Solving the last problem.

I still had a problem, though. Is it really true that every thought from the inside-out way of using the mind can be a happy one? I know of people who experience upset or “negativity” but still somehow retain their common sense and mental well-being, without any loss of intelligence. They keep their bearings somehow. I wanted to know what they knew!

What is going on here? I’ve been led to believe that “quality of feelings” was a critical factor in whether I would be resilient, mentally healthy, loving, confident, and so on. Such a belief is not consistent with my own observations of some remarkable people who could handle all kinds of feelings.

“The quality of the feeling is an indicator of the quality of your thinking,” and then using that as an indicator or guide to make decisions is, in my view, a very dangerous belief to adopt. This belief actually makes perfect sense if there were only one way to use the Mind!!

I’ve been on the receiving end of bullying when I was at school because I am profoundly deaf, wearing hearing aids – an easy target in an environment where I was the only deaf child in a hearing school – and I asked the bullies why they did it; they said it felt great. I knew they were honest in their response. This was a big lesson for me, to the point that I tried to stop myself from feeling positive because I didn’t want to risk hurting others. Was there a way to have positive feelings without hurting others? I was missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

There is good news, though. We don’t have just one paradigm of the mind. We have two. Two Ways of Using the Same Mind. I had no idea I had underestimated the significance of this, and I still do today.

If there are two ways of using the same mind, and I’ve only ever known of one, then of course I’m going to be interested to find out more about the other way of using the mind. If there were going to be powerful benefits from uncovering the other way of using the mind, I did not want to miss out on it. This was not a stone I was going to leave unturned.

Not only have I been blessed to discover what I wanted, but I have gotten so much more than I had dreamed of; such is the impact of having insights into the Three Principles.

Feelings are easily misunderstood

Back to feelings. I knew that it was possible to have a positive feeling and be inside-out, and a negative feeling and be inside-out too! Suddenly, the need to feel a particular feeling just fell off the table. It was such simple logic.

I also realized that it’s possible to have positive feelings in the outside-in (yes, really, just like the bullies above), and negative feelings in the outside-in.

This raised such a fundamental question.

The answer couldn’t be more obvious. That’s when I knew: paradigms were where all the action was — not the quality of feelings.

Syd said:

Did Sydney Banks say inside and outside? Here we are with paradigms again!!!!

To take things one step further, every feeling comes from a thought. That means the feelings don’t come from a paradigm. Every thought on a conveyor belt will have its own feeling. Every feeling — positive or negative — can be experienced either inside-out or outside-in.

This means that a paradigm doesn’t stop a person from experiencing the full spectrum of feelings, which led me to another realization.

The Inside-Out and the Outside-In as paradigms don’t stop you from feeling the thoughts from each way of using the mind, yet there is no limit on what you can feel in either. Therefore, if “Happiness” and “mental health” aren’t about the quality of the feeling, since the Inside-Out doesn’t rule out the wide diversity of feelings, then “Happiness” or “mental health” couldn’t possibly refer to the quality of feeling. Most of the world currently lives as if it does.

At this point, given that there are two conveyor belts of thought, one for each paradigm or one for each use of the mind, I realized that “Happiness” and “Sadness” aren’t about the thoughts we have, but about which paradigm those thoughts arise from.

A person who has a thought with a negative feeling from the Inside-Out will be “happy” not because of what the thought is or the feeling that comes with it, but because of the paradigm from which that thought emerges.

Talk about an actual paradigm shift!

It’s the paradigm that goes deeper than the thoughts themselves. This was the beginning of relating to thoughts in a way that very few people have been able to articulate.

Happiness is not a feeling, it’s a paradigm! A Way of Using the Mind!

This also answered the question of whether “Happiness” and “Mental Health” were the same thing, just different names for the same paradigm. Likewise, “Sadness” and “Mental Sickness” were the same thing in different disguises, all because we found a logic that ran deeper than what a feeling could provide.

So, back to that phrase: “The quality of the feeling is an indicator of the quality of your thinking.” Now, given what we have been learning, we can factor in the existence of paradigms.

I actually 100% agree with the statement. However, that statement is true in BOTH ways of using the mind.

In the Inside-Out, the quality of the feeling is 100% an indicator of the quality of your thinking.
In the Outside-In, the quality of the feeling is 100% an indicator of the quality of your thinking.

Suddenly, if you are anything like me, everything about that phrase has been turned on its head, hasn’t it? I’ve yet to meet a client who wants to have ANY thinking in the outside-in, no matter how beautiful or incredible the feeling is!

After several decades, this finally answered the question that had quietly nagged me: why did the bullies say they felt great? What they didn’t know was that they were “great feelings from the Outside-in.”

Now that I have the direction between Inside-Out and Outside-In, I have the confidence to feel positive without hurting someone else. All I had to do was go within, and I’m inside-out! Again, it’s so simple, but that’s exactly what the logic showed me.

Can we control what others think?

Let’s go back to Atmos’s question. I suspect you can already see where I’m going with this — let’s remind ourselves one more time:

The first part of the quote — you have no control over what others think — is easy enough. The Principles themselves are neutral (and formless), so they don’t determine what we “think.” But something is. I’ll leave it to you to find out what that might be, as there are many different terms for it. My favorite one, but also the most challenging, is “That which USES the Three Principles.”

“Free Will/God’s Will,” “True Self,” “Level of Consciousness,” “The Thinker,” “The Dreamer,” are a few of the others I know of. There will be hundreds more.

You won’t be surprised I’m adding another Syd quote:

Whatever you go with, all feelings derive from and come alive through the Three Principles. It occurs within. In fact, nobody else but the user can use these Three Principles. I use the Three Principles that reside within me. No one else can use what is within me. Likewise, I cannot use the Three Principles that reside in others.

Therefore, we cannot control what others think. This forms the basis of “Separate Realities,” or, as I have also called it, “Individual and Independent Realities.”

If we believe we can control what others think, we must reject Separate Realities as a spiritual fact or law. As Separate Realities is a natural implication of the Three Principles, we’d have to reject the Three Principles too.

If the Three Principles are a fact, then we cannot control what others think. Since there is a 1-to-1 relationship between our thoughts and feelings, and no relationship between feelings and anything other than our thoughts, we cannot control what others feel. This is the beginning of maintaining our mental well-being and resilience in relation to others, by refusing to let others’ thoughts and feelings determine our own.

Not surprisingly, this includes whether other people are using either of the two paradigms of the mind. This inherent logic of the Three Principles freed me from the grip of needing others to feel positive or be inside-out, and what a gift that has been. I can say without hesitation that it reduced the number of conflicts I had with others by at least 95%. My feelings are so much calmer and steadier when I interact with others, even when they are in distress. Yes, I still get tripped up from time to time, but nothing like as often — and nowhere near as driven to make others adopt my reality!

Can we control what we think?

We have realized there are two ways of using the mind; could this be what Syd is referring to when he says, “We have the power to control what we think?”

I don’t think he’s referring to controlling what thoughts we will have, because we would need to know what those thoughts will be before we have them, which, to me, is impossible. How can we know what thoughts we will have before we have them? The thoughts on the conveyor belt would have to already pass through the bridge called the Principle of Thought, so that we can have and know them, and the feelings that come with them.

Could it be that he’s referring to which of the two ways of using the mind?

Now that is a much more tangible possibility! Please keep in mind that this is HUGE — again, I am NOT referring to controlling which thoughts or feelings come to us.

We can be inside-out, with no idea what thoughts will come to us.
We can be outside-in, also having no idea what thoughts will come to us.

Valda Monroe once said, “We never know what thoughts we’re going to have next.” I expanded on that with “We never know what feelings we’re going to have next.”

Therefore, trying to control what thoughts or feelings we’ll get is a futile endeavor.

This quote highlights that thoughts are spontaneous, not something we can foresee before they arise in us. The critical factor here is that, rather than preventing “bad thoughts” from coming to us, we retain the right to switch paradigms.

The way I personally see it is this:
“Good Thoughts” is another way of saying “inside feelings” or “Inside-Out thoughts.” (There are lots more names for this way of using the mind)
“Bad thoughts” is another way of saying “outside feelings” or “Outside-In thoughts.” (There are lots more names for this way of using the mind)

Everything that we go through will come from a paradigm. Yet we — as thinkers — retain our “Free Will” to switch paradigms. There are no thoughts or feelings from either paradigm that can stop us from moving from one paradigm to the other. It doesn’t matter how deep the rabbit hole someone is in the outside-in paradigm; they are still one thought away from being mentally healthy again.

In my view, when we are Inside-Out, we ALREADY know what we are dealing with – Thought!! We’re not dealing with “life,” we are dealing with Thought! We are not dealing with the “outside” or the “created.” The Inside-Out is an outward projection, and we know its real source – the inside. The inside is identical to the outside.

However, when we are Outside-In, we’re still going to have thoughts, but here’s the critical part: they won’t look like thoughts! The Outside-In is a projection that now appears real, and therefore it looks to us that the source is “out there.” This is the separation of the inside from the outside.

Talk about the great illusion, and we treat this illusion as an unarguable fact! It’ll look as though something outside us is what’s determining our experience. It’s a lot harder, if not impossible, to exercise free will over something that appears to be external rather than from within. Free Will cannot escape the boundaries of Mind, and there’s only one place in the entire universe where you will find Mind. This is why Free Will is not found outside, because there is no means for Mind to create an outside, so it can’t get there.

In my view, perhaps another interpretation of Syd’s quote is this:

If you realize, deep within, what that means, you’ll uncover hidden (and wholly unexpected) reserves of mental well-being, resilience, love, confidence, happiness, etc, even as others use their minds to create their own “sadness.” After all, we’ve all done that and been there ourselves, so we can be compassionate to others.

One word of caution, in case we are overdoing or overthinking this:
You still retain the right to agree or disagree with what others think. You can respect what others think, but it doesn’t mean “accepting” their realities or giving up your reality for theirs.

Answering Atmos’ questions:

Sydney Banks was vehemently opposed to using techniques and exercises to manage thoughts, simply because they propagate and perpetuate the Outside-In way of using the mind. The truth you seek will never be found in the Outside-In paradigm. If that sounds a bit negative or blunt, just know that you’re still one thought away from being Inside-Out and finding the very truth you seek!

Regarding the vocabulary question:

So, instead of analyzing Syd’s words, we need to go beyond words. We can listen to the words, but the words don’t contain what Syd wanted us to hear, or at least glimpse. The Logic of Mental Life is not found in the words, yet it’s clearly discoverable. Syd was a human being. So are we. If Syd can uncover it, surely we can at least glimpse what he saw.

I can’t speak for Sydney Banks — that is the law of Separate Realities at work. No one ever truly understood Syd because he alone knew his thoughts and feelings. And I can only ever know mine.

I am incredibly grateful for what Syd brought to the world. He pointed in a direction that no one else could, because he knew what to point to. The transformative power of discovering what’s within us cannot be expressed in words. Words are fantastic for communication, and can be used to point in a particular direction – inward – yet words are utterly useless for finding the inner life where happiness and mental health are already waiting for us.