Discovering that we’re living in the feeling of our thinking
Sydney Banks taught us that there are constant principles at work in how we psychologically experience life. He taught us that thought and feeling are inseparable. The living truth of this statement kept proving itself to us over and over again as we began to have more and more insight into it. It became clear that no one could think one thing and feel another in the same moment. No one can think love and feel hate in the same moment. Nor can they think hate and feel love in the same moment. This meant that we were always directly experiencing the feeling of our thinking in each moment. Experiencing the truth of this means that we are not directly experiencing what we are thinking about: we are directly experiencing our thinking in the moment about what we are thinking about.
This is a paradigm difference. This meant that people and past thinking and circumstance did not have the power to dictate how we felt. This explained why we could have different responses to the same circumstances. It explained why everyone did not have the same responses to the same circumstances. We began to see that we needed to factor our thinking in the moment – and the feeling of our thinking in the moment – into our equation of what we were experiencing at any given time.
When we experience strong emotions, we are apt to blame other people, the past, present or future circumstances for the way we feel. When this blame no longer became a logically viable option it enabled us to take an honest look at what was really going on for ourselves in any given moment. It was as if we had been leaving out the first step of how we were experiencing life.
In order for something to be on our minds it must be on our minds as thought. Whether it’s a loving feeling, a jealous feeling, a sense of unease or inexplicable anxiety, irritation, or impatience – it must be on our minds, in our lived experience, as thought. Thought is the means by which we experience life. We do not have another system that allows us to experience life.
Seeing the truth of this began to dismantle the illusion that it was possible our feeling could come from someplace other than thought. It showed us that life was an inside out experience – created inside the power of thought. We saw that the only reality that we could ever, and would ever experience, was the feeling of our thinking moment to moment. We were completely surprised that there was a pre-existing intelligent logic that emerged when we were not looking to something outside our thinking in the moment as the cause for our feelings. This was pointing us inside the logic and wisdom of the Three Principles Paradigm as a direction for learning and insight.
Learning to respect the power of how thinking works was an eye opener for us. When we saw that we were living in principles that pre-existed us, it reminded us of the deeper nature of life. There was something involved here which was beyond our known thinking that put us in the experience of being reminded of a greater intelligence.
Thought is a spiritual power, but on its own it really has no power. Thought itself is completely neutral. It is not until you put your ideas into that thought that thought gets its power. Whatever you put into that thought, whether it be positive or negative or whatever, will manifest itself into actual experience.
Sydney Banks
By Keith Blevens, Ph.D. and Valda Monroe