Why teach the innate?
If every living person, no exceptions, has innate health, why would we feel the need to share or teach the Principles that point people in that direction? Doesn’t “innate” imply you already know it?
To be honest, that nagged at me for a while when I first started in this work. I saw how much all of us were helping people out of psychological distress by describing the Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought at work, but I had difficulty reconciling that with the idea of innate health. Oh, yes, we told people that we’re not imparting intellectual knowledge, we’re pointing you to your own wisdom, eliciting the “realization” of something you’ve always, deep-down, known. But if someone asked, “Why would I go to a course about something I already know?”, I felt a little flummoxed.
I had an “Aha!” moment when a client said to me, “I always thought that times I stayed calm and somehow came up with good answers were just dumb luck. Until I talked to you, I didn’t realize the spiritual nature of life, or that it was intrinsic to me to do that. I didn’t know where it was coming from until you explained the inner workings of Mind, Thought and Consciousness.”

From New York Times
We enter this world with a lot of things we simply take for granted. Our whole system is functioning, without any notice or effort from us. Our ability to think and see our thinking as reality is part of all of that. We just “see” and “feel” and never wonder how. Our various moods, reactions, negative or positive thinking all seem pretty random, and it appears to us that they are at least influenced by externals.
A lot of people spend their whole lives simply “knowing” that they don’t have to be worried about what they were thinking because all thinking passes. It’s the source of volumes of advice we all received from elders in our lives:
- “Just sleep on it, honey, it will look different in the morning.”
- “Don’t take yourself so seriously; you’ll change your mind before you know it.”
- “You don’t need to talk about every little thing that comes to mind. Let some of it go if it makes you feel bad.”
- “Don’t think about it any more right now; you’re too worked up. It will all make sense when you calm down.”
We could all add to this list from our own growing up. Those aphorisms made common sense and resonated with us, but we never knew why. As time went by, many of us concluded that they were all easier said than done. But we were always glad that sometimes we felt great and things seemed easier.
The Principles explain everything. Innate mental well-being is our natural state, a spiritual gift that comes with life. We also have the gift of free will, the ability to direct our thinking any way we want. We can override common sense ideas. We can dwell on the negative. We can celebrate the positive. We can allow thoughts to come and go. We can overthink thoughts and add layers of complexity. We can reflect and evolve our ideas. We’re the navigators as we think our way through life. And our built-in GPS is the feeling state we’re experiencing. When we start feeling tense and our mood plummets, that’s the warning sign that we’re misusing our gift of thought. We’re at the controls. We can turn away; we can stop; or we can accelerate.
If we understand the whole system and know how to use the GPS, we know better than to accelerate into danger and misery. It’s just that simple. Once people truly “see” the Principles behind our life experience, it’s not problematic any more when we hit rough patches. We understand that it is in our nature to get a fresh start, take a new look, quiet down and think again.
“Have some faith in yourselves and know that somewhere deep inside, beyond your ego, beyond the personal self, lies a beautiful flower waiting to unfold. And it is the light of true knowledge that will make it blossom.” Sydney Banks, The Enlightened Gardener Revisited.