These Reflections essays were originally written for a university audience interested in the Three Principles and their implications across life. To my surprise, hundreds of colleagues from around the world who work across many professions to share the Principles began to get in touch with me to request copies. I began hearing from people who picked up copies at trainings, or in counseling offices, and wanted to express their thanks. So here, I offer them, edited and updated, in a free, downloadable format, asking only that people use them responsibly in service to mankind, and that the content be correctly attributed. If something I have been privileged to see and share can help one other person, then I am deeply thankful.
Note: Once blogging became popular, I started keeping a blog instead of writing and distributing the Reflections essays. Please see the Blog section for more Three Principles-related content.
Miscellaneous explorations.
The empowerment that arises from these principles in action is of a much different quality. It is not effort or willpower. It is a sense of freedom before the thought of any particular activity or frame of reference is formed in our minds and impelled into action.
Sometimes we start to think the shell of our life is “who we are”. We think we are no more than a blur of first impressions. We chase ourselves through life, trying in vain to capture a lasting and meaningful image and cling to it and give it substance. Beneath that shell is the human spirit, the essence of each person, which shines through the light of our eyes and finds expression in the laughter that bubbles up when we catch on to ourselves.
The most effective motivational training would be for all of us to see how our thinking works and how experience naturally changes as thinking naturally changes. Those who are temporarily enclosed within a cell of thoughts that impede their progress and enjoyment would have the key to their own prison. Those who are temporarily soaring on a current of thoughts that send them surging ahead happily would have the wingspan to glide gracefully through the downdrafts.
It isn’t recognized that insight and the intellect are partners, each as significant to the development of our knowledge as the other. Are we inhibited by our intellect, bound to work out the solutions to life’s problems only by sorting through the details? Or are we set free by the energy of our minds, to continually gain sight from within, insight that feeds our intellect and energizes its service to us?
Knowing that our experience is originating within our own thinking, which mediates what we perceive as we look out upon our world, we experience the freedom to see things differently and know the hope for all people to do so. We are not concerned about whether we will ever run dry or have enough to give to others because everyone already has what they need.
No individual, no culture, no race, no nation can claim perfection of thoughts or deeds. Yet every human being, every culture, every race and every nation can claim the perfection of the purity of the energy that precedes all thoughts and deeds, of whatever universal power they will call God, before the forms they give it to name it.