Wisely using our power to…

In every waking moment of every day, every one of us is using our incredible power of thought to heal — or not. That sounds black and white, considering the infinitude of thoughts that come to mind. But, when you step back and look, moment-to-moment, life is black and white. We are either moving in the direction of  calmer, wiser,  more insightful thinking, or moving in the direction of anxious, habitual, less functional thinking. Our guidance system is not the content of our thoughts, but the feeling state we are in as we generate them and see them come to life. Thoughts flowing through a calm or positive state of mind are likely to work out; thoughts flowing through an anxious or negative state of mind are likely to create difficulty.

How powerful is that? We always know which way our thinking is taking us intuitively, and we are the authors of our own thinking. So we are always at choice. Head towards healing — or not. The only reason the whole world is not always moving in the direction of deeper and deeper wisdom is that the vast majority of people in the world have absolutely NO idea that life is working from the inside out and they are living in a totally thought-created reality that reflects for each person the state of mind and level of understanding of the thinker. They are not living in an external reality that is causing the feeling state they feel and forcing the thoughts they think. Circumstances are not rushing at us like a speeding train; we are interpreting circumstances like an artist painting a scene.

In truth, most people live as victims of circumstances, ricocheting back and forth between emotional states in reaction to their perceived situation, feeling powerless and increasingly despondent if the situation is perceived to be bleak. This is what Sydney Banks used to call the “cosmic joke.” Our thinking appears so real to us as it comes to mind that it appears to us as though it is caused by what we see. It takes a deep insight to realize that we are creating what appears to us, and that it will appear entirely different to us as our thinking changes and our state of mind shifts. A shift in our state of mind is natural as soon as we experience the power of our own capacity to think and see our thinking for what it is.

Over the 30 years that I have worked in the many fields generated by the three Principles epiphany experienced and shared by Sydney Banks, the enormous power of this simple logic has become increasingly obvious to me. Mind, the energy of all things formless and in form, is the force of life. As sentient beings, we are part of that force which empowers all the systems of a living being, including the formation of Thought that comes to life in the brain and activates electrochemical responses that we “know”  through Consciousness, the capacity to experience our thinking as our reality. At first, it seemed to me like a revolution in mental well-being, that people could see how they were creating their own stress and distress and thus have the capacity to change. Then it seemed like a step towards a more harmonious public environment, that organizations and institutions could operate in higher states of mind and become more respectful, productive, responsive, creative and collaborative.

Now it seems to me to be the single most important recognition humanity needs to stop the trajectory towards disaster and turn the destructive tendencies emerging from an increasingly insecure and alienated disintegration of societies towards compassion, harmony, peace and creative solutions to the world’s problems. The hope in this is that the answer lies within, it is freely available to every single person on the planet, and it is an infinitely self-renewing resource. There is no end to what we can discover together if we look together towards incrementally increasing understanding and peace of mind.

We have, innately, the power to:

• change our minds
• forgive ourselves and others
• transcend current thinking
• create original ideas
• start fresh
• love unconditionally

It is the same, exact power we employ to:

• cling to our prevailing ideas
• remain remorseful and unforgiving
• ruminate about what we already know
• subvert original ideas
• stay stuck in the past
• love only when conditions are met

That’s the irony. We are already employing our enormous power to create life experience no matter how we are using it. It is the way life happens. Only when we become aware, realize the way life happens, can we be accountable for how we employ our power and create the life experience we want.

As Sydney Banks puts it in The Missing Link, “The answer people seek lies not in their separate beliefs, but in the realization that Thought is the common denominator in all psychological and spiritual understanding.”