — until the rains come again. Nobody in the village argues with it. You don't get a vote on the weather. You get a vote on who you are when it comes.

The seasons don't come once. So they are not stages to pass through but weather to read, and the question is asked twelve times. "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). The four below are mine.

The rains · spring

Plant now.

The rain doesn't ask if you planted. You plant in the window or you beg at harvest, and a man only gets so many springs.

What am I planting this month, and where?

In the year, loosely: the vow, and the first teaching months.

The green months · summer

Defend it.

Everything grows, and everything that eats what grows arrives with it. The attack is not a sign you did it wrong. It's a sign you did it.

What have I started that is under attack, and by what?

In the year, loosely: the mid-year slump.

The harvest · fall

Take what came.

Without apology if it's big and without complaint if it's small. You planted it.

What came this month, and can I write it down without excusing it or boasting about it?

In the year, loosely: the guiding.

The dry season · winter

Get stronger.

You can't tear the dry season off the calendar. You can come out of it a stronger man than you went in — and a man can get stronger in a room with nothing in it.

What am I getting stronger at this month?

In the year, loosely: the silence.

The placement in the year is loose: a man can be in the dry season in the eighth month. In a rice village the image needs no explaining.

The review

  1. 5 minRead last month's pages and your old goal lists. Do not rewrite them.
  2. 1 minWrite the date and one word: rains, green, harvest or dry.
  3. 10 minAnswer that season's question.
  4. 4 minWrite one thing you will do before the next review, and date it.

The program rule. Every man keeps a dated journal and keeps his old goal lists. Paper remembers; your head won't. The lists from three months back and three years back are the only honest record of who you were, and one of the men you most need to study is yourself.

During the silence, the abbot's rules decide whether writing is allowed. If it is not, ask the question silently and write the answer when the silence ends. The pages from card v are not the journal; those you may tear up.

The gate on the dry season

"When we are no longer able to change a situation… we are challenged to change ourselves."
Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, Part II, "The Meaning of Suffering", in editions from 1984 onward. The sentence is not in the 1963 text.
If it can be changed, change it. If it cannot, what can still be changed is how you stand in it.
The same gate, in the words this year uses. The idea is older in Frankl than the sentence: his 1963 text, in the same section, already speaks of "a fate that cannot be changed" (p. 178).

The two mean different things on different months. Get stronger, and next spring goes better: that is most months. When nothing can be changed, the stand you take is still yours: that is the other kind. Which of the two does this month need? And one thing this year does not keep: a scoreboard. The speakers I learned from kept the score in bank balances — the will to money Frankl warned about — and this year has no money line.

Sources for the protocols and the seasons

  1. Huberman Lab (Andrew Huberman, Stanford School of Medicine): Toolkit for Sleep, newsletter, September 20, 2021; Foundational Fitness Protocol, newsletter, November 2, 2022; Using Light for Health, newsletter, January 24, 2023; A Science-Supported Journaling Protocol, episode, November 20, 2023; Essentials: Sleep Toolkit, episode, June 11, 2026; the NSDR page, hubermanlab.com/nsdr. The source of the card format only. None of these carries an evidence grade; the grades on this page are mine.
  2. Petrowski, K., Schmalbach, B., Niedling, M., and Stalder, T. "The effects of post-awakening light exposure on the cortisol awakening response in healthy male individuals." Psychoneuroendocrinology 108 (2019): 28–34.
  3. Robertson-Dixon, I., et al. "The influence of light wavelength on human HPA axis rhythms: a systematic review." Life 13, no. 10 (2023): 1968.
  4. Drake, C., Roehrs, T., Shambroom, J., and Roth, T. "Caffeine effects on sleep taken 0, 3, or 6 hours before going to bed." Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine 9, no. 11 (2013): 1195–1200.
  5. Chang, A.-M., Aeschbach, D., Duffy, J. F., and Czeisler, C. A. "Evening use of light-emitting eReaders negatively affects sleep, circadian timing, and next-morning alertness." PNAS 112, no. 4 (2015): 1232–37.
  6. Dewar, M., Alber, J., Butler, C., Cowan, N., and Della Sala, S. "Brief wakeful resting boosts new memories over the long term." Psychological Science 23, no. 9 (2012): 955–60.
  7. Kjaer, T. W., et al. "Increased dopamine tone during meditation-induced change of consciousness." Cognitive Brain Research 13 (2002): 255–59.
  8. Bull, F. C., et al. "World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior." British Journal of Sports Medicine 54 (2020): 1451–62.
  9. Pennebaker, J. W., and Beall, S. K. "Confronting a traumatic event: toward an understanding of inhibition and disease." Journal of Abnormal Psychology 95, no. 3 (1986): 274–81.
  10. Baikie, K. A., and Wilhelm, K. "Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing." Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 11 (2005): 338–46. It reports the pooled effects of Smyth (1998; 13 studies, d = 0.47) and Frisina et al. (2004; 9 clinical studies, d = 0.19 for health).
  11. Frankl, V. E. Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Washington Square Press, 1963: p. 169 ("Sunday neurosis"), p. 178 ("a fate that cannot be changed"). The sentence "When we are no longer able to change a situation… we are challenged to change ourselves" (Part II, "The Meaning of Suffering") appears in editions from 1984 onward. I have checked that it is not in the 1963 text; I have not yet checked its wording against a printed later edition.
  12. Barron, Robert. Catholicism: The Pivotal Players — "St Thomas Aquinas: The Theologian." Word on Fire, 2016 (film). The account of Aquinas's working day, the five-year-old's question, and the burning-bush reading of his doctrine of God are from this film.
  13. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae I, q. 76, a. 8 (the whole soul in the whole body); II-II, q. 25, a. 5 (loving one's own body out of charity). Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV.20.7. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, 3rd ed. (1986), on love's roots in "scholastic or Platonic philosophy."
  14. Vervaeke, John. Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (YouTube lecture series, 2019), Episode 39, "The Religion of No Religion," and Episode 42, "Intelligence, Rationality, and Wisdom"; transcripts at meaningcrisis.co. Vervaeke and Mastropietro, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis — Part One: Origins (Story Grid, 2024). The full account of how the method sites use his work: logotherapist.com/method.html.
  15. Bilyeu, Tom. The Diary of a CEO E24, Feb 6, 2019 (transcript), at 00:10:09 — "I had big dreams, but I couldn't get out of bed." Podcast quotations are from third-party transcripts. Quest Nutrition sale: The Simply Good Foods Company announcement, Aug 21, 2019. What the method sites take from him, and what they do not, is on logotherapist.com/method.html.
  16. Mostaque, Emad, with Tom Bilyeu. Impact Theory, Oct 1, 2026 (YouTube, youtu.be/WsdcF7EEvhM; auto-captions, checked by ear), at 1:43:42 — "build stronger communities"; and The Peter McCormack Show, Aug 28, 2026 (transcript, singjupost.com), on his family's village in Bangladesh. His forecasts are his own; the library's method page says where we stand on them.
  17. Ecclesiastes 3:1 (King James Version). The four seasons of the Isan year, and the four questions, are mine.

vi. The method

Held inside logotherapy.

The year is not improvised. It sits inside the framework Viktor Frankl built before the war and tested in the worst laboratory any idea has ever been put through — four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The camps took his father in Theresienstadt, his mother and his brother in Auschwitz, and his wife in Bergen-Belsen, and did not take his conclusion.

Three assumptions hold it up. Frankl gave them in German, and I keep the German because each word is more exact than its translation:

Freiheit des Willens

The freedom of will

Not freedom from what happens to you — Frankl was a neurologist and knew what conditions do — but freedom to take a stand toward it. "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." (Man's Search for Meaning, Part I.) That is the one sentence of his the year is built on, and it is his, not a poster's.

Wille zum Sinn

The will to meaning

Not pleasure, as Freud had it. Not power, as Adler had it. Meaning. And when a man has none, no quantity of the other two will stand in for it — they are what the will to meaning turns into when it is starved.

Sinn des Lebens

The meaning in life

You do not ask life what it means. Life asks you — this week, in this village, with these children — and your answer is your life. The year is arranged so the question gets asked properly.

There is a newer vocabulary for what the year is, and it is worth having. The cognitive scientist John Vervaeke calls a practice that fits the mind and changes how it works a psychotechnology — literacy is one, meditation is another — and argues that no single one is ever enough: "we need a comprehensive set of psychotechnologies that are set within communities of practices" (Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, Episode 39), "cultivating an ecology of psychotechnologies." That is this year, named: light, sleep, rest, movement, writing, the seasons, the vow, the silence, and twelve men to hold each other to them. His series ends on an open question — "what would it look like: the religion that is not a religion?" — and this page began by saying I mean God. Frankl, who was a doctor and not a preacher, left the same door open and called it his open-door policy. The three of them are not in disagreement. They are standing in the same doorway, facing different ways.

The three roads to an answer — by what you make, by whom you come to know, and by the stand you take when neither is available to you — are set out in full, with Frankl's own words and the written exercises, on the method site. So is the evidence, at its real strength, including the parts that are weak.

Read the method →

vii. Where this actually stands

No cohort has finished yet.

I would rather you heard that from me than worked it out later. There are no graduates, no testimonials, no photographs of transformed men on a beach. Cohorts are small and every applicant speaks with me before being invited — which is as much about me finding out whether I can do you any good as the reverse.

What is in place: the village, the school, the temple, and the elephant camp. What is not: anyone who has been through the whole of it.

Status, November 2026: no cohort has finished yet. Write, and if it fits we talk; invitations go out when the next year is set.

What it costs you is your own travel and your living expenses for the year, which in a Surin village are small, and a year of your life. There is no fee for the program. I do not need your money, and I would rather that sentence were true than that it were persuasive.

And what I bring: I have taught English in village schools here, as a volunteer, for ten years. This is my first year running the vow. It is not my first classroom.

This is run by Ben Cunningham, a logotherapist who has volunteered in Surin village schools for ten years, through Transcendent, a non-profit; US 501(c)(3) recognition and Thai registration are pending.

Practicalities

A visa. It is not a route to a visa and we do not sponsor one; we tell applicants before they book what previous participants have used.

Living costs. Living costs in a Surin village are low; we give a range in the invitation.

Your health. The year includes fasting, a vigil and heat — ask a doctor first.

Cohorts are small, and every applicant speaks with me before being invited.

viii. Write to me

Write to me.

One email is enough. Tell me where you are, what you do with your days, and what made you read this far. I read them myself and I answer them myself.

No form, no funnel, no newsletter. If it is not right for you I will say so.

What happens next. I reply within a week. If it fits, we talk by video for about an hour. Invitations go out when the next year is set.

hello@transcendent.com

The three

The writing, the method, the vow.

The writing Baptized Buddhist Essays on meaning, from a family raised between a baptism and a temple. The method Logotherapist What logotherapy is, what a logotherapist does, and what the evidence actually shows. The vow — you are here Transcendent One year in Thailand. Vow, silence, elephants, teaching, guiding.