Psychology Has It Backwards

Beliefs are thoughts we have taken seriously over time, so that they appear increasingly less malleable and come to look like truths to us. They take on power in our minds. When a group of people share certain beliefs, they drive actions, both good and bad -- for example, placing service to humanity as a priority, or turning away from certain groups of people they consider not deserving of mercy or compassion. Once a thought is entrenched in our minds, it can lead to prejudice as well as favoritism, or exclusion of others as well as clinging to identity with certain others. Groupthink takes us away from seeing the shared humanity at the heart of being, and leads to sorting and separating -- or worse, prejudice and even violence. It keeps us from connection heart-to-heart. Support the show

The essential message we receive from the Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought is that all people, always, have access to insights. But we also have the ability to ignore in-the-moment fresh thoughts when we are caught up in habits or memories. If we start to recognize and trust the ease and certainty we feel when we are guided by the flow of fresh thought, we feel confident and present, even in the face of challenges. We are relying on wisdom beyond our intellect and learning as we live. When we override the inner voice of insight, we can get stuck repeating past errors or feeling inadequate to handle life situations. Support the show

It may seem counterintuitive that we accomplish more and enjoy what we're doing more from a state of ease and a quiet mind. But effort, drive, and urgency come from fear of failure, not from wisdom. Inspiration, fascination, and pleasure in our activities are positive feelings that arise from a quiet mind focused on what we're doing in the present moment. We don't need to create pressure, anxiety, and drive to succeed. We succeed when we are fully engaged and in touch with our own innate wisdom as our guide, not muddying the activity with worry or over-thinking every move. When we learn to trust wisdom, we can enjoy what we do and approach challenges without fear. Support the show

Hope, as we are discussing it here, is not "wishful thinking" or "unrealistic optimism." Hope is a deep, uplifting feeling we have that things will work out fine, regardless of how they may look at the moment and regardless of whether they work out as we may have predicted. People who generally experience hope are buffered from dread or disappointment. The gift hope offers is that it keeps us in the present, accepting life as it unfolds. It allows us to forget about our issues or concerns and just live. When we get involved with our thinking about what might happen, we end up going in circles in our minds because we don't know and it's easy to slip into worst-case scenarios. The feeling -- the attitude -- of hope, keeps us curious and open, without fear. Support the show

Without intending to, we often put pressure on ourselves from trying too hard and seeking to achieve goals that may be unreasonable, which amounts to doing more and more and becoming increasingly frustrated. Many "accomplished" people live on the edge of exhaustion and get no joy from what they do. If we turn in the direction we want to go, and then quiet our minds and listen for our own wisdom, we'll see what to do, at what pace, and we'll enjoy the journey as much as appreciating the destination. Support the show

Natural self-esteem is built into humanity; it's just being ourselves and embracing life. Once we start to analyze ourselves, or become self-conscious about perceived flaws or worried about what others think about us, we lose touch with our connection with life and others. Whether we think we're great, or fear we are awful, we live in insecurity. We live in our head, not from our heart. That doesn't mean we don't want to develop our knowledge, or take interest in staying fit or looking our best. It simply means that we are born with all we need to be at ease with moment-to-moment life. Support the show

The term "Innate Health" refers to the pure life energy that is the essence of our power to recognize when to turn away from non-constructive thinking and negative feelings. It is mental well-being that is natural to us. We lose touch with it when we get caught up in our thinking, but we can't lose it. It is who we are. The Principles describe it. We determine whether to acknowledge it, appreciate it, and listen to the common sense and wisdom it offers when we don't override it. Support the show

When we refer to deep feelings, we are talking about the quietude, inner ease, and sense of connection and appreciation innate to all people. It's a feeling natural to us, our spiritual essence, unconditional love. We sometimes try to attribute our deep feelings to things outside ourselves: people, situations or outcomes. But nothing outside has power to "make" us feel. The harder we try to find them, the farther we take ourselves away from them. Deep feelings are not caused by circumstances, but awakened within us when we quiet our intellect and listen to our heart. Support the show

Our life is a neutral sequence of ideas and events; how we think about life determines our experience of it. So the details of daily living are not the "cause" of our felt experience. Our thinking about them is. We forget that, as the thinkers, we can "color" our thinking about life any way we want. A lunch with someone we used to work with can be a light-hearted sharing of memories, or a depressing rehearsal of things that went wrong. Remembering a failure can generate reflection about lessons learned, or a moment of regret or self-recrimination. We are the "artists" who interpret and color our own life via the gift of thought. Our memories, our moment-to-moment experience, and our plans look different to us in different states of mind. So when we aren't satisfied with how life is going, maybe looking within rather than trying to alter the outside world, would make a big difference. Support the show

We talk readily about being "the thinkers of our own thoughts" and because of that, being "the creators of own reality." But it matters to realize the remarkable power of those facts. We never have to live as the victim of our own most negative or distressing thoughts. When people say casually how upset they are that they "keep thinking about" something that troubles or concerns them, they are missing the remarkable truth about our power TO think, the power we have to decide what we hold in mind, to change our minds, or to let it go. What we think takes form as an idea which appears real. But the life of a thought is only as long as we think it. So reality shifts as our thinking changes. We are never stuck in any "reality." Our experience changes as our thinking changes. Support the show

Some expressions we use are profoundly meaningful to us, but may seem like jargon to others. One of those is "going deeper," the way we describe how to slow the memory-based activity of the intellect to allow quietude, to trust that insight will arise when we need it. The benefit from seeing the Principles behind experience is not information, but feeling a positive shift towards living in peace and ease, trusting in universal wisdom and mental well-being as the essence of all us. We become comfortable with the silence between thoughts, in which we remain in wonder, confident that new thoughts will come through us. Going deeper is truly seeing who we are: human beings with the gifts to create any thought and navigate our way fearlessly and confidently through the thoughts we allow to define our life. Support the show

Those of us who work with the Three Principles often describe "shifts in level of consciousness" that awakened us, and that are the essence of change for clients who benefit from realizing the Principles that explain our life experience. These shifts are insights, the source of change, and they arise from quieting our minds and trusting wisdom will come. It may happen in a moment in time, but once people "see" the connection between our thinking and our experience, they can always look towards their innate mental well-being to find answers, rather than trying to figure out problems and get over negative feelings at the same level they were created. As we let go of trying to figure out what's wrong or why our thoughts appear to plague us, we see the promise in our creative energy to leave old thoughts behind and naturally find the clarity and freshness to rise above old ideas. The Principles point to the gifts natural to us that allow us to change. Support the show

We make up ideas about ourselves, take on ideas others have about us, and wonder why we have different thoughts about the same things day to day. We see this in others -- the girl with the beautiful voice who refuses a solo because she thinks she can't stay on key alone; the bright young man who never speaks up in class because he thinks he would be mocked; the grandmother who won't pick up her grandbaby because she can't stop thinking about a movie in which a baby is injured when dropped. It is a comfort to us to recognize, as we see the Principles at work, that we are the creators of the content of all our thoughts. We cannot be harmed by our own imagination; we bring thoughts to life and then we are free to take them to heart or ignore them. The power TO think is our gift. Thoughts have no power but the power we give to them. Support the show

As we grow up, we start to think about ourselves. We react to our parents' and other adults' expectations of us, and measure our worth against our performance. We watch people we admire and compare ourselves to them. The more we start to wonder how we're doing, the more we use our thinking to compare ourselves to others when we feel uncertain or insecure. Some people brag and "talk a big game." Some people feel more and more inadequate and either tell others about the things they don't like about themselves, or just fade out of social interactions. No matter what we think about ourselves, it is just the "reality" we're creating with our own thoughts. The common attribute we all share is that we have the remarkable gift TO think, and whatever we bring to mind appears real to us. We are all creating our own unique reality. There's nothing special about any one thinker. Every human being lives in the power to create their experience of life. We enjoy life when we accept the ordinary fact of ever-changing thoughts, and just appreciate our ordinary life as thinkers. Support the show

The sign that we're overthinking is that whatever we're doing starts to feel difficult and we start to feel more confused and urgent. The more we think, the more we get lost in our thoughts. Often our life training, or our inclination, is to keep trying harder to figure things out. But the feeling of confusion or urgency that arises is a warning sign that what we really need is to quiet down, give our thinking a rest, and get a fresh start. It doesn't require a long time, just a clear mind. When we're making something too hard, the focus turns personal -- we start thinking we should be able to do this, or we can't afford to fail... The relief of just stopping, glancing away, slowing down, giving ourselves a minute, brings us back to the moment and opens our minds to fresh, clearer ideas. A colleague often refers to this as like a deer finding its way through the woods; it will stop often, look around, sniff the air, and stay quiet for a bit until it "sees" where to go next, then set off again. Support the show

We sometimes make relationships and communications more difficult than they need to be through innocent misunderstanding of the state of mind that facilitates good communication. Common communication problems are not truly listening, which happens when we're thinking about the next point we want to make or taking things personally and thinking about ourselves rather than listening for the point. To sidestep awkward or difficult communication, we can listen to the other(s) from a quiet mind, without personal thinking or analysis that muddles our listening for the others' point. Support the show

Christine offers the metaphor of life seeming like a high-speed train ride. We settle down, look out, and take in the view as the train slowly starts to move. Then we experience the illusion, as the train speeds up, that life is moving past us. Suddenly, when the train reaches full speed, life is a blur rushing by, and we can barely take it in or enjoy it. Many of us spend a lot of our time moving and thinking so fast that we are always in a hurry -- doing the best we can to make sense of the blur, and never realizing that it's the vehicle we're riding in, not the life we're passing through, that is too speeded up to appreciate it, or reflect on it, or learn as we go. We have the power to slow down, to be present and use the feelings of anxiety and pressure to push ourselves, as a sign to ease off, and trust that a quieter mind will "see" life clearly and awaken to wisdom, insight, and inspiration. Support the show

Life, as Sydney Banks described it, is "a contact sport." In a contact sport, each player has great plays and terrible plays. Wins and losses. Injuries they cause and injuries that happen to them. No one can expect smooth sailing under cloudless skies every minute of every day. Our life is our learning adventure. Life offers us the development of new skills, the clarity to learn from mistakes, the humility to recognize that denying our role in ups and down holds us back. Denial sustains the uneasy experience of insecurity. When we accept human frailty in all of us, when we don't try to evade or deny or refuse to see our part in the course of events, we are cheating ourselves from learning life's lessons, building trust within ourselves and with others, and finding peace of mind. Denial keeps us stuck in time; denial keeps us stuck in our own beliefs about ourselves and life. Stuff happens. We make mistakes. We are sometimes thoughtless and hurtful. We are human beings. Denial slams the door on our spiritual growth and our capacity to acknowledge and learn from our past, and the ability to take responsibility for our own missteps and then let them go. Support the show

When people are in low moods -- such as anxiety, hopelessness, grief, anger, discouragement -- the immediate response is to figure out what or who is bothering us so we can deal with the perpetrator or circumstance that we think is bringing us down. That is the trick of our mind explained by the Principles. We are the source of our thoughts -- but as we experience thoughts coming to life, it looks like things are happening TO us. As we understand that we are the thinkers creating our experience, we find our natural power to navigate ups and downs and realize our power to change. Support the show

Optimism is looking for the best in people and looking for the beauty in life, and trusting we'll see solutions when faced with challenge. Hopelessness is insecurity about whether people will accept or like us, seeing risk or danger in life, and focusing on analyzing what is wrong when faced with challenge. Those opposite states are not the result of life; they are the result of how we are using our thinking to describe life. Hopelessness and Optimism are both habits of thought that we adopt without intent. Understanding how we think and generate our own unique experience gives us the opportunity to accept that ups and down are part of life, and the assurance that we can always change. Support the show