TL;DR

TL;DR (too long; don’t read). It looks like I’m dealing with the loss of a loved one. What I’m actually going through is still no less a human experience. Therefore, the neutral principles underlying the human experience remain relevant. It’s these principles that allow well-being, love, hope, and faith to stay with the bearer of the human experience, even as we navigate the deaths of others, rather than delegating the human experience to what happened and its consequences.

The passing of Keith Blevens

In the early hours of Thursday, February 26th, 2026, Keith Blevens passed away. He leaves behind his beloved wife, Valda Monroe, and his daughter, Mattie.

What is a tribute to Keith?

I’ve wondered what it means to celebrate the life of a remarkable human being. I note that many talk about the man, but something tells me I want to share something Keith held deep within his heart, something spiritual, rather than what meets the eye. There were many things he loved, family especially.

To honor Keith, I focus on what mattered most to him: the Three Principles and their relevance for every human being. He was passionate about guiding clients to discover innate well-being through their own insight – and importantly, not from Keith – the source of the insight must come from the client. Even after decades, he kept having new realizations, ever-deeper aspects of the Principles, showing that learning is endless—a path I hope to follow. Sydney Banks said, “I see the Three Principles as the greatest gift I or anyone else could hope to ever receive, in their lifetime.”

Keith wanted everyone to encounter and realize the power of the Three Principles because he knew what they could do for them. And perhaps a helpful way I can demonstrate that is by sharing my learnings about what I went through, the human experience, after Keith passed. It’s worth noting in advance that Keith did not care for his own identity, which might be one reason he was so resilient. He never wanted the Three Principles to have anything to do with him or his journey and history; he always pointed to them because they are more profound and universal than any thought any human being has ever had.

My tribute isn’t so much about Keith as about the lasting insights on the Three Principles I was blessed to receive through my conversations with him (and Valda). These insights continue to live on and assist me in staying on the path of mental health. In that sense, Keith is still around, not just keeping me on track but also helping me find my way back to my spiritual heart when I have inadvertently taken a temporary leave of absence. Keith is tickling my heart, supporting my journey in unexpected ways.

What I experienced

Even though I knew Keith was going to pass away at some point, and as best as I could prepare for such an event, there was still nothing – literally nothing – in my thoughts and thought-created ideas that could have prepared me for receiving the news that Keith had died. All my beliefs about the idea that “I can handle such an event” were shattered by my actual, felt experiences in the immediate aftermath. It was a humbling moment, and quite devastating to the ego because it got caught in the act!

Projecting myself into how I might feel in a future loss seemed logical, but my actual experience was entirely different from any imagined scenario. Valda often said, “We never know what we are going to think next.” That’s a statement you’ll find true regardless of the era we live in. As there is a 1-to-1 relationship between thinking and feeling/experience, it also makes sense to say, “we never know what we are going to feel or experience next.” I knew this, but now, I realize, there’s more to it than I thought there was, and that I had gone too far ahead!

The closest I can come to describing what I experienced is “waves of intense emotion.” My ability to name specific emotions is poor, and it remains so today. The good news is that naming these feelings isn’t required within the context of the Three Principles—just that I feel them as they arise through the mystical bridge called Thought, whether positive or negative.

Words are words, and feelings are feelings. Words are unable to “capture” feelings. Any attempt to describe a feeling with words is not the feeling itself, only an attempt to put words on it, not of it. It’s an attempt to translate the wordless, which is spiritual, into the “formed/created” school of thought called language and linguistics. As positive as the intentions are, this particular form of translation is often a futile endeavor, which may be an indicator of why Sydney Banks repeated to us, “Don’t listen to my words. Go beyond the words.”

In a recent “The Mystical Bridge Group” meeting that I run every Monday, I reminded one of the students, who has a fantastic lexicon, “Don’t let language or linguistics outrank the spiritual. It’s the spiritual that knows more about language, and beyond, than you do.”

Let me return to my experience. I’d feel an emotion; it seems to begin from nothing, the intensity increases rapidly, to a point where I suddenly hold my breath after a sharp intake, and it feels like I am carrying the weight of an elephant. After a brief moment at the peak, the intensity dropped, and I could breathe again with relief. Sometimes I’d shed a tear or two at peak intensity. The entire “emotional wave” occurs between 2 and 5 seconds (roughly).

For four days, these emotional waves arrived unexpectedly and repeatedly. Between these waves, I felt an undercurrent of sadness and regret over missed time with Keith, and underappreciating the time I did spend with him, which lingered quietly. Each wave brought a fresh intensity I hoped I wouldn’t have to endure again. Even with my understanding of the Three Principles, they kept coming. This was a sign I didn’t know I needed, because this made it clear I had more to learn about the human experience. I just didn’t know what it would be.

The waves slowed on the 5th day and never returned, except for one moment on the 8th day, when I saw an incredible photo of Keith with his grandson on his shoulders – you can see it here on Facebook (opens in a new tab). On the 6th day, the grey clouds somehow disappeared, and I had no idea what I had done to make it happen. It just happened. I realize it sounds bizarre, particularly to those who want “something to do” or are hoping for a “mental prescription,” but that is truly the way it happened. I cannot offer anything, because I don’t have anything!

Once the clouds lifted, I was filled with tremendous thankfulness that I had crossed paths with Keith and could take part in all the conversations we shared, and the negativity from the previous days had vanished, like mist in the morning sun. Honestly, it is breathtaking and mind-boggling how the world I see can be painted so differently, once the seemingly believable connection between the event and the human experience is broken. The world “out there” was just doing the same things it always had – but my world was transformed beyond comprehension.

Gratitude and thanking my friends

During those 4 days when I was having “waves of intense emotion”, I had several conversations online with friends from all over the world. It’s moments like these that one realizes what a friend really means. Some of my friends are also close to Keith, and I discovered through those conversations that they, too, were going through their own motions as they come to terms with the fact that Keith is no longer in this world with us.

It is an extraordinary gift that a friend can stay in a space and allow me to feel whatever I feel, even as my feelings change, without any need or desire to change to suit them, or put another way, they can handle other people having emotions without being affected themselves. This, I believe, is because they, too, have an understanding of the human experience, and that having a human experience is precisely what it means to be human. This gives me the space to be myself and let spontaneity flow. In other words, they knew that any experience is always a gift and that they were secure within themselves.

They have witnessed me, and I them, in a single conversation go from smiling to distraught, from calm to upset and crying, from steadiness to fear, and to convincing ideas about what the future might hold. We were going back and forth between these two dichotomies, a rollercoaster. Yet, even in the midst of what we went through, we knew neither of us was broken, not in need of fixing, nor wanting either party to think or feel a particular way. No wonder I felt appreciated and loved by others, and hopefully, they felt the same.

I can only hope in those conversations, with God’s grace, that I afforded my friends the same gifts as they gave me. What they went through themselves, and everything that came with it, was a gift to both of us. That’s something I’ll always treasure. In the end, we carry forward these gifts of connection and understanding—reminders that even in loss, we enrich each other’s lives.

Every conversation always involves at least two people. When there are two people, there are two minds. When there are two minds, then there are two feelings and two realities in the same moment. Both of those feelings and realities are individualized to the bearer, and independent of other people’s realities, hence the term, Separate Realities. They gave me the space to have my own feelings and realities, and for that, I am eternally grateful, not just for what they did, but especially for what they didn’t do. I can only hope that I did the same for them, too, as they, on a deeper level beyond emotions and realities, were going through the same thing I was, regardless of whether their emotions and realities were similar to or different from mine. All of us were having feelings and were painting realities. From that deeper place, we have something in common that connects us. “We are all in the same boat,” as Valda often said.

To those people I had conversations with, please know that I deeply appreciate you and love you dearly. I hope that I reciprocated in full within your experience, too.

Feelings (and realities), simply, are too spontaneous for our conscious thinking or any machinations of thought to keep up with. Feelings are always in the now and can never be felt outside the present moment. Not surprising, since thought is always in the now and can never be materialized into form outside the present moment, form being feelings and reality to name but a few.

The investigation of death… or the human experience?

One of my students asked me how I was able to get over the “emotional waves,” or as another person described it, the “heaviness.” I’ve listened to others try to put it into words for me, such as sadness, mourning, despair, numbness, resistance, suffering, grief, despondence, guilt, regret, shame, etc. It’s remarkable how many names we give a feeling, yet no one seems to agree on what words to use, just that there is a feeling.

She asked if I had been learning about death. I kindly replied, “I assure you, I wasn’t learning about death. I was learning about the human experience. I didn’t sign up for it, but that is how it turned out. It was the education of being in the human experience that I learned more deeply about it, yet, at the same time, not from it.

You could say I was having experiences that didn’t seem like experiences (or an exception, to use a Keith-ism), but it did indeed turn out to be a human experience brought to life by the principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. When an experience is not recognized as such, it’s because we have innocently delegated it to something “outside of Mind or us,” like the world out there, and as a result, the experience loses its “spiritual” quality. No wonder why it appears real and factual to us.

Insight isn’t about what the insight is – it’s about breaking the illusory-yet-appearing-real connection between the human experience and the world out there. Once this insight occurs, the “flavor” of human experience shifts toward the positive. It’s a switch from using the outside as the source for understanding to the inside. Why does it become positive? The Inside includes wisdom and mental health. It’s where the principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought are. It’s home. We fall back into our hearts, where we belong. When we switch to the inside, we’ll see the world through the eyes of Thought, infused with wisdom and mental health, guided by the Three Principles (rather than by the world). Our experience is once again spiritualized. It’s simple logic – do the math!

This is why learning about the nature of human experience, or the principles behind it, rather than what our human experiences are, gives us a clear direction for learning beyond what we know, so that the unknown can present itself to us and become known. This is why we are never, ever more than one thought away from what you’re seeking, rather than looking for a change in external circumstances, hoping it’ll change you (or others), as if circumstances had that ability/power. When we have insight, the same circumstance is seen through the eyes of Thought, and our relationship to the circumstances changes, making room for unexpected benefits and positivity. “The way forward” will be very different, simply because we’ve got a live connection to the source of deeper answers, which had lain dormant until now.

A wise man once said, “A smooth sea doesn’t make a great sailor.” This applies equally to “the sea” of human experiences – all of it. It’s what’s deep within our hearts that know how to navigate the rough and choppy seas and make our way toward the smooth seas of human experience once again. This is resilience. Sydney Banks said the same thing below:

There is no way to guarantee a trouble-free life.
Life is like any other contact sport. You may encounter hardships of one sort or another.
Wise people find happiness not in the absence of such hardships, but in their ability to understand them when they occur.

Sydney Banks (The Missing Link, page 124)

This quote doesn’t just apply to external events and circumstances; it also applies to our inner lives, where feelings, experiences, and realities are. Understanding can only occur once the Principle of Thought has been factored in via insight, because it switches us from the outside to the inside, where Thought is! Thought cannot exist outside of an individual, which is why “there is no outside” to hold them. Another Syd quote: “You’re literally one thought away, if you can find that one magical thought.” You won’t find that one magical thought from the outside, or from the event or circumstance. It’s deep within your heart. This one magical thought is not something anyone can foresee, guess, or plan ahead; it comes as a complete surprise. When it does come, your mind shall advance!

This shift from the outside to the inside obviously presents a very different way of relating to our external events and circumstances. This is why we say, “My world has transformed.” The event is still the same, and Keith is still dead. But we are not looking out there, because that’s not where the human experience is. When one realizes where the human experience actually takes place, it switches to the positive, and, in turn, so does my understanding of Keith’s death. One follows another in this specific direction. It works only one way!

This, in turn, allows us to experience a reality we hadn’t considered possible up until now. As powerful as the evidence appears to suggest it is because of time and the belief that “time is a great healer” and/or “getting used to it”, there is something else much more profound and simpler at work here, one that often isn’t immediately obvious.

While I deeply acknowledge that reality has changed, as significant as Keith’s death was, and whether I wanted it or not, there is one thing that still hasn’t changed – the principles that give life to the human experience – enabling us to see what we see, and to feel what we feel. It is unavoidable that we will have a human experience, but what it will be is the great variable. Truly, nothing is set in stone, no matter how strong our convictions are.

It is the three divine and formless principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought that are locked in for us. It is up to us to use it as we see fit. This is why Sydney Banks referred to the principles as a “gift”, and yet, it is our usage of such principles that gives us and our realities an in-the-moment appearance and the stamp of individuality.

After all, once something is insightfully realized as happening within a World of Thought, and nowhere else, well-being, resilience, love, hope, faith, and optimism will return to the bearer of the human experience. A priceless gift.

In my case, or reality, it’s one where Keith is no longer a part of it, except in my memories and imagination. When I do “see” him again, I have nothing but love, appreciation, and gratitude for having crossed paths, for being given the gift of Keith being Keith, and for the wisdom he shared with me.

The Tribute to Keith

It’s not just Keith Blevens, the man. It’s what he brought to this world. He sprinkled spiritual knowledge on all those he met. I’m profoundly deaf, and I heard. If I can hear, you definitely can! I certainly couldn’t have been the person I am today if it weren’t for Keith sharing spiritual knowledge.

It is with a gigantic smile on my face that I reflect on what I’ve learned from Keith and on taking his wise guidance to heart, and yet, it is the very thing that helped me understand and remove the resistance I had to the human experience after Keith’s death! There is some cosmic humor in there somewhere.

Keith was a master of pointing to the wisdom within the souls of everyone he met. It was never about Keith Blevens; it was always about what’s within the soul, deep within everybody’s consciousness. Those who heard are the lucky ones. They received a spiritual gift that they will treasure for life, like a long-lost friend that never left.

“Dealing with Death…or the Human Experience?” Hopefully, I’ve shown you why learning about the Three Principles behind the human experience goes a long way. Certainly, much further than learning about death, if finding peace in our inner lives and navigating the challenges of the world with love, hope, resilience, faith, and well-being is what you want.

Love to all, Brett