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The Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought are foundational tenets elucidating the facets of human psychological experience. They were first articulated by Sydney Banks, a welder with a ninth-grade education, a native of Scotland, residing in British Columbia, Canada during the early 1970s.
According to verbal accounts provided by Banks during recorded lectures, he realised the Three Principles while attending a marriage seminar held on Cortes Island, in British Columbia, Canada.
The seminar encouraged couples to "let their feelings out," be honest, and argue with one another. Discouraged with the process, Banks and his wife prepared to leave the seminar. As they were doing so, Banks entered into a dialogue with a therapist who was also participating in the seminar.
Describing himself as "an insecure mess" at that time, Banks began elaborating on all the ways in which he felt insecure. The therapist's response was a revelation to Banks: "I've never heard such nonsense in all my life. You're not insecure Syd, you just think you are." [1]
What I heard was: there’s no such thing as insecurity, it’s only Thought. All my insecurity was only my own thoughts! It was like a bomb going off in my head … It was so enlightening! It was unbelievable … [And after that,] there was such beauty coming into my life. [2]
The three specific terms, Mind, Consciousness and Thought, were not clearly delineated during Banks' initial experience. The three words, and his definitions, would become clear later through his talks and lectures. Referring to them as "the psychological trinity", [3] Banks does not take credit for finding the Principles, rather the Principles found him.[ citation needed ]
Roughly 40 years later, Syd Banks' "insight" has been introduced into hospitals, correctional institutions, social services, individual and couples therapy, community housing, drug and alcohol prevention and treatment programmes, schools, and multi-national corporations.[ citation needed ]
Application of the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought has spread throughout the United States, and into Canada, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Israel, Scotland, England, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Spain. [4]
According to Banks, the three "formless" principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought explain the entire range of human behaviour and feeling states. They are responsible for the creation of all human experience. [5]
The three principles are defined as:
The energy and intelligence of all life, whether in the form, or formless. The Universal Mind, the impersonal mind, or “wisdom” is constant and unchangeable. The personal mind is in a perpetual state of change. [6]
Consciousness is the gift of awareness. Consciousness allows the recognition of form, form being an expression of Thought. [7]
The power of Thought is not self-created. Thought is a divine gift, which serves you immediately after you are born. Thought is the creative agent we use to direct us through life. [8]
The Three Principles have become the basis of a growing, international psychological movement with centers in the United States and Europe. The fundamental premise of the movement is that life is metaphysically generated into form from formless energy, and that our experience as human beings is created from the "inside-out", from the interaction of the Three Principles; including the experience of self-identity.
Practitioners of the Three Principles believe that feeling states (and all experience) are created (through mental activity i.e., thought). Scientific research by Lisa Feldman Barrett supports this notion that mental states (ie. emotions) are indeed constructed from within the human mind. [9] Practitioners believe that beyond each person's limited, conscious, and personal thought system lies a vast reservoir of wisdom, insight and spiritual intelligence. No one person has greater access to wisdom than any other. Mental health is the resting state, or "default" setting of the mind, which brings with it non-contingent feelings of love, compassion, resilience, creativity and unity; both with others and with life itself. [10] Research by George Bonnano, professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, supports this notion that resilience, not recovery is a common response to difficult life events such as trauma and loss. [11]
It would be difficult to provide a comprehensive list of centers worldwide that are dedicated to sharing the Three Principles. However, some prominent organizations are 3PGC.org (Three Principles Global Community), the Center for Sustainable Change, Three Principles Foundation, Three Principles Movies, and The Cypress Initiative.
Banks, who died of metastasized cancer in May 2009, contradicted many traditional notions and practices of psychotherapy. Specifically, that for mental wellbeing, it was not important to process the past, nor that the content of peoples' personal thought systems had to be "worked with" and analysed.
Everyone in mental institutions is sitting in the middle of mental health and they don't know it. [12]
Banks was also averse to using techniques, or creating concepts, in order to share with others. These, he felt, contradicted the essential formless and original nature of the Three Principles, which emphasises kindness, "sharing, caring" and the simple gift of love. [13]
A number of therapists and psychologists showed an interest in the concepts, and the teachings were spread [14] into various private practices, social services, corporate training and consulting, psychiatry, education, community mental health and development work, and drug and alcohol treatment systems.
The Three Principles have been called by other names, including The Inside Out Understanding, Health Realization, neo-cognitive psychology, Psychology of Mind, and Innate Health. The form of how the Three Principles has been taught has changed over the decades, with an increasing emphasis on simplicity, formlessness, and speaking from the heart. The Three Principles are not a "technique" that can be taught but a paradigm shift that clarifies the field of psychology and forms a fundamental base for understanding mental health, mental illness and psychological functioning.
Works by Sydney Banks, currently published by Lone Pine Publishing, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
The mind is that which thinks, imagines, remembers, wills, and senses, or is the set of faculties responsible for such phenomena. The mind is also associated with experiencing perception, pleasure and pain, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. The mind can include conscious and non-conscious states as well as sensory and non-sensory experiences.
Zazen is a meditative discipline that is typically the primary practice of the Zen Buddhist tradition.
Alan Wilson Watts was an English writer, speaker, and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience.
The Eight Consciousnesses is a classification developed in the tradition of the Yogācāra school of Mahayana Buddhism. They enumerate the five sense consciousnesses, supplemented by the mental consciousness (manovijñāna), the defiled mental consciousness (kliṣṭamanovijñāna), and finally the fundamental store-house consciousness (ālāyavijñāna), which is the basis of the other seven. This eighth consciousness is said to store the impressions (vāsanāḥ) of previous experiences, which form the seeds (bīja) of future karma in this life and in the next after rebirth.
Integral yoga, sometimes also called supramental yoga, is the yoga-based philosophy and practice of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Central to Integral yoga is the idea that Spirit manifests itself in a process of involution, meanwhile forgetting its origins. The reverse process of evolution is driven toward a complete manifestation of spirit.
The mental body is one of the subtle bodies in esoteric philosophies, in some religious teachings and in New Age thought. It is understood as a sort of body made up of thoughts, just as the emotional body consists of emotions and the physical body is made up of matter. In occult understanding, thoughts are not just subjective qualia, but have an existence apart from the associated physical organ, the brain.
The New Thought movement is a new religious movement that coalesced in the United States in the early 19th century. New Thought was seen by its adherents as succeeding "ancient thought", accumulated wisdom and philosophy from a variety of origins, such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Taoist, Vedic, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures and their related belief systems, primarily regarding the interaction among thought, belief, consciousness in the human mind, and the effects of these within and beyond the human mind. Though no direct line of transmission is traceable, many adherents to New Thought in the 19th and 20th centuries claimed to be direct descendants of those systems.
Saṅkhāra is a term figuring prominently in Buddhism. The word means 'formations' or 'that which has been put together' and 'that which puts together'.
Health Realization (HR), or Three Principles Psychology, is a resiliency approach to personal and community psychology first developed in the 1980s by Roger C. Mills and George Pransky, and based on ideas and insights these psychologists elaborated from attending the lectures of philosopher and author Sydney Banks. HR first became known for its application in economically and socially marginalized communities living in highly stressful circumstances.
Buddhism includes an analysis of human psychology, emotion, cognition, behavior and motivation along with therapeutic practices. Buddhist psychology is embedded within the greater Buddhist ethical and philosophical system, and its psychological terminology is colored by ethical overtones. Buddhist psychology has two therapeutic goals: the healthy and virtuous life of a householder and the ultimate goal of nirvana, the total cessation of dissatisfaction and suffering (dukkha).
The metaphor "stream of consciousness" suggests how thoughts seem to flow through the conscious mind. Research studies have shown that humans only experience one mental event at a time as a fast-moving mind-stream. The term was coined by Alexander Bain in 1855 in the first edition of The Senses and the Intellect, when he wrote, "The concurrence of Sensations in one common stream of consciousness enables those of different senses to be associated as readily as the sensations of the same sense". But it is commonly credited to William James, who used it in 1890 in his The Principles of Psychology. The full range of thoughts—that one can be aware of—can form the content of this "stream".
Torkom Saraydarian (1917–1997) was an Armenian author, poet, and musician. He was born in Sevas, Turkey to Armenian parents. He was trained in The Ageless Wisdom Teachings under the guidance of his father, Monasteries, Arcane School.
Joseph Bailey is an American psychologist, consultant and public speaker. He is noted largely for his 1990 book about addiction and treatment, The Serenity Principle and is the author of three other books on mental well-being: Slowing down to the Speed of Life, The Speed Trap: Avoiding the Frenzy of the Fast Lane, Slowing Down to the Speed of Love and Fearproof Your Life. Joe Bailey has been a psychotherapist for thirty-five years, and is a consultant to many corporations and healthcare, mental health and chemical dependency organizations. He is a seminar leader and trainer of professionals. His practice of research and teaching an integration of psychological and spiritual health embraces many of his writing partner Richard Carlson's techniques in addressing a person's innate health, as well as those of Sydney Banks and refined by George Pransky and Roger C. Mills, known as "Health Realization."
Buddhism is a religion and philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices, largely based on teachings attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, commonly known as the Buddha, "the awakened one".
The Universal White Brotherhood (UWB) is a religious movement founded in Bulgaria in 1897 by Peter Duenow. It was later established in France in 1937 by Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov, one of Deunov's followers.
In the oldest texts of Buddhism, dhyāna or jhāna is a component of the training of the mind (bhavana), commonly translated as meditation, to withdraw the mind from the automatic responses to sense-impressions, "burn up" the defilements, and leading to a "state of perfect equanimity and awareness (upekkhā-sati-parisuddhi)." Dhyāna may have been the core practice of pre-sectarian Buddhism, in combination with several related practices which together lead to perfected mindfulness and detachment.
This is a glossary of terms used in New Thought.
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Romantic epistemology emerged from the Romantic challenge to both the static, materialist views of the Enlightenment (Hobbes) and the contrary idealist stream (Hume) when it came to studying life. Romanticism needed to develop a new theory of knowledge that went beyond the method of inertial science, derived from the study of inert nature, to encompass vital nature. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was at the core of the development of the new approach, both in terms of art and the 'science of knowledge' itself (epistemology). Coleridge's ideas regarding the philosophy of science involved Romantic science in general, but Romantic medicine in particular, as it was essentially a philosophy of the science(s) of life.