What if the Principles Aren’t Enough?

One of the things that I will often say to students on Supercoach Academy is this:

What impact looks like on the outside can vary wildly, but is most apparent in the simplicity with which people share it:

• Nothing has changed, but everything is different

• I’m not afraid anymore

• It’s like I’ve emerged from a cloud

• I fell back in love with my family

• It feels like the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders

• I’ve realized that a good life is good for business

• Everything seems so much simpler

• I found a way to be happy

The source of this impact is a simple understanding of what’s really going on behind the scenes of life – a glimpse of the wisdom of the ages in a form that’s easily digestible by the soul if often a bit crunchy for the intellect.

Here are some of the ways I’ve heard that understanding explained over the years by various teachers in the field:

• “Thought creates feeling.” (Elsie Spittle)

• “All you have to know is everything is created from thought – you don’t have to know anything else.” (Syd Banks)

• “You can have your experience without your experience having you.” (Linda Pransky)

• “Whatever you are is all you can give away.” (Syd Banks)

• “All we are is peace, love, and wisdom, and the power to create the illusion that we are not.” (Jack Pransky)

The words, beautiful and quotable as they are, are not the source of impact. They come from that source, and at their best they point us back to it. But it’s the easiest thing in the world to fall in love with the words and miss the point.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had two different people on two separate continents say to me that “the principles weren’t enough.” They shared their stories with me – heartfelt stories of suffering and pain, lostness and loss. “I really get that I’m feeling my thinking,” one of them told me, “but it hasn’t been enough to get me back to myself.”

They both went on to say they’d found comfort in non-principles based interventions, using a tone as if in a confessional, or as though concerned that the 3P police were waiting around the corner to pounce on their admission.

Personally, I was just thrilled they were doing well. When my own kids went through various adolescent nightmares, some of my colleagues were appalled that I allowed them to seek solace in something other than a conversation about the nature of the human experience. With as much patience as I could muster at the time, I would explain that they could hold tight to their theories and I would hold tight to my children.

An understanding of the principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought is not a cure for what ails you. It is awakening to the peace, love, resilience, creativity, and wisdom inside you that leads to transformation and change. As it happens, a deep understanding of the principles often leads us back to the space within, but it’s what arises in that space that heals our broken bodies, soothes our tired minds, and guides us forward in our business and our life.

In other words:

There is a story I’ve always loved about a little girl who is obsessed by her new baby brother. She keeps trying to convince her parents to let her be alone with him, but they can’t understand why and are concerned she might be jealous and intending to do him harm.

Finally, they arrive at a compromise- they’ll pretend to let her be alone with him in his room, but they’ll watch and listen through a crack in the door.

The little girl excitedly creeps in to the room and leans over her brother in his crib. “Brother,” she whispers. “Remind me what God is like. I’m beginning to forget.”

The story usually finishes at that point, but I like to imagine what happened next…

With a silent, Buddha-like smile, the baby looks up at his sister, eyes twinkling with the unconditional love of life. His sister lets that smile in, allowing it to impact her as she fills back up with the quiet reverence we all feel in our most settled-down moments. They both begin to giggle, and the power of those giggles impacts the parents outside the room to the point where their own eyes begin to twinkle with love. In no time at all, the whole world begins to giggle. Swords are beaten into ploughshares, and human beings and the planet they inhabit once again begins to thrive.

Syd Banks, the Scottish mystic who first articulated the three principles, also articulated what it is to share them with others.

“We have the most wonderful job in the world,” he said. “We find people in various stages of sleep. And then we get to tap them on the shoulder and be with them as they wake back up to the full magnificence of life.”

It has been my honor and privilege to do that job for the past decade or so, and to teach others, as best I can, to do the same. Unlike most other modalities I’ve worked in, there is a built-in integrity to the system. You can’t give away what you don’t yet have, so in order to become truly impactful, you have to first be truly impacted.

And how cool is that?

With all my love.