Psychology Has It Backwards: Recent Episodes
Christine Heath and Judy Sedgeman
We're offering mental health professionals a fresh look at the fundamental cause of stress and distress, and the fundamental source of cure. It's simpler than it has seemed, and the result is sustained mental well-being. Psychology has had it backwards.
Who hasn't experienced periods of feeling entangled in habitual unpleasant thoughts -- maybe worry, or anxiety, or fear, or self-criticism, or pressure to perform, etc.? Who hasn't had periods of feeling haunted or punished by persistent thoughts that limit them -- "I'm not smart enough," "I'm not comfortable talking to strangers," "I'm afraid of heights," "I always mess up under pressure." Everyone has their own collection of such thoughts. We've thought them so often for so long they appear to be real and inevitable for us. Once we understand the nature of thought and the beautiful gift we have to think fresh, to choose which thoughts we appreciate and which thoughts we brush off and leave alone, we still stumble into negative thinking, but we see it as "just those thoughts again," not as some important truth we must ponder. The Principles reveal the power we have as the thinkers of our thoughts, the creators of the power we give to thoughts. Then we realize that no thought can entrap us or hold us down unless WE think it can and allow it. We don't have to "fix" anything because thoughts unattended simply pass as new thoughts come to mind.
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Central to the understanding of the contribution of the Three Principles to our understanding of mental well-being, ease, and grace in life is Insight. Insight is, literally, "sight from within," a new thought that arises effortlessly, without the effort of "intellectual figuring out." It's a common experience. We have ordinary terms for it. Ideas that came "out of the blue," or "when I wasn't even trying to come up with something," or "as a surprise." It is the product of the spiritual energy that informs life; that allows people to learn and discover. It often comes with a feeling of relief: "Wow! That's the answer I need!" Or with a feeling of discovery: "I never thought of that before!" Or the feelings of gratitude, or inspiration: "It just came to me how beautiful Earth is and how glad I am to be alive." Often insights are life-changing, as when we suddenly realize something about ourselves that has held us back, or caused distress to someone, and find that we can simply change because it makes sense. Once we realize the power of thought and the power we have as thinkers to welcome and nurture the thoughts that are meaningful and helpful, we have limitless possibility to discover, grow, and change.
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The ease and availability of electronic communication is changing the experience of gatherings. Many groups have stopped holding in-person events, and we are losing touch with the importance and depth of people coming together in one space -- the spiritual connection of a shared feeling. We describe the early days that the first generation of Three Principles students met with Sydney Banks, and why we are inviting people from around the world to join us in August 2026 in Vancouver, Canada for a meeting. It is a reminder that the power of the Principles is not in the simple logic of the words, but in the feeling that arises when people gather in quietude and there are no distractions, just presence in that moment with a quiet mind. We often talk of presence, and people think of it as being somewhere in space and time; presence as we use it refers to people being free from the distraction of their own personal thinking and feeling truly quiet and at peace, when we can share that feeling and realize the wisdom that naturally leads us beyond what we were thinking. More info on the conference: https://3pgc.org/vancouver-2026
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Life is a series of ups and downs for all of us. We have no choice about where and into what era we're born, who we will encounter throughout our lives, and what circumstances we may face. Our navigation system APPEARS to be the thoughts we have about life, but it isn't. Thoughts are the ideas and images we bring to mind, sometimes intentionally, sometimes randomly. But the feelings engendered by our thoughts are the true navigation system. What we make of our thoughts, how seriously we take them, whether we recognize negative thoughts as red flags, matters. When negative thoughts and feelings appear to be important and meaningful -- things we must take seriously and deal with -- we slip into a downward spiral unintentionally. When we wake up and remember negative thoughts and feelings are Caution signs on the road of life, we can slow down, quiet our minds, allow those thoughts to pass, and soon we get fresh ideas and a better perspective. We pass through "thought storms" just like travelers on a road trip pass through thunderstorms. The same advice works: slow down, trust yourself to get through it, and soon you'll see the sun again.
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Beliefs are thoughts we have taken seriously over time, so that they appear increasingly less malleable and come to look like truths to us. They take on power in our minds. When a group of people share certain beliefs, they drive actions, both good and bad -- for example, placing service to humanity as a priority, or turning away from certain groups of people they consider not deserving of mercy or compassion. Once a thought is entrenched in our minds, it can lead to prejudice as well as favoritism, or exclusion of others as well as clinging to identity with certain others. Groupthink takes us away from seeing the shared humanity at the heart of being, and leads to sorting and separating -- or worse, prejudice and even violence. It keeps us from connection heart-to-heart.
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The essential message we receive from the Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought is that all people, always, have access to insights. But we also have the ability to ignore in-the-moment fresh thoughts when we are caught up in habits or memories. If we start to recognize and trust the ease and certainty we feel when we are guided by the flow of fresh thought, we feel confident and present, even in the face of challenges. We are relying on wisdom beyond our intellect and learning as we live. When we override the inner voice of insight, we can get stuck repeating past errors or feeling inadequate to handle life situations.
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It may seem counterintuitive that we accomplish more and enjoy what we're doing more from a state of ease and a quiet mind. But effort, drive, and urgency come from fear of failure, not from wisdom. Inspiration, fascination, and pleasure in our activities are positive feelings that arise from a quiet mind focused on what we're doing in the present moment. We don't need to create pressure, anxiety, and drive to succeed. We succeed when we are fully engaged and in touch with our own innate wisdom as our guide, not muddying the activity with worry or over-thinking every move. When we learn to trust wisdom, we can enjoy what we do and approach challenges without fear.
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Hope, as we are discussing it here, is not "wishful thinking" or "unrealistic optimism." Hope is a deep, uplifting feeling we have that things will work out fine, regardless of how they may look at the moment and regardless of whether they work out as we may have predicted. People who generally experience hope are buffered from dread or disappointment. The gift hope offers is that it keeps us in the present, accepting life as it unfolds. It allows us to forget about our issues or concerns and just live. When we get involved with our thinking about what might happen, we end up going in circles in our minds because we don't know and it's easy to slip into worst-case scenarios. The feeling -- the attitude -- of hope, keeps us curious and open, without fear.
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Without intending to, we often put pressure on ourselves from trying too hard and seeking to achieve goals that may be unreasonable, which amounts to doing more and more and becoming increasingly frustrated. Many "accomplished" people live on the edge of exhaustion and get no joy from what they do. If we turn in the direction we want to go, and then quiet our minds and listen for our own wisdom, we'll see what to do, at what pace, and we'll enjoy the journey as much as appreciating the destination.
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Natural self-esteem is built into humanity; it's just being ourselves and embracing life. Once we start to analyze ourselves, or become self-conscious about perceived flaws or worried about what others think about us, we lose touch with our connection with life and others. Whether we think we're great, or fear we are awful, we live in insecurity. We live in our head, not from our heart. That doesn't mean we don't want to develop our knowledge, or take interest in staying fit or looking our best. It simply means that we are born with all we need to be at ease with moment-to-moment life.
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The term "Innate Health" refers to the pure life energy that is the essence of our power to recognize when to turn away from non-constructive thinking and negative feelings. It is mental well-being that is natural to us. We lose touch with it when we get caught up in our thinking, but we can't lose it. It is who we are. The Principles describe it. We determine whether to acknowledge it, appreciate it, and listen to the common sense and wisdom it offers when we don't override it.
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When we refer to deep feelings, we are talking about the quietude, inner ease, and sense of connection and appreciation innate to all people. It's a feeling natural to us, our spiritual essence, unconditional love. We sometimes try to attribute our deep feelings to things outside ourselves: people, situations or outcomes. But nothing outside has power to "make" us feel. The harder we try to find them, the farther we take ourselves away from them. Deep feelings are not caused by circumstances, but awakened within us when we quiet our intellect and listen to our heart.
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Our life is a neutral sequence of ideas and events; how we think about life determines our experience of it. So the details of daily living are not the "cause" of our felt experience. Our thinking about them is. We forget that, as the thinkers, we can "color" our thinking about life any way we want. A lunch with someone we used to work with can be a light-hearted sharing of memories, or a depressing rehearsal of things that went wrong. Remembering a failure can generate reflection about lessons learned, or a moment of regret or self-recrimination. We are the "artists" who interpret and color our own life via the gift of thought. Our memories, our moment-to-moment experience, and our plans look different to us in different states of mind. So when we aren't satisfied with how life is going, maybe looking within rather than trying to alter the outside world, would make a big difference.
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We talk readily about being "the thinkers of our own thoughts" and because of that, being "the creators of own reality." But it matters to realize the remarkable power of those facts. We never have to live as the victim of our own most negative or distressing thoughts. When people say casually how upset they are that they "keep thinking about" something that troubles or concerns them, they are missing the remarkable truth about our power TO think, the power we have to decide what we hold in mind, to change our minds, or to let it go. What we think takes form as an idea which appears real. But the life of a thought is only as long as we think it. So reality shifts as our thinking changes. We are never stuck in any "reality." Our experience changes as our thinking changes.
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Some expressions we use are profoundly meaningful to us, but may seem like jargon to others. One of those is "going deeper," the way we describe how to slow the memory-based activity of the intellect to allow quietude, to trust that insight will arise when we need it. The benefit from seeing the Principles behind experience is not information, but feeling a positive shift towards living in peace and ease, trusting in universal wisdom and mental well-being as the essence of all us. We become comfortable with the silence between thoughts, in which we remain in wonder, confident that new thoughts will come through us. Going deeper is truly seeing who we are: human beings with the gifts to create any thought and navigate our way fearlessly and confidently through the thoughts we allow to define our life.
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Those of us who work with the Three Principles often describe "shifts in level of consciousness" that awakened us, and that are the essence of change for clients who benefit from realizing the Principles that explain our life experience. These shifts are insights, the source of change, and they arise from quieting our minds and trusting wisdom will come. It may happen in a moment in time, but once people "see" the connection between our thinking and our experience, they can always look towards their innate mental well-being to find answers, rather than trying to figure out problems and get over negative feelings at the same level they were created. As we let go of trying to figure out what's wrong or why our thoughts appear to plague us, we see the promise in our creative energy to leave old thoughts behind and naturally find the clarity and freshness to rise above old ideas. The Principles point to the gifts natural to us that allow us to change.
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We make up ideas about ourselves, take on ideas others have about us, and wonder why we have different thoughts about the same things day to day. We see this in others -- the girl with the beautiful voice who refuses a solo because she thinks she can't stay on key alone; the bright young man who never speaks up in class because he thinks he would be mocked; the grandmother who won't pick up her grandbaby because she can't stop thinking about a movie in which a baby is injured when dropped. It is a comfort to us to recognize, as we see the Principles at work, that we are the creators of the content of all our thoughts. We cannot be harmed by our own imagination; we bring thoughts to life and then we are free to take them to heart or ignore them. The power TO think is our gift. Thoughts have no power but the power we give to them.
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As we grow up, we start to think about ourselves. We react to our parents' and other adults' expectations of us, and measure our worth against our performance. We watch people we admire and compare ourselves to them. The more we start to wonder how we're doing, the more we use our thinking to compare ourselves to others when we feel uncertain or insecure. Some people brag and "talk a big game." Some people feel more and more inadequate and either tell others about the things they don't like about themselves, or just fade out of social interactions. No matter what we think about ourselves, it is just the "reality" we're creating with our own thoughts. The common attribute we all share is that we have the remarkable gift TO think, and whatever we bring to mind appears real to us. We are all creating our own unique reality. There's nothing special about any one thinker. Every human being lives in the power to create their experience of life. We enjoy life when we accept the ordinary fact of ever-changing thoughts, and just appreciate our ordinary life as thinkers.
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The sign that we're overthinking is that whatever we're doing starts to feel difficult and we start to feel more confused and urgent. The more we think, the more we get lost in our thoughts. Often our life training, or our inclination, is to keep trying harder to figure things out. But the feeling of confusion or urgency that arises is a warning sign that what we really need is to quiet down, give our thinking a rest, and get a fresh start. It doesn't require a long time, just a clear mind. When we're making something too hard, the focus turns personal -- we start thinking we should be able to do this, or we can't afford to fail... The relief of just stopping, glancing away, slowing down, giving ourselves a minute, brings us back to the moment and opens our minds to fresh, clearer ideas. A colleague often refers to this as like a deer finding its way through the woods; it will stop often, look around, sniff the air, and stay quiet for a bit until it "sees" where to go next, then set off again.
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We sometimes make relationships and communications more difficult than they need to be through innocent misunderstanding of the state of mind that facilitates good communication. Common communication problems are not truly listening, which happens when we're thinking about the next point we want to make or taking things personally and thinking about ourselves rather than listening for the point. To sidestep awkward or difficult communication, we can listen to the other(s) from a quiet mind, without personal thinking or analysis that muddles our listening for the others' point.
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Christine offers the metaphor of life seeming like a high-speed train ride. We settle down, look out, and take in the view as the train slowly starts to move. Then we experience the illusion, as the train speeds up, that life is moving past us. Suddenly, when the train reaches full speed, life is a blur rushing by, and we can barely take it in or enjoy it. Many of us spend a lot of our time moving and thinking so fast that we are always in a hurry -- doing the best we can to make sense of the blur, and never realizing that it's the vehicle we're riding in, not the life we're passing through, that is too speeded up to appreciate it, or reflect on it, or learn as we go. We have the power to slow down, to be present and use the feelings of anxiety and pressure to push ourselves, as a sign to ease off, and trust that a quieter mind will "see" life clearly and awaken to wisdom, insight, and inspiration.
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Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport." In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays. Wins and losses. Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them. No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day. Our life is our learning adventure. Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down holds us back. Denial sustains the uneasy experience of insecurity. When we accept human frailty in all of us, when we don't try to evade or deny or refuse to see our part in the course of events, we are cheating ourselves from learning life's lessons, building trust within ourselves and with others, and finding peace of mind. Denial keeps us stuck in time; denial keeps us stuck in our own beliefs about ourselves and life. Stuff happens. We make mistakes. We are sometimes thoughtless and hurtful. We are human beings. Denial slams the door on our spiritual growth and our capacity to acknowledge and learn from our past, and the ability to take responsibility for our own missteps and then let them go.
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When people are in low moods -- such as anxiety, hopelessness, grief, anger, discouragement -- the immediate response is to figure out what or who is bothering us so we can deal with the perpetrator or circumstance that we think is bringing us down. That is the trick of our mind explained by the Principles. We are the source of our thoughts -- but as we experience thoughts coming to life, it looks like things are happening TO us. As we understand that we are the thinkers creating our experience, we find our natural power to navigate ups and downs and realize our power to change.
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Optimism is looking for the best in people and looking for the beauty in life, and trusting we'll see solutions when faced with challenge. Hopelessness is insecurity about whether people will accept or like us, seeing risk or danger in life, and focusing on analyzing what is wrong when faced with challenge. Those opposite states are not the result of life; they are the result of how we are using our thinking to describe life. Hopelessness and Optimism are both habits of thought that we adopt without intent. Understanding how we think and generate our own unique experience gives us the opportunity to accept that ups and down are part of life, and the assurance that we can always change.
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Over time, we take on ideas about who we are and how we are. We start to see them as our personality, our character. Maybe someone we respect has frequently referred to us as a hard worker. Maybe a friend has commented favorably on our looks. Maybe a sibling has called us stupid. Maybe a counselor has diagnosed us as anxious or depressed. Whatever "labels" have affected us become the story we believe about ourselves. Without understanding the way Thought works, we can hold ourselves back -- or exceed beyond our dreams -- depending on how seriously we take our labels and whether we recognize that we can decide what thoughts to take to heart, and we can change our minds.
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We don't always realize that the only source of our feelings and experience about life is our power to think and our thoughts coming to life as our personal reality. So we often "blame" our experience on what other people say or think, or believe that we need others to say or do things to make us happy. The Principles explain that our experience is generated from within ourselves. When we see that we can change our minds and change our experience, we know we do not live at the mercy of life circumstances, but we live from the thinking we do about them. That is the freedom to make the most of life.
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It's natural for people, groups, nations to have differing ideas, and for them to believe in them. This only creates conflict, hostility, or anxiety when the people involved become attached to their ideas and take them personally. That can lead to polarization and hostility, rather than interaction from the understanding that every person's thinking looks real to them. If one party thinks "A" is the answer and another party thinks "Z" is the answer, the solution arises from understanding the power of thought and respectful exploration of each others' ideas, with an eye to possibly finding common ground or even discovering new ideas.
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When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same. Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions. Events have no power to make feel bad or good -- how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings. As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads and find fresh thoughts. When things are difficult or confusing, we still have wisdom within us. If we look towards our innate wisdom, we see what we can do to be helpful, not hopeless.
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"Panic" crops up a lot in conversation. "I realized I forgot to finish that report and I panicked." "Tests always induce panic in me." "She panicked when her brother uncovered her secret." The actual experience of panic -- racing heart, shaking, sweaty palms -- is unpleasant. We tend to think events and things induce that feeling in us. But panic is just the feelings arising from the build-up of distressing thinking. It's an alarm waking us up to a flood of non-constructive thoughts. As soon as we're onto ourselves and quiet our minds, the feeling of panic dissolves.
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Most people are taught that productivity makes us feel good about ourselves, proud of our efforts. It gets linked to well-being. In truth, when we're not at peace with ourselves, we can't force productivity and if we do a lot of work, it usually leaves us tired and depleted. When we are at peace in our own minds, feeling at ease and connected to the moment, we are naturally productive because we are focused on what we’re doing, not on ourselves and trying to feel better.
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Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don't realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from. When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place. That leads to defining ourselves as negative. We come to expect it. With understanding of how thought works, we can decide to quiet down and turn away from those thoughts. As soon as we look in a new direction, new thoughts occur to us. It's natural to change.
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Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality. No two people create the identical experience. Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to "read" our own and others' moods and reactions. When we know that thinking is a creative power, we recognize it is a spiritual gift that allows us to change, and find fascination with, rather than reaction to, others' realities.
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"Ego" is whatever we think about ourselves. Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas. Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be. Our thoughts appear real as we're thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created. There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking them and turn our thoughts elsewhere. We all live in the same reality, but our experience of it is how and what we think it is, unique to us moment-to-moment. Recognizing ego-thoughts for what they are -- just fleeting images we are making up in our own minds -- helps us not to become discouraged or frightened by negative thoughts we have about ourselves, and not to become arrogant or boastful about positive thoughts we have about ourselves. We are all just human beings using the gift of the Principles to think our way through life. Because thoughts are illusions, images passing through our minds as we create them, we are not prisoners of our own thinking. We're always just a thought away from creating a different experience.
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People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind. We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time. We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back. We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what is. We miss the possibility of going deeper and learning from fresh insight. Yes, thought creates our experience; but when we are thinking a reality that we don't want, our true gift is we can let any thought go. Our true guide is the feeling state that comes with thoughts. If something occurs to us that gives us an uneasy, negative feeling, we know to stop; slow down, remember we are the thinkers and we have the power to take thoughts seriously or let them go. The experience thought creates is a feeling state; that is what guides us to know whether our thoughts are helpful, constructive, inspiring, or not worth keeping in mind. Every moment is a fresh start.
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It's true that the only "reality" we experience is created by our thoughts. But it's not an excuse for acting on any and every thought we have. We've heard people who have exposure to the Principles say things like, "Yes, I probably shouldn't have done that. But when it came to mind, it was so real and compelling to me." We can't forget we have free will to act or not to act on any thought that comes to mind, and we have wisdom to guide us towards or away from our thinking moment-to-moment. It's important in the understanding of how the Principles work to see deeper than "our thinking becomes our reality." That alone bypasses the fact that if the reality we're experiencing creates bad feelings, or doubts, or compelling but uncomfortable ideas that might be hurtful to ourselves or others, we can let those thoughts go and see the feelings they're creating as information that tells us we need to quiet down and wait for a clearer head and wiser ideas to come to mind. Our feelings are a navigational system that guides us to turn away from low mood negative thinking and use our intuition (common sense, judgment) to make choices about thoughts to ignore and thoughts to follow.
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Many people struggle with decisions. What to do, what to do? The usual approach is to mull it over; consider all the options, think carefully, solicit a lot of information. Our tendency is to engage our intellect in analysis of pros and cons, advice and considerations. This kind of thinking is exhausting and frustrating. For every pro, we can think of a con. There are always new ways to look at an issue. We easily forget to depend on the gift we have for natural insight and clarity: a quiet mind and confidence that from that state of mind, we'll get the answer we need. We'll "know" and the answer will be obvious. When we trust our innate wisdom, the experience of decision-making is simple. We approach life with a clear head and recognize common sense when it occurs to us. Experience with quieting down and waiting for inspiration when we face new challenges teaches us that answers will always come to us, and the feeling of certainty we get when they do assures us that they are right for us. We all have what our colleague Christa Campsall calls "our guide inside" — the ability to listen for our own wisdom.
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People sometimes assume that if they really "saw" the Principles, they would always be happy. The truth is, understanding the Principles that describe how we create experience does not lead to any particular emotional outcome; it simply leads us to accept the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs and the range of emotions we feel as they occur as natural and ever-changing. We do not need to think ourselves into reaction to our own states of mind and responses to life events. We don't need to "pretend" to be unaffected by negative events. We ride the waves without worrying about them. So, even when we are having negative feelings, we don't get frightened by them, or worried that they will never pass, or concerned that people will judge us. Life, as Sydney Banks told us, is "a contact sport." We're meant to take part and experience the thrills, the spills, the wins and the losses, the hurt and the joy as grateful participants in the experience of being a human being. It's not necessary to fight our feelings when we don't enjoy them; they will pass as life continues to unfold. Pain is pain; suffering is the way we are thinking about the pain.
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Innate Health is a description of the effect of The Three Principles in action. Everyone has Innate Health; it is the pure spiritual energy of creation that is aliveness in us. It is the pure energy we bring to our experience via our power to think. The Principles have no role in what we think; they describe that we think. Innate Health is the state we experience when we are in the present moment, with a quiet mind. It is "innate" because it is natural, neutral life energy, before we add ideas and images that then appear to be real to us in that moment. Once people see that until we think, we are in neutral, we realize that the power to think again, to get a fresh perspective with one new thought, to have faith in the universal gift of Thought, is the power we have to come back to neutral and clear our minds and think again. Innate Health is the fact of humanity that allows us to forgive ourselves and others for thoughts we regret acting on, or for getting stuck in negative thinking about life or people. As soon as we "see" that, we are able to come to peace and open our minds to insights and fresh ideas.
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It seems like anxiety is a plague of contemporary life. Anxiety is a feeling generated from our habit of constant access to an overload of information and entertainment, and the fear of missing out (FOMO in today's internet shorthand). We've lost our appreciation for stillness, for quiet moments of appreciating beauty and the delight of presence in the moment. We check our phones constantly; when we have a little time, we often open up a game or puzzle, rather than noticing our surroundings, or chatting with others. When we keep our minds racing through a thicket of thoughts, we start to feel the pressure of a busy mind. Did I miss something? What have I forgotten to do? Is that my phone? I need to check my texts. Exhausted mind. Anxiety.
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The higher the IQ a person has and the more they have depended on analysis and retention of information, using what they know to "figure out" what to do moment-to-moment, the harder it is for them to trust insights — fresh ideas that just pop up for us. Many of us have rejected helpful ideas we've had, inspiring new thoughts, because we hadn't analyzed the situation sufficiently to believe we could trust an unexpected insight, even if it made sense. Once we understand the way our minds work, and we recognize that wisdom is always available to us, it's like discovering that behind the thick vegetation we thought defined the limits of our property, a lovely river flowed, offering a constant source of all the clear, fresh water we could want. Until we knew it was there, we had to figure out how to get water every day, driving several miles to find places to fill jugs and buckets. But when we stumbled upon a path behind the house one day and walked through it, there was the river. It was always there for us, but we had to discover it for ourselves to believe that we would never lack for fresh water again.
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The good news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts and we can create anything. The "bad" news about understanding the Three Principles: We are the thinkers of our own thoughts; our thinking creates our reality; we are totally responsible for our moment-to-moment experience of what our life offers. For many people who have spent a lot of time telling therapists and friends about their awful pasts, or the people who have disappointed them or hurt them or made them angry, or the many reasons they have to be cynical or depressed or hopeless... the Principles at first are scary. But it dawns on all of us that we don't need anything or anyone outside ourselves to take care of our bad feelings. We are the thinkers creating our lives; we can turn away from dark thoughts; we can quiet our thinking and find our own wisdom; we can think anything. We are responsible for ourselves. That is freedom.
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Chris and Judy confess to their own habitual perfectionism. We've learned from years of delving deeply into the Principles that it's just a thought not worth taking seriously, and harmless when we can laugh it off or let go of it. Thoughts that seem vitally important to our happiness or impossible standards we set for ourselves, our lives, or other people, are just ideas that we adopted at one point to feel more secure. When we understand how thought works, and the true source of and release from insecurity, then we have the option of remaining attached to habits that are harmless and enjoyable. For example, we enjoy getting dressed up. But if it's inconvenient, we just go where we need to go as we are. We don't want to make mistakes, but we're over being embarrassed or crushed to discover we've made them. Security is acceptance of our humanity. That's the perfection that is our birthright, that comes from the peace of mind inside of us.
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Anger is a warning that we are taking things personally. Anger rises up when we think that someone or something is making us upset, hurting our feelings, undercutting us, not caring how they impact us. We stop listening to what is being said and start listening to our own reactions. We feel or express defensiveness. Anger is no different from any other experience; OUR thinking creates ALL our experiences. As we come to understand that our feelings reliably tell us how well we are using our own power to think, we can sidestep bad feelings that come with taking things personally and realize that everyone is speaking from their own state of mind. If they are insecure, their "tone" might be off; but if WE are insecure, we might hear information as personal and react, not respond.
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We have talked before about the potential harm from taking diagnoses seriously. Diagnoses are a snapshot in time, not the portrait of who you are deep-down. The manual of Diagnoses the mental health professionals use is a huge catalogue naming observed behaviors of people who appear to be "mentally ill." From our perspective, they are descriptions of the individual creativity we express via our power to think, representing our most insecure thinking in low states of mind. It is never helpful to explore the details or the content of the thinking. When we recognize insecure feelings and understand that they pass when we quiet down and leave our thinking alone, our thinking naturally comes into balance and we no longer exhibit "diagnoses."
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When it comes to escaping negative thinking, less is more. As we become increasingly aware of the Principles at work, we increasingly realize that we always have natural peace of mind available to us and we don't have to manage our thinking to find it. We know that bad or sad feelings are signals that tell us we are using that power against ourselves. We become comfortable with ups and downs, with thoughts coming and going and our feeling states changing as they do. We don't take negative thoughts seriously or get drawn into them. We live in the intention to find neutral and to look towards a positive feeling because the quality of our thinking in that state of mind brings us clarity and wisdom and insight. We don't dwell on negative thoughts or try to do anything about them.
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When we have a lot of negative thoughts on our mind, they look very real and upsetting to us and we get the feeling we have to do something about them to get away from them. Or we get the feeling there must be something wrong with us, and we have to figure them out or discuss them with others to resolve them. But, as a colleague of ours often used to say, "The life of a thought is as long as you think it, not a moment longer." The strategies we come up with to escape our negative thoughts or get rid of them just hold them in place, exacerbating the frustration of negativity. As counterintuitive as it seems, we never have to "deal with" the content of thoughts to get it off our minds. If we leave it alone, look away, don't take it to heart, it will pass.
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We created this podcast live with an audience at the Three Principles conference in London. Chris was on stage in London; Judy was being broadcast from her home in Pittsburgh, appearing on a big screen on stage with Chris. People often ask how we develop ideas, how long it takes to prepare our material, etc., so we decided to show them. We asked for a subject from the audience. Someone responded quickly that he would like to hear us talk about how people know when they're ready to share their understanding of the 3P. We chatted about it for a couple of minutes, then we started recording the podcast. We did our usual 25 minutes or so, sharing what we see about the topic. The point was if we talk from the heart about what we truly know, if we listen deeply to each other, we're ready to share.
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Clients normally seek mental health help when they are facing "problems" they feel they can't resolve. A question others ask us is, "If you're not paying attention to their problems and helping them to solve them, then why do they keep coming to you?" Some people are concerned that we "brush off" problems and don't listen to our clients. Grounding in the Principles makes it natural for us to listen for and touch the innate mental health in our clients, even as they are describing their problems and concerns. We try to hear beyond the details to the understanding natural to all people. It doesn't matter what we're talking about with clients, we move in the direction of health and wisdom. We don't see our clients as broken or damaged by events in their past or their lives now. We speak from our trust in innate mental health and our understanding of how the mind works to draw out their health and help them realize the nature of thought, and the gifts they have to awaken to their own wisdom.
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When people become curious about the Three Principles, they often think of our work as a tool to add to their tool kit. So sometimes it seems confusing when we make a point about not "mixing" the 3P with other approaches. The reason is that, although there are well-established approaches that do help people, the assumptions of other approaches are that people are affected by circumstances that have to be dealt with. We assume that people all have innate mental health as a birthright, even if they've lost touch with it, and our goal is to awaken it within them and guide them back to their innate wisdom, peace of mind, and contentment. Once they understand how their thinking creates their experience and see how to recognize their own common sense, they get insights about their life situations. We are not offering information and answers or methods to help them; we are eliciting and explaining their own ability to find clarity and recognize their power to see beyond any circumstances to the answers they need.
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There are many expressions that are used when people are sharing the Principles that are easily grasped and interpreted by our intellect, but do not mean what people commonly think they mean. Our intellect, the repository of everything we have learned or know so far, is quick to jump in and give us easy answers. That is why we tell people to listen for the feeling, or listen beyond the words. Here we offer some examples of this. A common one is the word "listen." The intellect listens to remember information. A good listener, to most people, is someone who can retain and repeat information they've heard. When we talk about listening, we're talking about having nothing on our mind at all as we take things in, and then, from a clear mind, "hearing" what we have taken from the experience. Listening is not thinking about what another person is saying as they talk; listening is a deeper experience of understanding. Our words do not do justice to the depth of the Principles.
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When we decide we want to change or we feel we need to change, we often work at it. We try really hard to change. We come up with strategies; we seek advice; we read self-help books; we go to courses, thinking we'll find a technique, or a means to fix ourselves. Too often, that leads to hopelessness and discouragement. Too often we monitor ourselves and force ourselves and get ourselves so stressed and anxious that we give up. Trying hard, despite good intentions, rarely works for long. True change does not come from more intensity and greater effort from the same level of thinking; it arises from wisdom that guides us in a new direction from the quietude of our own minds. We can't think our way into a different experience of life, but when we look to quiet our thinking and "allow" fresh thought to occur to us, we find inspiration and clarity and a new direction easily, and change is natural and effortless. Sometimes we hardly realize it until someone else notices that we are different.
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This is the first installment of occasional podcasts we are going to make with Hawaii Counseling and Education Center (HCEC) intern, Spirit, to track his journey from traditional psychological training into becoming a counselor whose work is grounded in the Principles. Chris started HCEC 40 years ago, the very first clinic in the US founded on the Principles, and has sent many interns out into the world over time. Their journey into lifelong learning reveals how this work differs from traditional psychology.
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A listener of this podcast asked us to explain what we mean when we tell people to "reflect." When we're trying to understand ourselves and life, we tend to ask ourselves "why" questions. Why is this happening to me? Why can't I come up with an answer? Why did so-and-so do this to me? The list is endless. "Why?" takes us in the wrong direction because it gets our personal thinking going -- we start scrambling through the memory library looking and feeling worse and worse. Reflection means wondering, being curious about what we don't know or see yet, keeping our minds open for insights, inspiration, fresh ideas, staying in the present moment. Everyone can recall "effortless" times in their life when things just flowed. Those times seem "magical;" they are the actual magic of living naturally in the present, in a state of reflection, trusting that you'll know what to do and knowing, when it comes to mind, that it's right. Answers that emerge from reflection feel obvious and simple, no second-guessing.
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We are all "lifelong learners" but we are taught early on to "figure things out." Everyone can remember being told as a child, "Think about it. You'll figure it out." As we move through life, we spend more and more time going over and over life situations in our minds, trying to come up with answers, or asking other people for answers and then trying to figure out how to follow their ideas. This takes us away from the most wonderful resource we have: the ability to have original thought, ideas that occur to us out of the blue in a quiet state of mind. When we are looking for what we don't know, we won't find it in our stored thought (our personal mind), which only contains memories, things we DO know. But we have a safety net, the capacity to stop trying to come up with an answer and wait, in a quiet state of mind, to see what occurs to us. Fresh answers come from before our personal thought; they arise from a deeper wisdom, before thought, always accessible when we have faith it is there for us.
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We are very dependent on our intellect (everything we already know that is stored in our brain) for a lot in life. It allows us to remember how to run things, where we put things, what we've learned, how to find our friends' houses, how to do our jobs, phone numbers, people's names, etc. Sometimes people hear us talking about looking to live from original thought, wisdom, and common sense rather than from memory as if we had to reinvent the wheel every day. Or they hear "wisdom" as something really special and hard to attain. Original thoughts are fresh ideas we get that are perfect for that moment in time, or for the problem at hand. They come to us out of the blue and they come with a feeling of certainty that they're just what we need to know. If we spend our lives in our intellect, applying what we know to seek new answers, trying to figure everything out, it's exhausting. If we accept everything we know as a resource and look for wisdom to keep life fresh, in-the-moment and interesting, we live at peace.
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We might awaken from nightmares frightened or sad, but as soon as we wake up we realize it was just a dream. Even if we find our dreams disturbing, we know they are dreams. Yet when we fall into low mood thinking or get stuck on troubled memories or entertain fears during the day, we don't call them "daymares." We don't realize we can "wake up" and put those thoughts behind us. We're always thinking. Thoughts come to mind. If they are distressing, they affect our feeling state and we can hop on a train of negative thinking. But when we know we just got caught up in some negative thoughts, they have no more power than nightmares, just temporary intrusions into the moment.
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Low mood thinking is always compelling because it generates strong feelings and it arises from insecurity. So it looks like we have to do something about it. It is habitual thinking that comes to mind from our memories with a familiar feeling, which gives it more weight. People complain about being "plagued" or "haunted" or "frequently visited by" negative thoughts, and the need to "deal with" them. The Principles show us that thoughts are nothing more than images brought to mind by our own power to think. As the thinkers we are always at choice. Turn away from them. See them as signals to quiet down and let our mind rest. Not take them seriously because they have no power but the power we give them.
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People are often confused by the power we have as thinkers to create our experience of reality. It does NOT mean that we can stare at a new car in a showroom and manifest it in our life; it does not mean we can wish for an outcome of a situation and make it happen. Life is happening; there is actual reality in which we live. But what WE see of it, we see from our own thinking. So in a low state of mind, we might look out at a rainy day and feel glum about having to go out in it. In a different state of mind, we might just remember to take an umbrella and feel grateful that the rain will help the flowers grow. Reality does not create what we think and feel about it; we create what we think and feel about reality.
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When we recognize the simplicity of living in the now, following our wisdom as things come to mind, we live at peace. We benefit from a flow of insight which allows us to see more clearly our own power to think and create our experience of reality and understand life. We learn as we go, finding the lessons and blessings in disappointment as well as in great outcomes. We are inspired by fresh thought, and we start to see that we can't figure things out or force a plan to work out; but we always get the thought we need when it's needed and we are guided through life. When we ruminate about the past or worry about the future, we accidentally abandon our natural peace of mind to things outside our control.
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The definition of changing our minds is "having a new thought." It is natural to allow thoughts to come and go, responsive to the moment, without attachment to any thought. If we get stuck on a thought, though, we hold onto it. We think some things so often for so long that they seem more "real" to us. We all have ideas we assume are true because we've always thought them. We easily let go of passing thoughts and we change our minds all day long without even realizing it. In the face of habitual thoughts, though, it takes an insight to change. As we understand the true nature of thought, we increasingly lose attachment to our thoughts and live in the moment, easily changing our minds.
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Each one of us is always creating our own experience of reality with our unique power to think. So there really is no such thing as objective reality. We all see what we see; someone looking at the same situation will see it differently. Indeed, in a different state of mind, WE may see it entirely differently. So our experience of life is unique to each of us, and what we see for ourselves looks compelling and true to us. The Principles explain this. Seeing the truth of this reveals why disagreement and conflict occur and why they are understandable and forgivable. We're all acting on what appears to be true or right to us; no one else sees it exactly as we do.
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A lot of people talk about "doing the Principles," or "using the Principles," or "combining the Principles with other 'approaches,'" or thinking the Principles are a "really interesting method." That downplays the power of Principles as words that stand for and describe formless power, the essential energy, from which all creation takes form. We use words to represent the idea of what that energy means. But the Principles are the understanding of how life works that wisdom brings us when we look away from the form and deeper within our own soul or consciousness to gain "insight." Long before we had words for them, before we "knew them," the Principles were the eternal laws of creation.
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When you hear about the Principles, you hear of "Levels of Consciousness." What does this mean? Our ever-changing "level" is the degree to which we have insights that lead us to realize that all thought is illusion, merely what we make up in the moment. All of it, even though early on, much of it seemed "real." The more we realize that the power to think is what sets us free and the content is variable and transitory, the higher our level of consciousness. The level is our ability to live at peace, knowing that everyone's thoughts are unique. It allows us to find love and understanding for all people because we are all the same before we create the illusion, just thinkers making up our experience of what we see.
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Listening to others in neutral is difficult until we understand how thinking works in all of us. Everyone is creating their own experience of every moment in life. No two people see anything exactly alike; we all think our own thoughts and draw information from our own memory and see things in our own way. And we express what we see to each other. Knowing how the power of thought works allows us not to take things personally, but to listen to each other without judgment. We can learn from others' ideas when we can truly listen; and we find compassion for others who may appear to be harsh or critical or emotional because we understand it is their state of mind and thinking we are hearing, not anything about us.
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Many people ask us whether encouraging people to find a calm state of mind and contentment isn't just positive thinking. Our state of mind is BEFORE what we think; when we are at peace and our minds are quiet, the quality of thoughts we produce is a much higher level than the thoughts we produce from a negative or upset state of mind. The problem with the technique of Positive Thinking is that is doesn't come from our own level of Consciousness; it's a technique we impose on ourselves to try to feel better. We don't truly SEE or believe those thoughts. When we address our state of mind and quiet down, more positive thoughts naturally come to mind; we don't need to read them from a list.
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The Principles describe the way the formless energy behind life manifests in the creation of form. They describe the way creation works. Divine Mind, formless intelligent energy, is the force behind all of creation. Divine Thought is what allows us to bring ideas and images to life within our own minds. Divine Consciousness, the energy behind awareness, allows us to see our thoughts as true, as the reality we experience. The Principles are descriptive of what it means to be alive and how we navigate our way through the world in which we live. They are not a Theory. They are the true explanation of the inside-out nature of our experience of life; we are living what we think and thus see as real.
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Discernment is not judgement. We can speak up if we see a friend heading down a dangerous path, or if we notice a client shading the truth, etc. The difference between the negativity of "judgement" and exercising our common sense with good will and a loving feeling is the difference between harboring negative opinions and speaking from wisdom when we see something of concern. It would not be an act of love or a responsible service to others to fail to reprimand a child for stealing, or try to stop a friend from entering a bad deal. As long as we are coming from a good feeling and sincerity, we should be true to wisdom and be able to express concerns without harm to others.
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Not being judgmental does not mean not using common sense to speak up or act honestly when we see people we care about or people we serve doing things that are contrary to living at peace, in harmony with life. Syd says "a non-judgmental mind is a mind at peace." That refers to things like personal judgments -- resentments, attitudes towards certain types of people or negativity, things that carry a bad feeling. But, for example, if you know someone you love is using dangerous drugs, the loving thing to do is to exercise your judgment that you will not encourage drug use or overlook it. It would make no sense to support the person's drug use to avoid looking judgmental.
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People often express confusion about Sydney Banks' advice to "just be yourself; be ordinary." They hear it as if it means "mediocre" or "not realizing your potential." Actually, the deeper meaning of "ordinary" is "part of the order of things," and that is what we point to with the Principles. Everyone comes into life with extraordinary gifts: the divine universal energy of Mind powers us to be able to create Thought and become Conscious of our Thoughts as our reality. To be ordinary is to be comfortable in your understanding of the order of things and the power you have to use these gifts to create the life you want. That's special, but it's available to all people, so it's ordinary.
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It's that time of year again when we're all expected to be joyful and enthusiastic, and a lot of people just feel stressed, pressured, and anxious about doing all the things they think they have to do for the holidays. We forget that we're making it up. It's our own thinking about holidays, our own exaggerated ideas of what we need to get done, our own pressure to make everything perfect for friends and family, that creates a lot of worried, stressful thinking. We don't lose our natural resilience during the holidays; we simply forget to depend on it and get caught up in thinking and planning and striving. When we start feeling the tension build, it's a good time to stop, clear our heads, and quiet down. It all works out.
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(We are re-sharing a podcast from last year during the holiday season because it feels timely to us to remind ourselves and all of us that love and understanding are the answer to to human suffering and the problems of the world.)
The universal energy of creation finds expression in human beings through our ability to think and experience our thinking. It moves from perfect formlessness into the forms we create via thoughts. We "see" thoughts come to life as our personal reality. We remember our thoughts, which become our personal "library." But each moment is a moment in which we choose to recall and reconsider memories or bring fresh thoughts from formless energy to form, so every moment offers the possibility of a fresh start. When we discover our true spiritual nature, formless energy at the essence, we are in touch with pure, unconditional love and understanding, the source of life and the forms we give love in it.
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Many people struggle with the painful feeling of shame. Perhaps we were told as children that we "should be ashamed" of something. Perhaps we suffered mistreatment that we interpreted to mean we were not worthy of love and care. Perhaps we did things for which we harbor shame. Shame is nothing more than a negative thought about ourselves. As we understand that people are always doing what makes sense to them at the time, given their level of consciousness, we realize that there is nothing to be ashamed of. We can see beyond negative situations and learn from them, but there is no shame in being human.
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People tend to define themselves according to the outside world. We try to "be" something or someone, pursuing the ideas we and others have made up about ourselves, and react to events and people. The Principles show us we are guided by our spiritual power of Thought and, when we have peace of mind, by the quiet wisdom beyond our personal knowledge. Once we find stillness of our own minds, we act with the certainty, strength, and confidence wisdom brings. We fearlessly follow opportunities life presents us. We are at ease. We gain the perspective that allows us to understand others, and find peace with differences, rather than fighting for the illusions of our own thinking.
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We are often asked, "Why is my child hanging out with 'bad' friends?" Or "Why do I keep falling for abusive men?" Or "Why do I keep doing business with people who cheat me?" Those questions arise from one deeper question: "What is it about the state of mind I live in that attracts me to the 'wrong' people?" Everyone lives in a range of feeling and understanding that they would call "normal." People who live at the same level we do feel safe and familiar. So our own security and peace of mind determine our associations. As we change, some drift away and others are drawn in. If we want "better" friends, we deepen our own understanding and find more peace of mind. Then it happens naturally.
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Everyone has guilty thoughts. Some people get stuck in guilt and never lose the feeling. Others experience guilt and make amends if possible, or learn from the experience it's related to and move on. Guilt is a feeling that informs us we have done or said something that we realize was not right or caused harm. It is healthy to experience the feeling, reflect on the source, and clear it up. It isn't healthy to go on and on harboring guilt over things from the past which we cannot resolve or change. We act on the thoughts that make sense to us at each moment in life, given our state of mind and level of consciousness. The gift of growth in understanding is to see beyond thoughts that no longer make sense.
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Psychology is a product of early 20th century interest in studying the soul and the mind. The word psychology has its origins in Greek words meaning "the study of the soul." As scientific methods -- focus on the measurable -- became the focus of study, Psychology abandoned the immaterial, immeasurable soul, calling it the purview of Religion, and focused on behavior, which is measurable. With that, we lost the understanding that a soul at peace would generate different behaviors than a soul in turmoil. We lost focus on the spiritual source of thought and started defining people by the outcomes of their thinking. The Principles bring us back to the Source, a Feeling of deep connection to the universe.
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The essence of The Three Principles is that everything in the world originates from Spiritual Energy formed into thought. The Principles belong to the Spiritual realm; they describe how the energy of life works and what creation is. Often, when people hear "spirituality," they think religions, but religions are the form the energy of spirituality has taken. Often people mistake spirituality for a learned behavior: they take certain actions or define themselves certain ways to show they're Spiritual. But Spirituality is not a designation; it is a truth of life. We are all spiritual beings; everything created arose from the Divine Intelligence of the Spiritual realm. We discover our spirituality in a beautiful feeling of ease and contentment.
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Most of us grew up being told that humility was recognition that we were "mere mortals," or that humility was a set of behaviors -- modesty, consideration for others' feelings and needs, being grateful. The Principles describe a universal fact: we all come from the pure energy of life, and before we use our gifts to think and see our thinking as our reality, we are all the same. Pure energy; pure potential to think. Humility is our own insight that that is true: we are distinguished by our unique thoughts, but the universal capacity TO think is the source of our understanding of humility. Anyone can change. We are all equally free and capable of changing the thoughts we create and thus changing our reality.
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People are always asking us to "define" Mind, Thought, and Consciousness again, or put them in different words. If you're trying to "figure out" the Principles by looking at the words, you can easily become frustrated and confused. Definitions are the intellect trying to figure things out. Look to understand how life works through us, from within us. Experience the life force that is our spirit in action, recognize how real our thinking looks and feels to us, and how quickly life looks different and we feel differently, as our thoughts change. We never come to the end of understanding the Principles, but as our minds quiet, we get a deeper and deeper feeling for what they mean to each of us.
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We've all done it -- looked for an expert, or a highly recommended source, or a certain book, or a guru, or a technique, to find the answers to our deepest questions. No matter how hard we look, we end up still confused or uncertain. For many, the search goes on for a lifetime. Looking outside of ourselves for understanding will never lead us to peace and certainty. The Principles explain that we are born with everything we are looking for. Divine Mind, Consciousness, and Thought, the pure energy of life before personal thought, draws forth wisdom; when we look within and "see" wisdom in action, we get insights, our own answers to our own questions.
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The Principle of Thought describes the absolute power every individual has to create their own experience of life. We do not experience anything we have not thought, whether it's a memory, a fear, a desire, a pain, a recognition, a profound insight. Until it enters our mind as a thought, it has not happened for us. The good news is we have free will, and we can allow thoughts to pass, think again, look into quietude for new thoughts, turn old thoughts over and over in our mind, dwell on painful thoughts, play with fanciful thoughts, imagine a new direction. Realizing that life truly is all thought is the key to our peace of mind, happiness, and enjoyment of life in the moment. It is our freedom to change.
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A misunderstanding that arises from talk about the Principles is the idea of "listening for a feeling" or "following your feelings." When we create thoughts, images in our mind, Consciousness allows us to recognize our thoughts and to understand whether they are helpful. Our feelings provide feedback. When our thoughts are producing negative feelings, that tells us it is time to quiet down, clear our heads, take a break from our personal thinking. When our thoughts are producing positive feelings, we can trust our thinking and take our thoughts to heart. Our feeling state is not something to indulge or examine, but simply a guidance system to let us know when we need to quiet down.
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Often our clients bring up some version of, "I understand what you're talking about, but knowing it just isn't helping me." The Principles are not about "what," but about "how" life works, and SEEING what it truly means that we are the thinkers always creating our own experience. What "works" is listening for the feeling behind the words, allowing your own habitual personal thinking to quiet, so that insights can arise within you. We are pointing towards the inner spiritual nature of life, and doing our best to foster the connection that allows clients to see for themselves. But what works is not our words, but the space of quiet beyond the words, that sets the stage for your own insights.
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Memories are stored thoughts, like all information we have accumulated. They have no "power" until we focus on them. Otherwise, they are like books we've already read on the shelf, unimportant unless we take them down and start reading again. They have "invisible" power only because, when they come to mind, Consciousness brings them to life and we re-experience them. If they are good memories, we call that reminiscing. If they are painful memories, we call it suffering. But no matter, memories are just thoughts, not things that are happening in the present. We decide how much time and attention to give them. When we turn away from them and come back to the present, they are gone.
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We often encourage our clients to "reflect" rather than "think about" or "figure out" life situations. Reflection is a quiet mind in a peaceful feeling; it is when we turn off the spigot of our personal thinking and listen for the natural flow of the stream of wisdom. Wisdom comes to us directly from the unknown, before thought, and it is our source of guidance, insight, fresh ideas, and just common sense. Wisdom informs the intellect but the intellect has nothing to offer wisdom. When our minds are quiet, regardless of what is going on around us, we can count on wisdom to give us the thoughts we need in that moment. Quiet is our natural state of mind, the default setting we return to when our personal thinking stops.
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When we talk about living a happy life, we are not talking about living in denial of the facts of life events, we are not describing a life miraculously free of trouble, we are not suggesting a strategy of avoidance. Happiness is a deep feeling of well-being, of confidence in our moment-to-moment access to the guidance of wisdom and insight, of faith that we have all our resources to address life issues available from a quiet and content mind. Happiness shines from people; we are all drawn to people with that bright life force. Happy people respond to life moment-to-moment. They do not dwell on the past or worry about the future, but create the best possible response to life in the present.
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Unlike other therapy approaches, The Three Principles has one primary goal for therapy: Happiness. While that seems counterintuitive to people who seek therapy to address problems or resolve issues, it is the expression of the profound truth of the Principles: Before the formation of thought, we come into the world at peace and content and living from wisdom. As our intellect gathers memories, we have the free will to look for answers there and to try to figure things out. But the intellect only knows what we already know. From a quiet and content mind, confident that we can access wisdom and insight in the moment to address all life situations, we live from happiness, not at the mercy of distress.
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Continuing on our last podcast, since we are not analyzing what is wrong or problem-solving with clients, what DO we do? Although every 3P practitioner works from their own wisdom in the moment, and there are no "techniques" or "processes," all of us listen as deeply as we can to clients until we "hear" their mental health in their stories and "see" where to enter to address the nature of thought. We know that everyone, before they become engaged with the content of their personal thinking, is perfectly mentally healthy and that everyone can get "before thoughts" into the profound spiritual feeling of the energy of life from which we find our own wisdom about what to do. We speak to that health.
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Traditional psychologies diagnose what's wrong with clients and help them "fix" issues. To us, that does not lead clients to a deeper understanding from which they can access their spiritual power to think, and to recognize our shared origin from the intelligent, formless energy of life, the source of wisdom. We point to the deep feelings of peace and security that arise from touching our spiritual essence and trusting wisdom to guide us through life. Our intellect, our personal thinking, then becomes a resource for wisdom, not a frustrating means of trying to use our memories to "figure out" how to deal with life, rather than getting fresh insights in the moment. We see the freedom to create our experience as we go.
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Clients often say, "OK, I understand the Principles: Mind, Consciousness and Thought. We create our own thinking and then see it as real via Consciousness because of the formless power of Mind. But I still don't feel any better." The Principles are words, metaphors that explain the logic of how human beings come to experience reality. "Learning" that intellectually does not in any way change people's experience. UNDERSTANDING the Principles at work arises from finding the deeply spiritual feelings of contentment and love. Then we REALIZE the Principles at work, and see for ourselves the power of creating our realities. That's why Sydney Banks always urges us to "listen for the feeling."
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For 50 years, since Sydney Banks first shared his profound insight into how the intelligent energy of creation manifests in human beings as the power to think, to create our unique experience of life, some people have called us a cult. Mr. Banks spent his life telling people not to be followers, but to find their wisdom and insight to guide them through life. He shared what he saw about the innate health within all people. He refused to give advice, and avoided any situation in which people tried to make this about him personally, not about his discovery. We are people who all see the beauty and power within everyone, and point people to their innate capacity for peace and joy. No one tells us what to think or do.
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"What do you mean by 'change is one thought away'?" people often ask us. "Isn't change a hard, long process of working through stuff?" As we come to understand the inside-out nature of thought, how our thoughts create the moment-to-moment reality we experience, we recognize that change occurs when we realize something we didn't know before. For example, in 3 Principles work, many people's lives changed completely as soon as they realized their feelings were a reliable guide to the quality of their thinking, and they didn't need to "figure out" ways to get rid of negative feelings. All it took was quieting their thoughts and allowing new thoughts to come to mind.
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Those who have spent their lives accumulating knowledge and working hard to figure things out have, without realizing it, gotten lost in the Memory Library. Our personal thinking, a product of active, busy minds, lives there. It can only work with already-thought thoughts, what we already know, which is why we get frustrated going over and over the same problems with no new solutions, or asking the same questions, with no new answers. Inspiration, insight, fresh ideas, aha! moments all come to us when our active thinking quiets and we are curious and open to see something new. Then wisdom, the spiritual source of fresh thought that is our inner guidance system, comes to mind.
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Many people mistake excitement, high-energy, cheerfulness as "the positive feelings" we talk about in the Three Principles. They assume that having a good time, being temporarily happy, is the desirable state. The Feeling we point to is deep peace of mind, a sense of connection to the moment and to the universe, a feeling that generates quietude, appreciation, love, and contentment, regardless of circumstances. From this feeling, we find faith in wisdom, always accessible but not always accessed, knowing that it is a Divine source of guidance through life. Once we experience that feeling, we lose tolerance for times when we are caught up in personal thinking, and look to return to quiet.
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Psychology is traditionally focused on solving problems. Right now, there is a focus on working through past traumas. We say that when you dredge up the past, you get trapped in something that cannot change. Every time you think about it, you relive it, but you can't make it turn out differently. With the 3P perspective, a Wisdom-Focused approach, we help people see we all create life from the inside-out via Mind, Consciousness, and Thought, and explain that all people have innate Wisdom, available through a quiet mind, to guide them through life. We point people to being safe in the present moment, understanding the past is now only thoughts we choose to carry forward via our own gift of Thought.
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We all have in common that we emerge into life from the power of Divine Mind, Thought, and Consciousness and we use that power to create our experience. Every single one of us uses it differently, and builds their own unique personal thought system. Even after we see that finding peace of mind and access to wisdom to guide us through life is the path to happiness and contentment, we still stumble into our own entrenched "realities." Knowing ourselves means being "onto" our long-held habits of thought by which we innocently trap ourselves in the past or in hopelessness. Once we're "onto" ourselves, wisdom shows us the way to peace. We know our "true selves" as spiritual beings experiencing life.
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In traditional psychology, practitioners often see "resistance" in clients. Resistance, from the standpoint of the Principles, is really hopelessness. People lose hope that they have innate mental well-being, that they always have access to their own wisdom, that they are born with the gift of creating their own reality, and that peace of mind is always within them, even though they can obscure it indefinitely with personal thinking. As we get trapped in our intellect, which only knows the past, we are living in the prison of our own thoughts. Rediscovering hope is seeing that it is one thought away, and we hold the key to the presence, peace of mind and trust in wisdom that sets us free.
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It's easy to get addicted to troubled thinking because our worst moments, or our most negative thoughts look and feel more significant to us than ordinary everyday thoughts. We get frightened, embarrassed, discouraged, upset, angry, etc. about them. In other words, they bring us bad feelings. Bad feelings get our attention. They're supposed to. They tell us we're overthinking, stuck in the past, using our memory to try to figure out what we don't know. When we find our minds racing and our feelings plummeting, the answer is not to think more about the thoughts that are bringing us down, but to take that as a signal to turn away, and allow all those thoughts to pass. Then we drop into peace and wisdom comes.
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Once we begin to notice how the power of thinking works and how we change as our understanding deepens, it becomes a thrilling lifetime learning experience to experience new insights and keep growing and changing. We are taught early on that "figuring out" is the way to learn, but very few people are taught that insight is the way to grow and find deeper and deeper peace and contentment. We learn facts that are already known from our intellect. But insight brings us fresh and deeper understanding of our own experience and true knowledge about the possibilities that arise from a quieter mind, looking to see beyond the already known.
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Parenting becomes challenging as children grow and develop their own thinking and start experiencing their own moods and reactions. It helps to remember that children are all individuals, with the same access to wisdom and mental well-being as grownups, and with the same free will and free thought to develop their own way of seeing life. It takes love and understanding, and not taking things personally, to help children bring out the best in themselves, and learn to use their feelings as barometers to their moods, and see not to take negative thinking seriously. Parents are their models.
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Sexual abuse is a horrible experience for people of any age or gender, and often generates feelings of shame, fear of being damaged, unwillingness to seek help, hesitancy about any relationships. No trauma, not even the worst personal trauma, can break our innate well-being, which is a spiritual truth, formless and invincible. Only the way we think about trauma over time can obscure our natural well-being and get in the way of healing and feeling safe in the world. The spiritual energy of creation flows purely through us and gives us an opportunity for a fresh start with every new thought. We can find peace, no matter what.
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This is part two of our discussion of brain disorders, focused on the common issue of ADHD. Many people struggle with ADHD, and how to "manage" life tasks with it. First, there are good medicines available that slow down thinking, and there is no shame in taking them appropriately. Second, over time, we have come to recognize more and more that those with ADHD use the gift of thought differently, and often to their own advantage, once they understand it and come to understand how thought works and how not to get sidetracked and overwhelmed. The struggles people have are more related to fear and anxiety about their thinking than to the way they use the gift of thought.
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What people call "disorders of the brain" are a major source of distress for many people, handling their own different ways of thinking or trying to help their family members handle theirs. Autism, ADHD, and other Disorders of the Brain do not doom people to less than satisfactory lives at all, but they do frighten people and those around them who are baffled why they don't see the world the way most people do. Mind and the brain are not the same. The power to think is universal. Reactions to our personal thinking can inhibit our appreciation of the gift of Thought or our willingness to embrace our own way of thinking. There is still much we don't know, but what we do know is that no one is broken or damaged.
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When people hear the word "impersonal," they often think "indifferent," "unconcerned." As we use the word, it means "not personal" -- not taking things personally, not getting lost in our own personal thinking, not focused on ourselves, not caught up in our insecure, ego-thinking. That means not wondering how we're doing, what people think of us, whether we look good enough, how to prove ourselves. That means not judging ourselves, not comparing ourselves to others, not feeling bad about ourselves. When we stop taking life personally, we are fully engaged in life, in touch with other people, and able to be responsive to the moment, rather than reactive.
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It often confuses people to hear the expression "Listen for a Feeling." Listening is deeper than simply hearing sounds with our ears; when we truly listen, our minds are free of personal thinking; we are present; we experience the moment fully; we KNOW beyond the words we hear. That is the feeling state in which we feel connected to life, we feel at peace and in touch. We are neutral and non-judgmental. Then we can truly KNOW the feeling state of others around us. This feeling has nothing to do with emotions, which are created by our personal thoughts. It has to do with the deeper sense of life we have when we are not caught up in our personal thought. We listen for our own deeper feeling to know life.
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Many people think their body is independent of their Mind and is providing new information, beyond Thought. The Principles describe the universal, formless, creative energy behind everything. That energy is constant and infinite. In human beings, it enters the world of form through our creation of personal thoughts, which then inform the sensory system and create our feelings -- how we experience life. Our bodies are after the fact of the creation of Thought. So stored thoughts, such as memories of past trauma, that come to mind, will come to life again as a feeling when they are on our minds. But the body is always providing us information about what we are thinking. It is responsive to Thought.
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Overthinking is our memories running the show to keep us going in circles around everything we already know, hoping we'll find new answers or resolution to a perceived problem. We are the thinkers, with the capacity to access our memory when it's useful, but, most importantly, with the capacity to turn our back on circular thinking and allow space for wisdom, insights, fresh ideas to come into a quiet mind. Our wisdom is always there, like the pilot light on a stove. It isn't always visible, but as soon as the way is opened, it comes to light. There would be much less stress and anxiety if people would trust their wisdom when they weren't sure or didn't know, and use their intellect wisely.
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The universal energy of creation finds expression in human beings through our ability to think and experience our thinking. It moves from perfect formlessness into the forms we create via thoughts. We "see" thoughts come to life as our personal reality.
We remember our thoughts, which become our personal "library." But each moment is a moment in which we choose to recall and reconsider memories or bring fresh thoughts from formless energy to form, so every moment offers the possibility of a fresh start. When we discover our true spiritual nature, formless energy at the essence, we are in touch with pure, unconditional love and understanding, the source of life and the forms we give love in it.
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People who innocently spend most of their time in negative thinking, feeling unworthy and anxious about relationships, often dwell in wishful thinking that someone will love them and "fix" their sadness. We all tend to connect with people who share our prevailing state of mind, however, so insecure people end up in relationship after relationship with people who are just like them, caught in a loop of negativity. When we understand how and why our understanding of our power to think allows us to change our feeling level (level of Consciousness) and our whole experience of life, our spirits lift and we are able find unconditional happiness and relate to others who have it, too.
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If we expect love to "happen to us," or to "come from" someone else to make us whole, we are setting ourselves up for a lifetime of disappointment. Love comes from within, from our own soul-felt connection to life, and when we find that feeling within ourselves, we attract others who want to share it. Many people believe they need something outside themselves, a relationship, or a person, in order to love and be loved. Coming from "need" with others is coming from insecurity, and misunderstanding of our true nature. It brings judgement to relationships. Seeing the Principles at work behind all of life allows us to discover we have everything we need, and takes the pressure off relationships.
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Gratitude is a deep and beautiful feeling filled with love and appreciation for life itself. We all learn as we grow up to be grateful for people and things, to say thank you for presents, to express thanks for our blessings on special occasions, to link our gratitude to special things and people and places. But true gratitude is a profoundly spiritual connection to the joy of just being. In the words of Sydney Banks, "Gratitude and satisfaction have wonderful effects on our souls. They open our minds, clearing the way for wisdom and contentment to enter. Once you become grateful, the prison bars of your mind will fall away. Peace of mind and contentment will be yours." (The Missing Link, p. 131)
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We are all vulnerable to "experts" promoting their advice, whether it be lifestyle coaching, investing, parenting, stress management, breaking habits -- and on and on. We tend to think if we're struggling with something, the best solution is to turn to someone who is smarter/wiser than we are and ask them. The catch in that is, even when they DO give us good advice, most of us don't follow it. And we get more frustrated. That's because the one true "expert" in your life is YOUR OWN WISDOM. When your mind quiets and your thinking slows down and you're open and curious, wisdom flows through you and you get the AHA! moments that guide you through your life's ups and downs.
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People get confused by the term "free will." Things happen that are out of our control! How could we have free will? We can't make the world conform to our desires. But we can make the best -- or the worst -- of our fate. Everything in the universe is part of the infinite energy of creation. So things are always in motion, changing, creating. We have a gift, free will, the ability to think any way we want to about anything we want to think about. We are constantly creating our personal experience of everything that is happening around us. Free will is the power to make the most of adversity, enjoy beauty, appreciate people and things, or to find the negative in everything and torture ourselves with insecurity. Free will is what allows us to change our minds, to see beyond our limitations, to choose our course through life.
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It's a challenge for people living in a world where people keep saying "Think about it," "Keep working on it, you'll figure it out;" "You just need to give it some more thought!" to resist the temptation to work hard at figuring everything out. Figuring out what's wrong with them, figuring out HOW to DO rather than looking to SEE and KNOW. The effort to keep on trying to figure things out keeps us from quieting our minds and realizing the wisdom always accessible to us. When we find our inner, spiritual strength, though, answers come to us effortlessly and we know them by the good feeling they bring. Wisdom, as Sydney Banks said, arises from deep within our own consciousness. We would add, never from the memory bank we call the intellect.
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Ego, as we use the term, refers to beliefs and ideas we have about ourselves and life. They define who we think we are and how we describe our individual preferences and opinions. We would not have identities without Ego, but without understanding Ego and the misuse of that thinking, it can become a curse and a burden, creating self-judgment, shame, anxiety, disappointment, disillusionment, etc. If we know that our thinking changes, and our thinking about ourselves is within our control and can change, we see that our ideas about the world around us are also variable, and not "right" or "wrong," but dependent on our state of mind and what thoughts we take seriously.
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The theories and techniques in traditional therapy tend to focus on details of people's problems, and how to find resolutions for various aspects of problems. Because people focus on the details, problems expand as they think about them, remembering more details. Sydney Banks wrote (in Second Chance) "The details are simply proof to the ego that the problem exists. They perpetuate the situation you are trying to get rid of." Details are memories, stored in the intellect. The answers to all our questions arise from wisdom, fresh thoughts arising from a quiet mind in a good feeling state. Our approach is to work from wisdom to draw clients into the moment in a good feeling, and await their insights.
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When we speak of psychological innocence, we are not excusing bad deeds. We are explaining that the world looks very different to us in different states of mind/levels of consciousness. So in a deeply insecure, negative state of mind, things make sense to people that would be unthinkable to them in a secure, peaceful state of mind. Each of us is always acting from the state of mind and quality of thinking that we are generating at the time. That's why awareness of the importance of noticing ours and others' states of mind is so critical to understanding.
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Realizing the Principles allow each of us to create our own experience of life moment-to-moment has a further implication. Each of us, looking at the same situation, creates our own entirely separate, unique experience of it. Our own reality looks absolutely real, so it's easy for us to forget that others are not thinking what we do, but their reality looks just as real to them. This leads to schisms and misunderstandings unless we look deeper to realize we still have common ground; we are all the creators of our own lives, and we can find understanding and compassion and look for agreement from a deep, non-judgmental feeling.
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Anything that pulls us out of the present moment, when we are creating our life, is memory. Memories can be powerful, beautiful, touching, or horrifying, upsetting, sad. No matter what, the past tricks us and keeps us from living life in the now, moment-to-moment. We can recall past joy and think the present can never measure up to it; we can remember past upset and think it is ruining our lives. Understanding the past is not about sorting out the content of our thinking, but recognizing that the past, good or bad, is over. We can't change it; we can't fix it; we can't make it happen again. We can learn from the past, deeply appreciate it, or leave it behind. But true contentment is found in the now.
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The field of Psychology, with the intention to end suffering, has fostered suffering inadvertently by focusing on people's past. Because people suffering mentally in the present tend to be focused on thinking, thinking, thinking to try to find relief, they are caught in their intellect and using their memories to try to understand themselves. When we are processing thoughts from our intellect, all we have to work with is the past because the intellect is all stored thoughts. So without an understanding of how the mind works, how quieting circular thinking allows for insight and clarity in the present, psychology has made the assumption that relief only comes from dealing with the thoughts people are thinking.
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We think about the past as "real" and important, the personal story of our life that has power over us. Or as memories that haunt us, or delight us. Or as the history we learn about in school. Really, the past is just thoughts, stored in our memory. Just images we can bring to mind. The past is the sentence you just read. The past is everything behind us that isn't happening right now. It is as easy to forget as to remember. It is not a "thing" that we have to deal with or figure out. It has no power except the power we give it when we bring it to mind in the present. The power to think and our own free will gives us the capacity to bring thoughts to mind, but the thoughts themselves have no power.
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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is a huge volume of symptoms of mental illnesses organized into many hundreds of Diagnoses. We see it more as a collection of observations of the creative ways people in low states of mind come up with to help themselves feel better or quiet their thinking. The Three Principles explain that there is only one underlying mental illness -- innocent misunderstanding of the power to think. And there is only one cure -- understanding our spiritual power to think and experience our thinking as real. When people see that, they recognize their freedom to change, to heed their wisdom when it comes to mind, and to allow less constructive thoughts to pass.
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While there is no excuse for doing harm to others, an understanding of why it makes sense to the people who do it would improve treatment and rehabilitation for them. We all live on a sine curve from low feelings of insecurity to higher feelings of security and peace of mind. For most people, the feelings come and go, just changing moods. But some people get deeply frightened by low mood, negative thoughts. In an effort to understand or fight them, they hold on to them and think about them more and more. Extended, worsening periods of negative thinking send them into a downward spiral, looking for who or what to blame. At that point, lashing out with horrendous behavior seems like the only way to rid themselves of the misery they have no idea was created by their own thoughts, not by anything or anyone else.
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When violent events occur, the quick response often is, "Society has a mental health issue." In truth, people experiencing mental well-being do not harm other people. But most people who are experiencing mental health difficulties do not kill or harm other people. There is a psychological path to violence: as some people experience extended periods of extremely dark, negative, insecure thinking and see themselves as alienated from others and hopeless about who they are or where they fit, they fill their heads with extreme nasty, vengeful thoughts. At some point, they commit violence, looking to get relief from the pain of that thinking, with no understanding that they are the thinkers who have created it. What is needed is a deeper recognition of how thinking works and how we can quiet our thinking and find our innate well-being.
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Principles are discoveries of eternal truths that allow us to understand life more deeply. Principles are at work behind life whether we know them or not. In the case of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, the Principles explain where beliefs come from: Mind, the formless energy of all things, empowering thoughts, which Consciousness brings to our awareness as "reality" (experience of life). They explain why our own thinking looks so real and important to us -- and why we can change our minds. Beliefs are the many ways thinking has manifested and taken root in people's thinking as meaningful as ideas are shared. They are real as long as we think they are real, and over time, they can change, or come and go.
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We tend to see ideas we have often as "things," -- baked into a reality. We do that with our life stories, our training, our political or religious convictions, our personalities. In our minds, they are "the way it is" or "the way I am." Understanding the inside-out nature of Thought, of the fact that each time we bring a thought to mind it is transitory -- either a memory drawn from our intellect, or a new idea altogether. Thoughts appear real in the present only while they are on our minds. Thoughts are not "things" with a reality of their own; they are images in the kaleidoscope of our lives. They appear, and disappear, as our attention shifts. We will not "see" them again unless we think them again.
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It's easy to confuse "FEELING" with what people commonly understand as their "feelings" -- what we would call emotions. When Three Principles practitioners talk about listening for the FEELING, we are talking about what Sydney Banks called "the silence of our minds." The FEELING that comes when our minds get quiet and we are open to wisdom is peace of mind, contentment, ease, a sense of connection to the energy of life. It is not an emotion; it is quietude. Paying attention to our ever-changing emotions to search for the FEELING there is pointless. The FEELING of peace is before thought. Feelings are shadows of our thoughts.
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Most of current psychology focuses on the details of people's thinking -- paying attention to negative thought content, encouraging positive thought content; suggesting journaling "important" thoughts, etc. Working with the details of our thoughts is after the fact; once we've thought something, we experience that thought as real, and the more we think about it, the more "real" or significant it seems. Understanding the principles focuses people on their power TO think. When we see that we are always thinking and the way we experience our thoughts moment-to-moment depends on our state of mind, not the details of our thoughts, every moment is a chance for fresh thoughts and a new perspective.
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The "information age" has pulled society into the intellect and the pace of life has lessened our respect for quiet, for reflection. As a result, we are divided by beliefs into rigid groups, or separated from family members, friends and colleagues by the ideas we like. Humanity feels fractured. We can reconnect with the understanding that the gift of thought we all have -- to create our own ideas from the energy of life and then see them as real, allows us to experience our thinking, but recognizing the gift and knowing we all think of different things and everyone's reality is unique, is what makes us interesting to each other, not locked in conflict. The common ground is that we think, not what we think.
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Because we have become accustomed to mental illness being difficult and complicated to diagnose and treat, the idea that all diagnoses arise from a common problem, the innocent misuse of our power to think, seems ridiculously simple. But the Principles reduce the complexity of all the thinking that has been done about our psychology and ourselves to the simplicity of creation: we are born through the energy of creation and we use that energy to create thoughts that consciousness brings to life as our perceived reality. Once we see this, we cannot be frightened by our own thoughts.
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There's an expression in the Mental Health field: "Flight Into Health." It describes a sense that dramatic improvement in a person's level of mental well-being can't last. People are often confounded when others have an insight that results in a shift in consciousness — for example, realizing that they are spending a great deal of time analyzing their negative thoughts, thus becoming mired in them. If they set themselves free from that habit as a result of that insight, their level of well-being shifts. It is a true shift into a higher level of understanding that is life-changing.
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As we understand more how our thoughts create our moods, and how our moods are a barometer to the quality of our thinking, we are less and less frightened by our low moods. Although it appears as though they are "caused" by people or events around us, they are actually just the shadow of our thinking. Moods lose their importance when we see that they are just as illusory as our ever-changing thoughts. As our thoughts change, our moods change. Being afraid of our moods and thinking about them more trying to figure ourselves out is what holds them in place.
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Therapists working from the assumption that external events create our anxiety and suffering take it upon themselves to help clients solve problems, change their lives, or figure out new ways to adjust to circumstances. In the process, without meaning to, clients can become dependent on their therapists to deal with their lives, and therapists can become exhausted as problems pile up. They feel they have to help clients get stronger. Three Principles therapy helps clients see that they are already strong, and helps them discover how to tap into their own wisdom and common sense. Both therapist and client are off the hook, and therapy is hopeful and uplifting as clients start to have insights.
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The common view of therapy is that people with problems seek therapy to get help solving their problems. Three Principles practitioners are unique in that the goal of our work is not solving particular problems or helping clients get over them, but rather, finding happiness and peace of mind regardless of external circumstances. We assist clients to find their innate resilience and power to address any life situation. The Principles elicit understanding of states of mind/levels of consciousness in our lives, and explain why and how our life looks different to us as we become aware of that. When clients learn to trust quiet moments of wisdom, they see how to navigate the ups and downs of life.
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Most of us got the message growing up that success is an outcome of making and adhering to careful plans. A deeper understanding of how our minds work, of the Principles, leads us to realize that having a direction, or intention, is helpful, but detailed plans keep the intellect busy and judgmental. That holds wisdom at bay. Deep listening, and patience to wait until an action or decision arises from wisdom, take us down unexpected paths towards our destinations, and often protect us from poor choices. We "know" it when when seeing it leaves us feeling settled, secure and confident.
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Sydney Banks always told people, "Just be you. Just be ordinary." Many people thought he was advising mediocrity. But he was not. He was advising understanding that each one of us is born with the power to think our way through the life we can imagine; no two people are alike. It doesn't help us to compare ourselves to others or to aspire to be more like x-person we admire. Just relaxing into our own being and understanding that what we all have in common as human beings is that we are each creating our own separate realities. No one is special; everyone has the same beauty, resiliency, and power to change from within, and infinite potential. Being the ordinary human being we each are is extraordinary.
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Understanding the Three Principles leads to mental well-being and allows for it to be sustained and strengthened throughout our lifetime. The Principles explain a universal fact: we all use the power of Mind to create our own Thought, and Consciousness enables us to experience our perception of our life as real. Once we recognize that we are the creators of our individual realities, we can navigate life's ups and downs. Knowing that our feelings are the barometers of the quality of our thinking allows us to turn away from figuring out or fighting our thoughts. Instead we use our feeling states as a guide to whether to take our thinking seriously, or allow it to pass. The Principles explain that the power to think is the power to live the life we want. We know to quiet our minds and look towards positive feelings.
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Much is written about personality disorders. With an understanding of the Principles, we can see that what we call personality disorders are the best efforts of extremely insecure people to define and control themselves. They either create a fantastic idea of themselves and present to the world as perfect, always right, and better/smarter than everyone else or they create a victim story in which their life is far worse than anyone else's. They think they are always mistreated, misunderstood and taken advantage of by others. Those are the two sides of profound insecurity: thinking about oneself constantly and hiding fear behind braggadocio -- positive or negative. If people calm down enough to just be in life and not worry about themselves and their image, the "disorders" fade.
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Some people get upset with life or disappointed in themselves if relationships don't turn out the way they hoped or planned. People get locked into bad feelings and find they have trouble "getting over" the relationship. In fact, as soon as a relationship ends, "it" is over. From then on, we are locked in a relationship with our own memories. It helps to see how easily we can be tricked by our own thinking. If we dwell on what we've lost, or what went wrong, or why our plan went awry, we are innocently wallowing in the muck of old thoughts and losing touch with life as it is now and a fresh start. A deeper understanding of our power as the thinker to quiet our thinking and listen for new insights is the answer.
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Planning and goal-setting are highly recommended techniques for life success. We offer a different view. The ability to have a successful experience of life is intrinsic to all human beings; it is recognizing and following our wisdom instead of getting locked into our personal thinking about what should happen and then struggling to make it work out. It makes sense to have a direction, an intention, for life -- the work or activities or people that attract you. The intention opens you to recognizing opportunities or listening to your own creative thinking as you make decisions and move through life. Wisdom is like our internal Sherpa, leading us through the unknown to as yet unseen beauty and happiness.
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We started "Psychology Has It Backwards: The Program" to give people who follow our podcasts an opportunity to meet with us and explore their questions and ideas more deeply. We wanted to help therapists understand our work; help people who are trying to find ease in life get experience with the ideas and interact with others who are finding more peace; and show people learning to work with the Principles how it looks to interact with clients/learners from this perspective. It has turned out to be a really nice experience, so we're hoping more people will join us. We have kept the price very low and there are no requirements; we just want to share contentment and happiness and the promise of the Three Principles.
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Disagreements are a head-on collision of thoughts. When two people (or groups, organizations, nations) who see the world differently confront each other's ideas, the result is often misunderstanding (or anger, alienation, war). Without understanding, thoughts look not only real, but clearly right, to us. The Principles bring us back to our common humanity with the understanding that thinking is a spiritual gift that all people share; we experience our reality as we think and become aware of our thoughts. But everyone creates a different, ever-changing reality. Knowing how the gifts of thought and consciousness work, we can appreciate differences. Knowing that the quality of our thinking changes with our state of mind allows us to understand ups and downs. That gives us ease with differences and grace with each other.
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Think of the intellect, our personal mind, as our individual library, collections of everything we've learned or thought about, representing all we know so far. It is what allows us to study and learn, to do our work, to remember how to get around places, to recall people we know, to enjoy reminiscing, and also to scare ourselves with recollections of our difficulties or bad experiences. We depend on our intellect, and we can become so attached to it and enamored of what we know that we lose sight of the greatest resource we have, access to the unknown and to wisdom beyond the intellect from which, in a quiet mind, we gain insights and new answers and fresh ideas to guide us.
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We talk about Innate Health as fundamental to the effect of the Principles. It's good to stop to appreciate what a gift it is to mankind. Innate Health is the spiritual core of well-being that cannot be touched by the circumstances of our life. It is our intuitive knowing that we're OK, deep-down, and we can rise above our problems. It's the resource that allows us to survive and thrive. It is our default setting that renews our resilience once we quiet down in the midst of turmoil; we naturally return to balance and wisdom as we understand the nature of thought and allow dysfunctional thinking to pass. People resonate with the very mention of Innate Health because it is a profound universal truth about humanity.
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Many people think it is important to love yourself to understand love. We would say trying to love yourself involves a lot of thinking about yourself, and dealing with judgments. When we connect with the spiritual nature of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, the life power before the formation of ideas and judgments, the FEELING of love, a universal, non-contingent contentment and appreciation for life itself -- pure love -- fills us up and we feel a connection deeper than personal love. In that deep feeling, we forget about ourselves and just immerse ourselves in the moment. Love and understanding for all of life emerges from that feeling.
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Mental Health approaches often contain "toolboxes," collections of tips and techniques to help you get through various psychological situations. From the standpoint of the 3P, we are born with the only tool we need to regain and sustain our well-being and peace of mind: the power of Thought. Once we understand and own that power and realize that we are the creators of our own experiences, we recognize our changing states of mind as the guide to the quality of our thinking and we exercise our own power to allow thoughts that are unhelpful to pass. The content of our thoughts has no power. We have the power to direct it, ignore it, allow it to pass, or just enjoy it.
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Some treatments for those who have experienced trauma assume that past trauma manifests in people's bodies, and creates chronic pain or discomfort. From a 3P perspective, trauma is not a "thing" or a "condition;" it is a memory, images carried forward through time which come to life as feelings via consciousness when the thought is present. The brain and the body and our physical feelings are all part of the world of form; our thinking is a spiritual power, our way of using the formless energy of life to generate our own experience of our lives. So we may "feel" trauma as we recall it, but what we are feeling is our Consciousness bringing a memory to life. When the memory fades, or when we come to understand what thought and memories are, the experience of it changes.
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Mental illness diagnoses are actually snapshots of times when someone is caught up in dysfunctional thinking, not descriptions of their character or being. People can become frightened by a diagnosis, as if it was a truth about them, and feel hopeless. As people realize their power to think and experience their thinking as real, they understand when to take thoughts to heart and when to allow them to pass. They see how quieting their minds allows wisdom to restore equilibrium. They know their innate resilience as their true nature, sometimes obscured by the insecure thoughts called diagnoses.
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Many therapy approaches are focused on trauma, based on the assumption that people who have experienced trauma must come to peace and move on in life. Three Principles practitioners assume people can realize that past trauma is a memory, a ghostly image from the past recalled in the present and re-experienced via Consciousness. It has no power but the power people give it as it comes to mind. We focus on understanding the nature of thought that allows us to recall memories and see them for what they are without suffering in the present.
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We talk a lot about Insight; it is a truly remarkable gift, always available to all of us. We can't say enough about the freedom and depth we gain from living from insight, rather than chasing beliefs. The source of beliefs is the intellect, the already known. Beliefs are ideas we generate from reorganizing our memory -- our bank of knowledge -- to try to understand or decide things in the present. Insights arise out of the blue, from Wisdom, always relevant to our present-moment situations. When we are able to let go of churning through our thoughts and accept not knowing until we "see" what we need to know, life feels easy and things work out in unexpected ways. Insight works beyond our intellect to allow us to see true change and make sense of our lives.
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People have asked us whether it's arrogant to talk about the Principles as spiritual truths, rather than as someone's theory. Principles, in every field of endeavor, once discovered, explain everything, no exceptions. The Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought explain how the experience of life is created, why it is changeable, and why as long as we are alive, we have the power to change. It explains where beliefs and theories come from -- the power of Thought. Without Principles, there would be no theories. Once people discover Principles, they need no more theories; they understand how something works and they are free from needing to keep looking for new theories to explain exceptions.
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A term used in Psychology for people who have an optimistic outlook is "toxic positivity." The idea is that people who embrace life in good spirits regardless of external events are burying or denying reality, or refusing to "process" serious problems. A common misunderstanding among people learning about the Principles is that those who "get it" are relentlessly positive and dismissive of negative feelings. The Principles describe how life works; they do not prescribe how we will work out our own lives. People who see the Principles at work experience the full range of emotions and responses to life. An understanding of the Principles allows us to know that states of mind are always changing as our thoughts change. It keeps us from becoming frightened by our own negative feelings, or from trying to cling to positive feelings. It leaves us at ease with all of life.
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This is the time of year when most of us come up with a list of things we must commit to do in the New Year. It has become a source of wry humor that most of us compare notes in February and realize we haven't kept up or aren't really committed to our "resolutions." For some, that's amusing, for others, it sets off negative, judgmental thinking. Yet, when we understand how thought works, it makes sense. We don't change because we "should" or we feel pressure. Change comes from moments of inspiration, when a change feels obvious and easy, because it arises from our wisdom and and makes sense to us.
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Most of us take for granted that quiet arises from shutting off the outside noise in our lives, turning off the music or the TV, going to a quiet, peaceful space free from traffic noise or busy people talking, settling down without distraction. Finding quietude is much deeper than that; it is turning away from our personal minds and the thinking and analyzing they always produce, and turning towards nothingness, towards not knowing and wondering. External activity has nothing to do with that kind of quiet; it arises from the depths of our soul and is always accessible.
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The most fulfilling aspect of living and working from an understanding of the Principles is that it offers infinite deepening of our understanding, and thus our mental well-being. Sydney Banks said "There is no end or limitation, nor are there boundaries, to the human mind." He pointed us to continually remain open to wisdom, the fresh thoughts that arise in a quiet mind directly from the formless energy of life. As we quiet down and gain insights our faith in wisdom grows. Our work always points to the simplicity, joy, and endless possibilities, of looking beyond the limits of our personal thinking.
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(This is a rerun of Episode 2.) Psychology has been treating all the outcomes of insecure, misunderstood thinking as though they were the problems. The one underlying problem is what creates insecurity.
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The usual reason people seek therapy is to solve their problems, or try to fix what's wrong with them. In this regard, particularly, Principles practitioners are entirely different. We see the goal of therapy as assisting people to reconnect with their innate mental well-being, find their own common sense and peace of mind, and realize they are naturally whole and resilient. No one is broken, and everyone is able to solve their own problems once they understand that answers are always available when our minds are clear and we recognize fresh thought.
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Recognizing stress in ourselves is a matter of awareness of the feeling state we are in and which way we are going. If we are feeling more and more tense, that is a signal that we are taking negative, stressful thinking seriously and trying to analyze it or fight it. The antidote to stress is becoming aware of our changing feeling states and having the intention to turn away from tension and agitation. Rather than arguing with ourselves or trying to talk ourselves out of "stress," we learn to quiet down, allow our thinking to settle, and look for a deeper feeling and moments of wisdom that elevate us.
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Most of us are taught that modern life is full of "stressors" and we are bound to get stressed out by things that happen in life — from traffic to trauma. We are told to develop coping mechanisms to help us deal with the stress we have to face. The Principles explain that stress is not thrust upon us by events, but created by the way we think about life events. Everyone responds to the whole range of life events in their own way. That's actually good news because, with an understanding of how thinking works, we are empowered to live at peace, no matter what.
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The intellect is our personal library, the collection of all the thoughts, experiences and knowledge we have had. It represents everything we already know. "Intelligence," on the other hand, is wisdom, insight, common sense — new knowledge that arises in response to present moment curiosity. When we "don't know" what to say or do or how to respond, going to the intellect to "figure it out," or ruminating about it, will not provide an answer. If we know the answer, we'll have it right away. If we don't know, the answer is in the unknown. The unknown from quiet wondering, listening deeply and waiting for fresh thought. It's where the thrill of discovery and the adventure of life in the moment arise.
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We've all been advised to "set boundaries" with others, or around our own behaviors. But does that mean that others will follow our "rules," or that we'll remember our own boundaries when we get insecure? We explain that boundaries that arise from insecurity are different from wisdom, or common sense insights, that occur to us in the moment and lead us to step away from situations, or step back from our own impulses or habitual thoughts and behaviors. We can "observe" boundaries without trying to manage others or make rules that won't be followed under pressure, and live at peace.
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We frequently talk ourselves out of inspiration by trusting our insecure thinking. Then we can get caught up in analyzing an infinite number of reasons WHY we're doing what we're doing. In this episode, we bring it back to simplicity and discuss how learning to quiet down, listen to your wisdom, and trust the thinking that comes to you, helps you to follow through and get the things done that you really want to do.
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Most of us have gone through a time in our life when we've had our heart broken or feelings hurt in relationships with friends and lovers. Misunderstanding of why things are happening comes from our own analysis of the events. We feel wronged and sometimes justified in holding onto grudges, feeling hateful, and obsessing about all the negative things that happened, but this only keeps us stuck in the past and personalizing everything.
Finding peace and moving on comes not from analyzing the situation but from accessing our own innate health and listening to our wisdom. We can then see the past from a different vantage point and once again find happiness.
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People are told to fix what appears to be wrong with them in order to feel better and end up feeling hopeless, or broken because it doesn't help. Focusing on the problems we have or trying to change experiences we have already created does not bring us to mental well-being. "Trying" is a signal you are turned around and attempting to find happiness by managing thought or behavior. Turn around and look inside. Find the state of mind that provides security and let the answers come to you. It is so simple and easy unless you are looking at it backwards!
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We've all had the experience of variable feelings of our own pain — for example, forgetting about an aching back in the presence of a laughing baby or a playful puppy. The way we experience pain is through thought. What and how much we think about pain determines how it feels to us. As our state of mind falls into insecurity, we tend to focus on what's wrong and it feels much worse. When we are distracted or our spirits lift and our thinking changes, pain moves into the background and we experience life in the foreground. Pain is a signal that lets us know how we're using our thinking.
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Everyone has stories to tell about "searching" for experts, wise people, gurus, geniuses... anyone perceived as having special, deep understanding of life. Many people search for years, often finding interesting and helpful ideas along the way. But searching does not bring us our own answers, or peace of mind. SEEING, that is gaining our own deep insights from our own wisdom, is the natural guide to our own lives, and wisdom is within all people, always accessible, but not always understood or accessed. When we SEE for ourselves, we get the answers we need for ourselves.
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Most people come to psychologists or counselors with the hope that they can get help dealing with their problems. In traditional psychology, problems are real, and various approaches help people to understand them, address them from a new perspective, re-frame them, re-direct their thinking about them. Three Principles practitioners understand problems as artifacts of our thinking in lower states of mind; "problems" look very different to us depending on our state of mind and understanding the role of our thinking in finding solutions. When people find wisdom, they resolve their problems.
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When people hear "spiritual," they often think "oh, religion..." But spirituality, in the context of the Three Principles, refers to the formless energy of creation, the power of life itself, the pure feeling of being alive in the moment, without the intrusion of personal thought. Spirituality is to religion as electricity is to lights; it is the power behind reverence and appreciation that leads to religious thinking, but it is not the content of that thinking. Put another way, spirituality is a beautiful, deep feeling, the space before thought, the impetus for us to create our experience of living in form.
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Traditional mental health approaches deal with the outcomes of our thinking, and put attention on what we think, why our thinking is making us feel bad, why we think it, etc. Three Principles practitioners address the fact that we have the power to think, and we can use a stressful, or any negative state of mind as an internal signal that we are holding onto negative thinking. We draw clients into their natural, innate state that is peaceful, calm, loving. From that perspective, clients start to have insights and resolve their problems. They learn to use their feelings as a guide to when to take their thinking to heart -- and when to see it as a just a signal to quiet down and look for a deeper feeling.
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No one can fix anyone else. Yet we have come to believe that if we just find the right advisor, or the right therapist, or the right self-help technique, or the right program, they or it will fix us. Clients even shop Three Principles programs eagerly taking notes and waiting for a magic bullet. Our work is really a roadmap to your own resiliency, insight, wisdom and peace -- the Innate Health that is our birthright and is always available to us. So the interaction between 3P practitioners and clients is meant to awaken the clients to what they already have, and assist them to find the way to access their own best ideas and natural peace of mind. We're built to do it ourselves.
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Because traditional psychology is focused on the contents of our thinking and the behaviors that result, there are many, many well-meaning books and articles offering advice about how we should feel in various negative situations. Thus people worry if they can't correctly follow the five stages of grief, or if they don't freak out if they are unfairly blamed for something, or if they remain calm during a traumatic event, or if they get over a bad event "too quickly." The truth is, we all access our own wisdom in our own way, and we have a natural guide, innate health, that will always lead us to the answers we need for ourselves.
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The magic of working in the Principles is seeing how people transform via their own insights into life. The experience of insight awakened all of us to the power of change from within, and when we see it happen to others as we work to them, the experience is joyful and inspiring. No one can fix another person; intellectual insights don't really change people. But true insight, a beam of wisdom lighting the mind and bringing to life a new idea, is transformational. These "Aha!" moments emerge from a hopeful feeling and a quiet mind, and the more we have, the more we live our dreams.
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A crucial element of the Three Principles understanding is the recognition that things look different to people as their states of mind change. People in a low state of mind experience a lot of negative thinking that affects their perception of everything. If we take to heart what people who are upset say to us, we can be misled, either in our own response to friends or colleagues, or in our listening to clients, into trusting the details of the way life looks in that state of mind. When we realize how readily states of mind lift and life looks different, we find understanding of ourselves and others.
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Mindfulness is increasingly recognized as a valuable mental health strategy. It moves the field closer to the Principles with a focus on awareness of the present moment, and acceptance of one's feelings and thoughts as they pass. People often ask us if our work is a form of mindfulness. It isn't because we do not ask people to think about their thinking or learn to accept their feelings. To us, that is still after the fact of the Principles, which focus people on their innate mental well-being and clear their heads, access wisdom, and continually experience higher quality thinking and better feelings.
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The most popular therapies today are Cognitive/Cognitive Behavioral approaches. They represent a significant movement towards focusing on thought as the primary issue in mental health struggles, rather than dredging up the past or looking for external causes that must be addressed. But they still are looking at an effect of the power of Thought, the thinking people do, rather than the nature of Thought, our power to think and change our minds. So they tend to focus people on examining or trying to change already-thought thoughts, rather than an understanding of how thought works.
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Increasingly, we've noticed people feeling defined by their diagnosis, even in some cases seeing it as a "reason" for issues that arise in their life. Comments like, "It's my depression kicking in," or "My anxiety is really bothering me this week," or "I'm bipolar and lately I have more lows than highs." The general focus on labels for misunderstood thinking causes both individuals and therapists to focus on the problem, what they perceive as wrong, rather than finding hope for cure and relief from temporary distress.
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When we see diagnoses as conditions caused by events or people in our lives doing us psychological harm, both therapists and clients get trapped in diagnoses because we can't change the past. So life becomes about treating and coping with our mental health diagnoses, rather than finding peace and true mental well-being and being free of them. It's a matter of perspective; knowing we are the thinkers creating our experience of reality with the power to think frees us to use our power to change.
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Happiness is a natural state for all human beings; when our minds are at peace, we fall into a state of happiness with no effort. When we have innocently used our own thinking to create turmoil and negativity and unhappiness, the intention to turn away from our circular thoughts and quiet down takes us effortlessly back to peace and contentment. People expend a lot of effort chasing elusive happiness in the external world, frustrated when they cannot achieve it. But we always already have it; it's like a hidden gem within us.
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Everyone, looking back on their life, can think of times they said or did things they regret, from hurtful remarks to physical violence. For some people, acting on their worst thoughts seems like a release from their own psychological pain and insecurity, regardless of consequences. Understanding the relationship between our ever-changing states of mind and thoughts allows us to maintain our bearings to keep ourselves safe and respond from common sense, rather than experiencing escalating rage or fear.
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We're in the habit of turning to "experts" to help us solve our "problems," yet we often find we can't act on others' "good advice." The Principles show us why. Problems look urgent and insoluble when we're insecure, in a low state of mind. When our state of mind changes, when we understand ourselves as the thinkers and know how to find our inner health and our own wisdom and common sense, we resolve things easily and enjoy the thrill of being our own expert.
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Wisdom is universal intelligence, what we call "common sense." Everyone in the world is born into wisdom, the guidance and fresh ideas that flow through a quiet mind. It is natural to children; we learn our way out of it or start to second-guess it with our personal thinking as we grow up. Seeing the Principles leads us back to appreciation for wisdom, and the faith and confidence to recognize when it comes to us with a positive, calming feeling. We cannot go wrong following our wisdom through life; it is a faithful guide.
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When we begin to explore and discover the power of Mind, Thought, and Consciousness, we naturally change, sometimes to the amazement of our friends and colleagues. Old relationship habits and patterns of interaction fall away for us, leaving others confused or worried about us. As we become calmer, happier, more caring, less self-conscious, more confident, those around us may try to pull us back into old habits, may wonder what we're doing differently and seek to learn, or may drop away. In any case, as we approach others with love and understanding, all is well.
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All of us face changes, large or small, throughout our lives. Change means getting comfortable with the unknown as our new realities unfold. If we overthink everything, and try to anticipate the details of change and plan ahead, we can become caught up in insecure, circular thinking and start feeling inadequate, overwhelmed, incapacitated by change. When we stay calm and focus on the present, taking challenges as they arise, change is a wonderful life adventure and our innate wisdom guides us through it.
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Consciousness, the power to bring our thoughts to life through our sensory system, is what allows us to know the experience of life we are creating. As we think, we feel, see, touch, hear, smell and taste what we bring to awareness. But Consciousness is also our spirit, our connection to the energy of life and the power of wisdom. As we experience that spiritual sense more deeply, we quiet down and increasingly know unconditional love and understanding.
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Personal thought is the use we make, individually, of the Power to think. It is the content we create for ourselves, then experience as our separate realities. It is unique to each person, and has no life beyond our own attention to it. When thoughts pass through our minds, the attention we give them determines how vivid or important they seem to us. As we recognize ourselves as the thinkers of our own thoughts, we can let go of the unpleasant, unhelpful thoughts.
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Thought as a Principle refers to the universal power all beings have to create forms from the formless energy of life. It offers us unlimited potential to think, create, imagine, envision anything. It is the power that allows us to redirect our lives. When we talk about the Principle of Thought, we are not referring to the content of our thinking, but the gift we have to think whatever we want to think and change our minds. Thought is constant and the same for all.
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Grief is a natural immediate response to loss or tragedy. But grief is really more about us than about the loss we grieve. When someone or something dear or important to us is suddenly gone from us, we feel the emptiness of a space no longer filled in our life. The natural remedy for grief is allowing our own wisdom to show us new paths for ourselves, and allowing our minds to come to peace so that we can enjoy our memories without suffering. Suffering arises from thinking we "should" be sad for a certain length of time, or that we "ought to" show respect by staying in grief.
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The more time we spend thinking about our problems, the more our spirits drop and the more "alive" our problems seem to us. With an understanding of how thought works, we recognize that spending time going over and over past distress or future worry is a surefire way to stay stuck in "mental illness." Principles practitioners get in touch with the innate mental health, always present in all people, and allow people to see how to put their minds to rest, come into the present moment, and find their natural wisdom.
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People like the title of our podcast, but we want you to know we really mean it. The Principles represent a radical turnaround in the way we look at the assumptions underlying mental health treatment. The "mental health" field has been a "mental illness" field, devoted to identifying and treating the results of the innocent misuse of our power to think. The Three Principles describe the nature of thought, and the spiritual power we have as the thinkers to create any thought. That is our innate mental health; The Principles lead us to awaken to it and use it wisely.
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Moods are like our personal, ever-changing weather. When we're gray and cloudy, others can feel the gloom. When we're stormy, people avoid us, or react defensively. When we're sunny, we brighten every interaction. Once we understand that feelings are the atmosphere in which people relate to each other, regardless of the words spoken, we see when to remain quiet until a mood passes, when not to take others' statements personally, and when we can talk about anything from a space of love and understanding. Awakening to our own and others' variable states of mind is the secret to keeping all relationships on track. We gain compassion for ourselves and others during the storms.
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Often, we feel like we are prisoners of our moods. We think our moods control our thinking, so we use a bad mood as an excuse for what we're doing or saying: "Don't mind me, I'm in a bad mood today." That is an innocent misunderstanding of how our own thinking generates our moods, and how we keep ourselves stuck in them by not realizing we are still thinking the low mood thoughts. Our moods are the barometer of our thinking. As our heads fill with upsetting thoughts, we feel increasingly upset. The answer to an unpleasant mood is letting thoughts pass and quieting our minds.
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We use terms like self-image, self-esteem, ego easily when we are thinking about ourselves. With an understanding of the power of our own thinking, we can see that none of them has any reality outside of our own moment-to-moment thoughts. We generate all kinds of ideas about who and what we are or should be. When we realize that our thinking is constantly changing and our ideas vary depending on our state of mind, we realize we are making all of it up. It is all an illusion. Our "true" nature is our shared human ability to create ideas and take them more or less seriously.
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There's a "harder, harder, faster, faster" mentality that keeps people stressed and preoccupied trying to "figure out" everything in life. The faster our thinking goes, the more complicated everything looks. When we begin to recognize the power of leaving our frantic thinking alone and quieting down, the pace of life slows and we become more responsive than reactive. A quieter mind opens the door to wisdom, insight, common sense, and good feelings.
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Many people in the mental health profession (and others, too) complain about "burnout" -- the feeling of exhaustion, frustration and hopelessness in the face of their work. As people come to realize that we can't "fix" problems after our thinking has made them real to us, people are stymied. With an understanding of the Principles, of the fact that we are creating reality, burnout disappears because the solutions to "problems" are always available from inner wisdom.
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This is an expression that describes where we are in our recognition that our experience of life events is created by our own thinking about them. As our level of consciousness rises, circumstances have less and less power to affect us. We know that we can look away from our personal, often insecure thinking about them, and quiet our minds to allow our wisdom to surface. As we come to count on wisdom, we gain confidence that we "know" how to handle our lives.
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Insecurity is a thought-created state of mind that creates feelings of self-doubt, suspicion, anxiety, alienation from others, discomfort... all kinds of negative feelings. It dissipates and resolves into increasing levels of security as our awareness of the role of thought increases. We all live in up and down feelings of security and insecurity, but as our understanding deepens, insecurity passes more quickly without engaging us.
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Looking at "fixing" the past, or behaviors, or outcomes to help people find happiness is really like suggesting to a sad dog that he just wag his tail and he'll feel much better. The Principles suggest a new direction; solve the underlying misunderstanding of how Thought works and how we function psychologically, and we don't need to fix anything. We see how to operate from understanding and leave the past behind to create from each moment.
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Analysis is an overuse of personal thinking, and keeps us stuck with what we already think and know. Reflection is the opening for wisdom and insight, and allows us to rise above our past thinking and circumstances and create anew. Unfortunately, most of us have learned we need to analyze our problems to fix them, and we innocently hold them in place. Reflection brings answers and a change in direction.
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With an understanding of the Principles, we can find forgiveness for ourself and others, and still maintain accountability. When we see psychological innocence, we see how people get trapped in insecure dysfunctional thinking that makes sense to them at that time. Once we understand that cycle, and learn to take such thoughts as warnings to slow down, forgiveness makes sense.
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Our thoughts always appear real and right to us, even when they are contaminated by an insecure state of mind. If we act on thoughts we have without any understanding of our state of mind or how Thought works, we are "innocent" because they looked like our best choice at the time. We can forgive people, and still not forgive deeds. That leads to accountability without suffering and blame.
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As we see the way we hold and use our own thoughts more and more clearly, we recognize addicted thinking sooner and sooner in the process. We find we have the power to let thoughts pass and the "need" to do something or use something to get relief from them disappears. We see that urges are just signals that we're starting to feel insecure. We're always just one thought away from dropping insecurity.
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Addictions are a symptom of unrecognized, habitual, insecure thinking. When we think a lot about troubling things, we seek relief from the pressure and negativity of our own thinking. We become "addicted" to whatever we found that gave us relief — substances, food, sex, work, exercise — anything. When we catch on to our own thinking and the power of thought, we can let addictions go.
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There are many diagnoses that are treated like inescapable conditions. Depression and Anxiety, for example. Once we understand Innate Health, we realize that nothing can break the human spirit. Our spiritual nature is untouched by the habitual thinking that we sometimes fall into that makes us feel hopeless or broken. Mental well-being is always at hand.
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It's easy to get worked up, or bummed out at times when life isn't going the way we want it to. It's tempting to listen to bad news and predictions of suffering and take them to heart and lose our bearings. But it's not necessary. We have the innate resilience to make the most of anything, and find our way through change and challenge.
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Many people consider a diagnosis of depression a sort of "character trait," a lifelong problem. But depression is a product of negative thinking taken seriously over time, and it passes. Like all misunderstood thinking, it's temporary.
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Anxiety is a frequent mental health complaint that escalates in difficult times. It always looks like something "out there" is causing it and anxiety is the only and inevitable response. We address the question whether anxiety is a natural response to external events, or an outcome of the way we think about external events. Is it possible not to be anxious, no matter what is going on? We say yes.
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Many people think experiencing trauma dooms us to long-standing psychological pain. No doubt, trauma results in horrible memories that are distressing when they come to mind. But with an understanding of how the mind works and what the past really is, we can allow those thoughts to come and go, and move on with life.
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When we feel mental distress, we seek help, just as we do when we feel physical distress. We get a diagnosis of our presenting problem. Is that diagnosis a long-term label, or just an observation about a temporary, misunderstood state of thinking? What if diagnoses are descriptions of the many ways we thinkers can get distressed and insecure and, without meaning to, start to use our thinking against ourselves?
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We've been referring to Principles underlying our work. Here's a deeper description of the three Universal Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought.
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When people understand their power to think, and their capacity to allow thoughts to come and go, they get in touch with the Innate Health that is their essence, and they discover the wisdom that arises through their own uncluttered thinking.
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The essential capacities of mental health practitioners are the ability to listen, not for our checklist of symptoms but for the heart of our clients, and then to have no fear of speaking from our own insights and pointing out our clients' insights.
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We see resiliency and mental health as our "starter kit," the essence of our being that cannot be lost, only obscured. We see our misunderstood use of thought as the way we obscure it.
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Psychology has been treating all the outcomes of insecure, misunderstood thinking as though they were the problems. The one underlying problem is what creates insecurity.
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Who are we, and why are we so passionate about our work? We are mental health professionals and we have seen results for more than 30 years.
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