People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind.  We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time.  We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back.  We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what is.  We miss the possibility of going deeper and learning from fresh insight.  Yes, thought creates our experience; but when we are thinking a reality that we don’t want, our true gift is we can let any thought go.  Our true guide is the feeling state that comes with thoughts.  If something occurs to us that gives us an uneasy, negative feeling, we know to stop; slow down, remember we are the thinkers and we have the power to take thoughts seriously or let them go.  The experience thought creates is a feeling state; that is what guides us to know whether our thoughts are helpful, constructive, inspiring, or not worth keeping in mind.  Every moment is a fresh start.

“Ego” is whatever we think about ourselves.  Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas.  Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be.  Our thoughts appear real as we’re thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created.  There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking them and turn our thoughts elsewhere.  We all live in the same reality, but our experience of it is how and what we think it is, unique to us moment-to-moment.  Recognizing ego-thoughts for what they are — just fleeting images we are making up in our own minds — helps us not to become discouraged or frightened by negative thoughts we have about ourselves, and not to become arrogant or boastful about positive thoughts we have about ourselves.  We are all just human beings using the gift of the Principles to think our way through life.  Because thoughts are illusions, images passing through our minds as we create them, we are not prisoners of our own thinking.  We’re always just a thought away from creating a different experience.

Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality.  No two people create the identical experience.  Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to “read” our own and others’ moods and reactions.  When we know that thinking is a creative power, we recognize it is a spiritual gift that allows us to change, and find fascination with, rather than reaction to, others’ realities.

Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don’t realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from.  When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place.  That leads to defining ourselves as negative.  We come to expect it.  With understanding of how thought works, we can decide to quiet down and turn away from those thoughts.  As soon as we look in a new direction, new thoughts occur to us.  It’s natural to change.

Most people are taught that productivity makes us feel good about ourselves, proud of our efforts. It gets linked to well-being. In truth, when we’re not at peace with ourselves, we can’t force productivity and if we do a lot of work, it usually leaves us tired and depleted. When we are at peace in our own minds, feeling at ease and connected to the moment, we are naturally productive because we are focused on what we’re doing, not on ourselves and trying to feel better.

“Panic” crops up a lot in conversation.  “I realized I forgot to finish that report and I panicked.”  “Tests always induce panic in me.”  “She panicked when her brother uncovered her secret.”  The actual experience of panic — racing heart, shaking, sweaty palms — is unpleasant.  We tend to think events and things induce that feeling in us.  But panic is just the feelings arising from the build-up of distressing thinking.  It’s an alarm waking us up to a flood of non-constructive thoughts.  As soon as we’re onto ourselves and quiet our minds, the feeling of panic dissolves.

When events leave people feeling hopeless or afraid, the inclination we have is to share our fear, or to follow people who feel the same.  Yet we know deep down that hopelessness and fear do not solve problems or inspire solutions.  Events have no power to make feel bad or good — how and what we THINK about events creates our feelings.  As the thinkers, we always have the power to clear our heads and find fresh thoughts.  When things are difficult or confusing, we still have wisdom within us.  If we look towards our innate wisdom, we see what we can do to be helpful, not hopeless.

It’s natural for people, groups, nations to have differing ideas, and for them to believe in them.  This only creates conflict, hostility, or anxiety when the people involved become attached to their ideas and take them personally.  That can lead to polarization and hostility, rather than interaction from the understanding that every person’s thinking looks real to them.  If one party thinks “A” is the answer and another party thinks “Z” is the answer, the solution arises from understanding the power of thought and respectful exploration of each others’ ideas, with an eye to possibly finding common ground or even discovering new ideas.

We don’t always realize that the only source of our feelings and experience about life is our power to think and our thoughts coming to life as our personal reality.  So we often “blame” our experience on what other people say or think, or believe that we need others to say or do things to make us happy.  The Principles explain that our experience is generated from within ourselves.  When we see that we can change our minds and change our experience, we know we do not live at the mercy of life circumstances, but we live from the thinking we do about them.  That is the freedom to make the most of life.

Over time, we take on ideas about who we are and how we are.  We start to see them as our personality, our character.  Maybe someone we respect has frequently referred to us as a hard worker.  Maybe a friend has commented favorably on our looks.  Maybe a sibling has called us stupid.  Maybe a counselor has diagnosed us as anxious or depressed.  Whatever “labels” have affected us become the story we believe about ourselves.  Without understanding the way Thought works, we can hold ourselves back — or exceed beyond our dreams — depending on how seriously we take our labels and whether we recognize that we can decide what thoughts to take to heart, and we can change our minds.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.