“In every systematic inquiry (methodos) where there are first principles, or causes, or elements, knowledge and science result from acquiring knowledge of these… It is clear, then, that in the science of nature as elsewhere, we should try first to determine questions about the first principles.”

– Aristotle

The word ‘principle,’ as I use it in my work, refers to the basic or essential quality or element of something that determines its intrinsic nature or characteristic behavior. In the field of chemistry, 117 distinct elements have been discovered that in various compounds form the substance of every ‘thing’ on the planet. In art, the three primary colors make up every other color in the spectrum.

When it comes to the human experience, we can understand the foundational elements in the form of three universal principles:  Mind, Consciousness and Thought. While those words mean different things to different people, the principles they point to have been observed and studied in science, philosophy, and religion throughout the ages. I’ve come to think of them as the basic facts of life – formless, foundational elements which can be observed only through their effects:

The Principle of Mind:
There is an energy and intelligence behind life. This is ever present but is not ‘in control’ – it has no inherent morality or apparent point of view. It simply ensures that but for the interference of external circumstance, acorns become oak trees, cuts heal, and life begets life.

The Principle of Consciousness:
The capacity to be aware and experience life is innate in human beings. It is a universal phenomenon. Our level of awareness in any given moment determines the quality of our experience.

The Principle of Thought:
We create our individual experience of reality via the vehicle of thought. Thought is the missing link between the formless world of pure potentiality and the created world of form.

These principles were first articulated by a Scottish welder named Syd Banks who had an enlightenment experience and glimpsed a deeper truth about how life works. Here’s how he introduced them in his book The Missing Link:

“The Universal Mind, or the impersonal mind, is constant and unchangeable. The personal mind is in a perpetual state of change. All humans have the inner ability to synchronize their personal mind with their impersonal mind to bring harmony into their lives.”

“Consciousness is the gift of awareness. Consciousness allows the recognition of form, form being the expression of Thought… Mental health lies within the consciousness of all human beings, but it is shrouded and held prisoner by our own erroneous thoughts. This is why we must look past our contaminated thoughts to find the purity and wisdom that lies inside our own consciousness.”

“Thought is the creative agent we use to direct us through life. Thought is the master key that opens the world of reality to all living creatures. Thought is not reality; yet it is through Thought that our realities are created.”

So what does this all mean? It means that there is an extraordinary creative potential that lies largely dormant inside human beings that can become a factor in every area of our lives…

Here’s a drawing of how the principles behind the human experience work together with our brain to create our experience of life:

At a limited view, we are only aware of our own thinking, and it appears to us as objective truth, even though it only exists in our own thoughts. Then, as we expand into another level of consciousness, we become aware of the subjective nature of our thoughts, which are often different to other people’s thoughts. Expand further, and we become aware of two different kinds of thoughts – the ones that come from our brain (i.e. memory and received knowledge) and the ones that seem to download into our brain (i.e. inspiration, intuition, and wisdom).

An even deeper understanding reveals that we live in a world of Thought – that in fact, we’re not designed to experience anything else. This is the first real recognition of “the human matrix” – that things are definitely not what they seem, no matter how real they look, taste, smell, sound, and feel. Beyond the human matrix is the deeper or “Universal Mind” – the intelligence and energy behind life.

After 30+ years of coaching individuals and groups from nearly every walk of life, I can say with confidence that the people who do really well over time are often not the smartest, or most well-read.  They can be introvert or extrovert; seemingly self-assured or apparently neurotic and insecure.

What they all have in common is that they have somehow stumbled across the secret of operating in harmony with that universal mind. They’ve learned to switch off their personal thinking just enough to open up the space for a deeper wisdom to come through. It happens spontaneously in the shower, at the gym, or driving in to work; on walks in nature or sipping coffee in a cafe. For some, it’s a more formal ritual – a meditation practice in a darkened room, or a prayer to a higher power and a surrender of individual will in favor of divine guidance.

In short, whether they describe it as intuition, insight, common sense, or the voice of God, they have a deep relationship with and abiding faith in the wisdom within.

To use an analogy, our minds have two modes – receptive and active. When our personal mind is in “receptive mode”, our thinking settles down and we gain access to a kind of an inner genius – an intelligence that comes from somewhere beyond our personal database which will guide us through even the most difficult of circumstances. When our “personal mind” is in active mode, we access our intellect – a kind of a processing capacity to quickly sift through available information in support of a specific result.

Both modes of mind are useful, but most of us use the processing capacity of the intellect as our primary means of navigating life and the guiding wisdom of our genius intelligence only when we “really need to”.

The benefits of reversing this pattern are immediate and universal. As your intellect settles down and your intelligence kicks in more and more, you will:

• feel more at peace
• have insights more often, both simple and profound
• get “philosophical” about life and take things less personally
• connect more deeply with others

These are not goals to be achieved – they are the natural result of using our minds more in line with their design. Your intellect will still be there when you need it but it will no longer try so hard to run the show on its own.

Here’s a metaphor I sometimes use with clients:

You wake up in a completely darkened room.  At first you remain completely still, too afraid to even move, but soon you realize you are not alone. There are others there with you in the dark, and they have learned to function relatively effectively.

Many of them have simply memorized their way around a relatively small area so they can navigate it with confidence as long as nothing out of the ordinary comes to pass. Others have maps, carrying the accumulated wisdom of others but difficult to read in the dark and easy to misinterpret.

There are some who act as a light in the darkness, filled with the flame of their own wisdom and casting enough light to both draw others to them and guide them forward.

But the secret that so few teach because so few know is this:

The divine spark of wisdom is alive and well in all of us, just waiting for the gift of our own attention to help it burst into flame.

How this inner wisdom helps us in the outer world is the subject of the next two sections…

“Leave thinking to the one who gave intelligence. In Silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving, and watch how the pattern improves.” 

The meditative state of mind is the closest thing to a ‘magic wand’ that I’ve come across in 25 years of exploring the human potential. It heals the body. It’s the gateway to deeper wisdom. It opens up a world of deeper feelings. It gives us glimpses into the nature of the universe.

Most people who understand its power have learned to access it through discipline and practice over time. In fact, people put an extraordinary amount of effort into attaining and maintaining a peaceful state of mind. They try to protect their mind from disturbance by not watching the news, not reading the papers, and not allowing negative people into their life. They employ meditative techniques designed to still the mind through inquiry, mantras, and visualizations. Or they shift their attention away from their mind and onto their body, using intense exercise, gentle movement, or focusing on the breath to change their state.

Each one of these practices can be an effective way of experiencing greater peace of mind and the insights that come with it. But there’s a difference between having a meditation practice and living in a meditative state of mind.

In traditional coaching, our level of performance is often explained with some version of this formula:

Level of Performance = Capacity + Information

If that were true, the only thing between you and optimal performance would be a missing piece of information. Once you knew what to do, you would get the most out of your innate capacity. But even a cursory glance at our own life will show up the fallacy in that idea.

• How many “strategies for success” have you studied in your lifetime?
• How much of what you’ve learned do you actually apply on a regular basis?
• Are your results commensurate with how much you’ve studied, or do they seem to have more to do with how you show up in actual performance situations?

Level of Performance = Capacity – Interference

In other words, when we eliminate interference, we perform closer to our full capacity. But in order to eliminate interference, we first have to understand what it is and where it comes from.

Here’s a visual representation of how our mind functions when we’ve got our mojo working – in the zone and on our game:

When we’re operating in sync with our natural design, we’re tuned in and receptive to the infinite potential of the universe (Mind). We’re able to experience the energy of the universe taking form (Thought) via an aperture that is continually expanding and contracting (Consciousness).

To function at our absolute best, all we need to do is allow the system to operate as designed. Thought takes form in our personal consciousness as fresh ideas, creative possibilities, loving thoughts, and a moment-by-moment sense of direction, and we move forward in absolute harmony with the intelligence of the universe made manifest via our common sense and a sort of “wisdom within”.

What could possibly interfere with such a great design?

Well, the problem with a brain is that over time it starts to produce lots and lots of repetetive personal thinking over and above whatever fresh “of the moment” thinking we really need to perform at our best. Since our experience of life is really an experience of Thought, the more we have on our mind, the more complicated everything seems, and the more the aperture of our consciousness tends to contract. Before we know it, all we can see when we look out into the world is our own habitual thinking reflected back to us in the fun-house mirror of our own self-consciousness.

Where we get ourselves into real trouble is when we then start analyzing and attempting to control our thinking. In the process, we completely lose sight of both the power of Thought and the intelligence of the deeper Mind that can guide us through life with relative ease if we let it.

It looks something like this (but not this):

Simply put, the less we have on our mind, the higher our level of performance. Or to put it even more accurately, the less we think about what happens to be on our mind, the better we tend to do at whatever it is that we’re doing.

There’s a story I sometimes tell about a Zen master who used to have his followers begin each day with the ritual of 10,000 prostrations to the North, South, East, and West, which would pretty much take them to lunch time. Then they would repeat the ritual in the afternoon until dinner, and then one more time in the evening before retiring.

One day in a talk, the master told his students that “There is nothing you can do to become enlightened. Enlightenment is but a happy accident.“

A monk who had grown tired of doing all of this practice every day said to the master, “If enlightenment is just a happy accident, then why do you have us doing all of these practices?”

To which the Zen Master replied, “To become more accident prone.”

While full-blown enlightenment may or may not be on the table here, when it comes to experiencing a deeper dimension of life on an ongoing basis, practices and rituals seem to get in the way of simply getting quiet and looking inside for a deeper, more universal truth.

In fact, there are only two things I’ve found to be universally helpful:

1. Listen Differently

The advice on listening I was most often given throughout my early days of study in this field (and have most often shared with others since that time) was to “listen with nothing on my mind”.  Variations on that advice include:

• Listen like you might listen to a piece of music
• Listen as if you’ve only come to keep the person next to you company
• Listen for a feeling
• Listen like a rock with ears

But what I’ve found more recently is that people who seem to struggle to “get” the principles are actually asking a different question than those of us who are sharing the principles are attempting to answer.  We’re sharing the inside-out understanding as an answer to the question of how life works; they’re listening for an answer to the question “How shall I live?”

Here are some of the other differences between these two fundamentally different questions:

So it is somewhat unsurprising, given what different questions we are asking, what different things we hear when we listen.

For example, imagine someone says to you “There is an intelligence behind life.”

If you are listening to answer the question “how shall I live?”, you will almost immediately jump ahead to the implications of that idea in your life. “If there is an intelligence behind life,” you might think to yourself, “then I need to find a way to tap into it more. Maybe I should do some intuition training, or see if I can find someone who’s got more access to that intelligence than I do and ask them for advice. And how do I know which thoughts are coming from the intelligence behind life and which ones are just my thinking? This is hard!”

Or someone suggests “Every human being is born with innate mental health and well-being,” and your mind begins to race not only through every apparent exception to that statement you can find, but also to questions like “How do I access it? Why don’t I experience it more?  Why is my husband/wife/parent/child struggling so much if they have it?” and implications like “If every human being has innate mental health and well-being, I should be able to be happy all the time, and getting caught up in insecure thoughts and feelings is a sign of failure, or at least of weakness, laziness, and limited understanding.  I need to try harder!” 

Whereas if you’re listening for how life works and someone says to you “There is an intelligence behind life”, chances are you’ll sense the truth of that.  After all, most of us know that we don’t make the sun come up in the morning or the earth spin around on its axis.  It makes you quieter instead of noisier – more humbled, awed, and grateful than confused.

If they say “Every human being has innate mental health and well-being”, there’s nothing you need to do about that. It’s just a possibility to sit with and see what comes through. And in that simplicity and quiet, chances are you’ll get some insights of your own into the nature of the human mind.

Now of course, if you’re reading this to figure out how best to live, I’ve just given you a prescription for you to take into your life, put to the test, and practice until you too can listen the “right” way, learn to have a “quiet mind”, and live in a “deeper feeling”.

But if not, you’ll likely recognize the simple fact of what I’m pointing to – some things are just true whether we believe them or not. And it turns out that seeing those truths for ourselves makes life simpler, gentler, and more fun to be a part of.

2. Stay in the conversation

When people would ask Syd Banks how to get this understanding for themselves, he was known to reply “Look in a direction and do nothing.”  Which for me always begged the question, “If there’s nothing to do, why would I read books, listen to recordings, watch videos, hire a coach or go on trainings?”

The answer, as I now know, is simple:

Because there’s nothing to do, but there is something to see.

The three spiritual principles we are talking about are invisible to the eye (like the physical principles of electricity, gravity, and magnetism), but they are ever present and explain everything that happens in the human experience. We “see” them by looking away from that which is created (the “outside”) and towards what is doing the creating (the “inside”).

When you look inside, you start to see.  When you listen with nothing already on your mind, you start to hear.  What you see and hear is the deeper potential of all human beings.  It is that which allows us to be “awesomer”.

And if you continue to look in this direction, what you see will set you free.

The Advanced Course

Our experience of life is 100% thought created, moment by moment and thought by thought.

The advanced course is equally simple, if harder to see:

No, really!

The Inner Circle

Going Deeper in the Inner Circle