Psychology Has It Backwards

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...

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, whet...

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...

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 experien...

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 co...

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 an...

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, caug...

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,...

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 th...

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...

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 ab...

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...

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....

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 th...

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...

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...

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 live...

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 intelle...

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 r...

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 -- i...

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, negat...

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, insecur...

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 lif...

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...

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, con...