Principy Života® (The Principles of Life) is an educational system and it is also an original philosophy created in the Czech Republic, which is discoursed within the terms of this system. Even though Principy života® appeared in its present form and with its present name only in 2004, there are over fifteen hundred students in the Czech Republic and over two hundred students in other countries, especially in Hungary, today.
There are people of various age, social status and education among the students. However, they all have come because they all have the same need - the need for change. Some of them come because something in their life doesn't work to their complete satisfaction, be it relationships, health, economic situation, social status or anything else. Others come despite being successful at the first glance and having everything that they wish for. Nevertheless they are missing something which is difficult to name, something intangible but important which they come to find.
Change and an ability to adjust to changes is something, which is inseparably connected to life. Man is able to change faster than other creatures thanks to his specific characteristics, and he also manages to change his surroundings faster. However, thanks to that he gets into the situation in which his own survival depends on the speed at which he can adapt to his own changes and changes he has created in his own surroundings. This fact has been summed up even by the European Council at its conference in Lisbon 2000 and in its material it indicated the development of lifelong education as the highest priority and necessary condition for further development.
We are convinced that to enable such education to proceed, it is necessary for people to learn to work on their picture of the world throughout their whole life. People create their own picture of the world, their own basic image of the world, their own basic life philosophy during the first three years of their life. And this picture usually doesn't change much as life goes on. Therefore, the rest of people's life is fundamentally influenced by the conditions in which they lived during the first three years of their life and this primary life experience becomes the frame, which constrains their life. With regard to the current speed of development of human society, this frame cannot, in any case, be sufficient for the whole life, because it is naturally always dependent on the level of development of the society during one's infancy. Therefore the older the person is, the greater problems s/he usually has to adjust to the new development.
Working on our picture of the world is not easy, because most of this picture lies out of our consciously accessible area. This is because its basics originated at the time when a baby could not speak and therefore it had not yet developed conscious thinking. However, this does not mean that there is no way to revise our own picture of the world and adjust it in such a way that we have enough space within the frame of our picture to live our own life and to reach all our goals. Principy života® (The Principles of Life) system is created in such a way that it enables this very revision of our picture of the world and a change in our unconscious patterns.
A tool for working on our own picture of the world is a philosophical disquisition, which is described in detail in the how the basic training proceeds chapter and in the description of our method. The basic guidance is the philosophy of Principy života®, which is offered to students by lectures at the workshops. We don’t expect students to identify themselves with this life philosophy; the goal is to offer them an outline for adjusting their own ideas and their own picture of the world. However, there are six basic points, which are a kind of an absolute minimum necessary to be accepted, to create a common basis on which it is possible to build.