Psychology Has It Backwards

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...

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...

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...

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 presen...

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...

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 i...

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 o...

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 hear...

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 acknow...

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 hard...

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...

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 troubl...

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 livin...

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 ti...

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 pic...

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 &q...

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 qui...

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 po...

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 mo...

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 fr...

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 loo...

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...

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 t...

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....

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 th...