Let me tell you a bit about myself.  My name is Ruth Phillips and I am the owner of the chateau with 34 acres of land - Chateau de Cautine. I am the mother or four beautiful children.  I am also an entrepreneur on a small scale and a social activist with a passion for creating projects to help people and our environment. I have created a number of successful projects along these lines. I believe in beauty, love and creativity as well as independence and self-development through helping others. I have studied and practised many spiritual disciplines  and understandings over the years.  I have, through practise, begun to internalise this knowledge into actual experience. I embrace the broader recognition that all natural life bears the symbol or gesture of the Source, the God force, love or whichever name you wish to give it.  This recognition is now a scientific fact on a quantum level which has discovered that consciousness and matter are intertwined – the observer and the observed are indivisible and that there is a field of consiousness outside of the time/space continuum which gives rise to matter and which connects all matter and experience as one. When we are able to align ourselves with this consciousness through specific practices, we experience that all matter carries the gesture of giving itself freely in its relationship to life, from the tiniest sub-atomic particle in our bodies’ cells to the planetary movements in the universe. We feel as if we are ‘asleep’ and we suffer when we live disconnected from this force.  Awareness within our experience, at each moment (internal and external), allows us to experience alignment to this gesture as well as that which opposes it or is contrary to it.  This awareness brings with it an overwhelming sense of gratitude, which amplifies its strength and reconnects us, without thought or words, to the Source or love in everything.  Thus, we are able to manifest its powerful, vast and beautiful complexity in our lives.

I feel part of the movement for change surrounding these turbulent times and I have a burning desire to do something to facilitate our transition to a better world. For this reason, I have dedicated the past 3 years to the creation of this project.  Following is my biography...

PERSONAL EARLY YEARS

Life threw a number of wonders and challenges at me from my birth and life on the island of Penang, Malaysia. As the daughter of a gregarious Australian hairdresser, dancer, comedienne and spiritual seeker and a dogged, reclusive Cornish sea captain-turned-pilot who could not stop building boats, (culminating in a Grand Banks Novascotian fishing schooner that swallowed all the savings and ended 15 years of post-colonial life in Malaysia), we ‘returned’ from our privileged tropical paradise to Cornwall, with no money and no home, to the fog and grey rain.  This taught me the meaning of ‘that which does not kill you makes you stronger’.  The impact that lack of money had on every aspect of our lives is something that influenced me profoundly.

After going to university in Bristol, I spent many years teaching English throughout the world - Spain, Ecuador, New York, Hongkong and Australia. I met my Chilean-born husband in Sydney.  As a grassroots activist for the Humanist Movement (promoting non-violence and ‘humanising the earth’) he had worked as a volunteer in many countries and was then posted to London to continue his work.  So off we went to London and started having a family in 1988 when the first of four children was born. We drove taxis and sold pancakes in Camden Locke Market to earn a living in our first year.

PERSONAL ORIENTATION

I started life as a pessimist, transformed myself into an optimist and now it is incurable.  When faced with a pile of horse sh**, I will start digging: ‘Where there’s horse sh** there’s gotta be a horse! 

I started with no financial support but with a wondrous and privileged childhood that abruptly came to an end.  Destiny was in the design.

For many years, I was a member of the Humanist Movement (HM), an international movement promoting the human being as the central value in society with nothing (institutions, economy, religions, governments etc.) above this value and no person above another.  The HM has been building grassroots groups all over the world for more than 30 years.  I have participated in many street activities, political activities and campaigns to assist with this in Australia and Europe for the past 20 years.

I now feel that have a deep understanding of what we need to do as human beings to transform ourselves and society from a limited view to unlimited possibilities of evolution.  It is only by each one of us understanding who we really are and what we are capable of that we can make a difference.  We can become!

I believe that the economy of the world can be likened to its heart in terms of its physical function and that the system of monetary impropriety and abuse that we live in is siphoning humanity's lifeblood.  It generates and perpetuates massive suffering that can end only when we install a fair and human system of exchange. For this reason, I promote PEOPLE for Mathematically Perfected Economy as developed by Mike Montagne.  My personal future project will be to promote the replacement of the present monetary system and corrupt, unrepresentative government with this simple, logical and irrefutable alternative. Together with the evolution of our awareness, I believe this will be the beginning of the next renaissance on this planet.

WORK BIOGRAPHY

Political:

·       1987  I was a candidate for the Senate in the Australian government for the Humanist Party (click here to see a rather patronising article in the Daily Telegraph Australia, July 10^th 1987). Main platform: the human being as the central value with nothing (institutions, economy, religions, governments etc.) above this value and no person above another.  With 33,000 votes, I nearly got elected (thanks to the preferential voting system there which allows small parties a fair representation)…Phew, that was a lucky escape!

I started and ran the following projects in the UK:

• 1989-2001 A small English language teaching business in the City of London, partnering with a reinsurancecompany and teaching all their Eastern European executives.  I employed a number of freelance teachers to deliver this training.

• 1989 - 1992 A volunteer Saturday parent and child (play) group for parents who worked during the week. I found that many of these families were isolated and lonely.  This provided a much-needed social support and networking function for both the children and the adults, including myself and my children.  It grewinto a group with more than 40 participating families, many of whom formed strong friendships, extending far beyond the Saturday group.

• 1998-2003 The Foundation for Human Development, click the following links to see brochure:  

page 1, page 2, page 3, page 4, page 5

Teaching personal development to ‘humanise the earth’,principles of non-violence and learning by teaching others.  This grew into a large teaching project funded by government bodies and self-funded by a social enterprise run by participants of the project who were the ‘socially-excluded’ of London.

We had a huge amount of local support, involved and trained hundreds of active volunteers and participants each year and grew to a staff team of 35. The incredible venture was prematurely terminated after 5 years thanks to the 'catch-22'  funding system which made it extremely difficult to access new funds. 

• 2004-present A Thai & Southeast Asian restaurant in Truro, Cornwall (Chantek), which has won,awards and is a ‘best seller’ amongst the locals.  This project, still very muchalive and kicking! (Motives for starting this restaurant are not hard tofind and they are not profit-based as anyone who knows the restaurant business will understand!)

Current project: I am starting a co-housing community, Eco Chateau, somewhere in France!