Christian Review of Three Principles by Sydney Banks
"Everything rests on a few ideas that are fearsome and cannot exist looked at straight." —Paul Valery
Sydney Banks (1931–2009) was a Scottish welder who had a mystical experience in 1973. He wrote a few books nigh his spiritual revelations and gave lecturers. More than chiefly, he transformed the lives of a cadre of "post-therapy" psychotherapists who recast his ideas nether diversity of names, nigh notably "Health Restoration Therapy" and "The Psychology of Mind."
Banks' ideas are currently experiencing a new resurgence under the moniker "The Three Principles." Put simply, "The Three Principles" are a way of looking at the relationship between mind, thought, and consciousness that offers a kind of unified field theory of the interior life. Human being beings are experience-generating animals, but the individual experiences we generate are the product of thoughts. It is our thoughts that shape the formless unknown into meaningful events and images. This is both a useful and disorienting affair since the process of human thinking takes us away from the limitless potential of absolute reality for the sake of a single, limited event or interpretation.
As a event each one of us lives in small, separate, psychological worlds of our own making. The trouble is that we innocently believe that these worlds are exterior of us, shaping our lives, when they are actually created from the within out. When nosotros motion more securely into these petty worlds by thinking, we move even further from reality (limitless potential) into various narrow, imagined roles, needs, and identities.
This is really non something we tin can overcome. Human beings, by nature, must surrender consciousness to engage in tasks and projects, and so end up innocently assuming their perceptions reflect reality when they are almost always and inevitably what the psychologists phone call projections.
Nosotros take our moods and insecurities as directives to recollect harder or take even more than command over our lives — lives which we have already cutting down to fit our small, particular culture-leap ambitions. The better road to mental wellness and happiness is to meet these uncomfortable feelings as a signal to question our beliefs in society to rise to a higher level of consciousness.
According to Banks, our insecure feelings and anxious perceptions are always the production of emotionally driven ego states. In guild to experience the deep security and peace of heed innate to every human beingness, we demand only take our personal thoughts less seriously which, in turn, opens our minds upwardly to natural contemplation and present-mindedness.
Every bit human beings, nosotros don't know we have chosen such express awareness or made habits of our fears, anxieties, and addictions until someone points this out to u.s.a. because it seems so natural to be perpetually stressed and unhappy. It is simply when something breaks through the self-approbation of our everyday lives — an affliction maybe or a expiry in the family, great honey or exceptional beauty — that we see through our false selves and express worlds. Until this happens, nosotros proceed to blame our feelings of futility on the homo status. In fact, until we wake up from ordinary everyday despair, we will continue to imagine that all our bug are coming at u.s. from the exterior world and not through us via our own thoughts, ideas, and assumptions.
This is the "innocent" fault all human beings make: forgetting that we are experiencing our thinking and taking our thinking for reality, and it takes a rebirth of innocence to overcome this disarming illusion.
Many of us, information technology turns out, are relatively loftier-operation depressives suffering from full general anxiety disorder and don't fifty-fifty know it. And yet once nosotros wake up to the fact that there is another office of us that sees through the roles we play and the thoughts we have, a formless consciousness peeking out at the world through a limited meat-spirit overlay conditioned and hypnotized by a conspiracy of illusions — we find our lives instantly transformed and return to our "normal" state of natural contemplation and psychological health.
Of a sudden the hope nosotros may have talked ourselves out ten years earlier returns every bit an antidote to a self-inflicted despair. Or the dark thoughts we in one case worshiped compress downward to human size as we at present realize how limited they are.
All human thoughts — even the thoughts of our then-called geniuses — are mere moments in the eternal, formless scheme of things. Once nosotros come across how we are situated with respect to idea, heed, and consciousness, we begin to appreciate — perhaps for the very first time — our own originality and existential uniqueness. Nosotros begin to see the ignorant perfection of ourselves every bit ordinary people whose ideas are just as limited contingent as those of Kant and Hegel, but whose souls are just a limitless and large.
Luckily, as God and or equally nature would have information technology, our feelings of alienation drive us to seek out a sense of truthful being to supercede our limited thinking. This intuition of a transcendent absolute is our experience of the universal listen. Information technology is that part of us that remains unconvinced past the world and unconvinced past our mere thinking. It is that part of united states that recognizes the truth when we see information technology and connects united states with being rather than condign. This innate psychological health — or natural contemplation — then replaces the stressful thoughts built-in of our anxious, ego-driven attempts at self-management with replaces them with present mindedness. In a phrase "The Iii Principles" teach what Teresa of Ávila chosen "the thinking without thinking."
Unlike other psychological systems that advocate various practices and protocols for achieving such liberation, Sydney Banks taught that it is enough just to meet how we are situated within our own minds for the trance to be lifted. Whatever attempts to control thinking adds fuel to an already runaway fire of self-involvement. To get to our second innocence, we need only recognize ourselves as partial, yet unique, manifestations of universal divinity. Once we do this, even if but for a moment, we cannot go back to assertive in our self-generated worlds of experience.
When this happens, all our private perceptions get suspect, and we suddenly detect ourselves looking down upon and through ourselves from a new state of intellectual liberty. This gives u.s. enough distance from our mistakes and life-long illusions to undo years of false posturing and self-limiting behavior. Our broken-hearted feelings settle downwardly as our neurotic thinking go less existent to us, and life'southward hitherto unseen possibilities become present in ways not experienced since childhood. The unknown — which once frightened us — shows u.s. a positive aspect we had previously in our fearfulness-driven state not dared to take seriously.
Admittedly, at that place is not much new here, only the succinctness of the formulation and the operational definitions of the terms. Maybe, most importantly, the willingness to believe in innate human goodness.
Sydney Banks, in a way, discovered a country already inhabited by every mystic, artist, and enlightened sane soul that ever lived. Only what makes him important — and useful — is that the post-therapeutic therapy born of his revelation speaks directly to the prevailing neurosis of Western civilisation: its self-mystification by its own ideas and media which have get echo chambers of false consciousness and fear.
Banks and his followers have not only noted, but described and explained exactly how this false i-dimensional emotionally driven consciousness multiples itself within and around us. In our ego-driven, meme overloaded lives, nosotros accept go occupied from inside by false names and pseudo-hierarchies — by thought idols, images, heroes, and terrifying systems — which take precedent over our own native intelligence and self-worth.
The expert news appear is that our depression, self-uncertainty, and addictions all exist in our consciousness first and foremost equally thoughts we choose to entertain, and and so nosotros can decide whether or not we wish to be duped by them. We are the ones creating the pain and suffering for ourselves held earnest by our intellectual interpretations. Michael McNeil, writer of The Inside Out Revolution put it this way:
"When our thoughts wait real, we live in a world of suffering. When they expect subjective, we alive in a earth of choice. When they look capricious, nosotros live in a world of possibility. And when we encounter them every bit illusory, we wake up inside a world of dreams."
As any meditator or contemplative will tell yous, thoughts condition our experience but thoughts are not who nosotros are nor do they accurately mirror the earth. Thoughts are partial, functional, and transitory metaphysical fixes and forms — momentarily efficient causes and disposable mantras that make up our fleeting experience of formless beingness.
Our so-called identities are equanimous of the thoughts we choose to take seriously. Knowing this, nosotros tin can unravel the imaginary selves we believe ourselves (or others) to be, the selves we struggle against or despair over. Our minds can and so take their rightful identify as servants to the universal heed, and when this second innocence occurs, we brainstorm to alive unconventionally again, spontaneously, joyfully, and creatively.
I do not think it was any accident a Scottish Canadian welder formulated these ideas in 1973 at the peak of the counter-culture where thoughts such as these were floating around in the lyrics to almost every song one heard on the radio. Sydney Banks wasn't the only one enlightened in those days, just he was unique in the fashion he articulated what he had come to run across, and he was able to inspire an impressive array of authentically inspired students and disciples who keep his work.
In the 1980s Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys stone' roll band coined the slogan "Don't Fight the Media, Go the Media," and that turned out to not exist the all-time advice. It matters very little who broadcasts illusions or how large an audience 1 garners for one'south thoughts if those thoughts merely spread more than false beliefs and negative values. And although in a media culture, it may seem that perceptions are reality, in an aware state of consciousness and being, they never are.
The so-called war of ideas that makes up the intellectual life of our republic is a war of thoughts. And thoughts are never what they appear to be, never the solid things our egos think they are. Thoughts, as Sydney Banks has pointed out, are merely projected illusions that accept at best a temporary usefulness merely no bodily metaphysical substance. Seeing their true relationship to pure consciousness should bred in all of usa a tolerance for one some other's tiny thought-driven lives, for our ain by blunders, and from the intellectual overreach of both our friends and enemies. Just then volition the war of ideas give way to a globe where no 1 takes themselves or their leaders too seriously, and we all recognize each other for who and what we truly are: as empty, equally divine, equally becoming the Christ-Buddha.
The human heed, as it turns out, contains its own self-correcting mechanism in its perpetual longing for beauty and truth — feelings that take u.s. dorsum to natural contemplation if we would but get out of its style.
Source: https://onbeing.org/blog/a-unified-field-theory-of-the-interior-life/
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