One may call it serendipity, but at a recent gathering I struck up a conversation with an woman who coaches individuals who want to reach life goals. Apart from the fantastic conversation we had, she left me with a great recommendation, which came in the form of a book called Somebody Should Have Told Us, about the ‘three principles’.
Now the three principles are Mind, Consciousness & Thought, and these principles are interconnected. But it is the thought principle which has really been my gateway into these ideas. By ‘principles’, Pransky is referring to something which is an indisputable fact about our human nature. Much like the theory of gravity, it is an undisputable fact of our existence. The three principles are therefore not questionable, but simply how lfe is.
Now rather than hijack the book paragraph by paragraph, likely bemusing myself and you the reader in the process, I will tell it how I see it.
Thought! We think. Of course we do. But this might seem a little different when we begin to recognise that our entire reality is made up of our thoughts. We generally think that the outside world happens to us, and effects us, and we then feel a certain way. For example, the weather may be bad, therefore I feel low; the crazy car driver cut me up, therefore I feel angry; I was fired unreasonably from my job, so I feel depressed; my addiction to drugs has hounded me all my life, therefore I am filled with guilt and shame.
This can be said to be an outside-inside world. What happens on the outside, effects us in the inside. The three principles rather sees our experience as an inside-outside experience, not as an outside-inside experience. Therefore what happens on the inside creates our experience.
So what does this mean in concrete terms? Well, let’s take the above examples and review them in light of the Principles. In an inside-outside world, yes, the weather may be bad, and yes, I may be feeling low – But note: It’s my own thinking which is making me feel bad, NOT the weather. Yes, the crazy car driver cut me up, and yes, I feel angry – But note: It’s my own thinking which is making me feel angry, NOT the errant car driver.
Yes, I was fired unreasonably from my job, therefore I feel depressed – But note: It’s my own thinking which is making me feel depressed, NOT being fired.
Yes, my addiction to drugs has hounded me all my life, I am filled with guilt and shame – But note: It’s my own thinking which is making me feel the guilt and shame, NOT the drugs.
So you may say, of course I feel angry, the driver cut me up, what else am I suppose to think? Well, actually, there are any number of ways of thinking about this event. And it is down to you, which way you choose to think about the event. Let’s say the Dalai Lama was driving the car, and he was cut up, would he feel angry? Well likely he would feel something completely different. He may choose to feel happy, or he may regard the other driver as a novice and so understand it; he may pity the driver as someone unable to control his emotions, etc.
In fact there are thousands of ways of thinking about these event, or any other event which happens out there. How we choose to filter this information, by our thinking about it in certain ways, determines how we feel.
Underpinning every negative feeling is a negative thought. There can be no feeling, which doesn’t have a thought hidden beneath it. The way we think, determines how we feel. Therefore, if we are feeling negative, we can be sure that there are negative thoughts lingering behind the feeling. Sometimes our thoughts happen so quickly, we aren’t even aware that they’ve happened. Why am I feeling this way? I haven’t been thinking negative thoughts. Well, yes you have. Why? Because there can be no feeling without a thought first generating it.
We are, what we think. Our thinking creates our experience of the world. So this is a revelation. If you can see it. Not everyone can. It may take time. If we know that our thinking can create a negative experience of the world for us, we can also know that by choosing to think good thoughts, we can create a fantastic experience of the world for ourselves!
Well, that’s the book and its basic theory. How does this translate into realtime? I guess that’s for you to discover - or not.
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