How to Share the Principles (according to Syd Banks)

In the midst of a wonderful day of exploring Oneness with Dicken Bettinger last week, he mentioned four things that Syd Banks would remind him before he’d go out to share the heart of the Three Principles understanding with others:

While I normally shy away from behavioral prescriptions, I was so struck by the simplicity and feeling of those four simple statements that I thought I’d explore them each in a bit more depth…

1. Keep it simple

One of my first jobs after I finished school was modeling the problem-solving strategies of a top Silicon Valley troubleshooter. When I asked him how he would begin to solve an extremely difficult problem, his surprising answer was, “I never solve extremely difficult problems. If I find a problem is too difficult, I know I’m looking at it wrong.”

In my own work, I’m often complimented (and occasionally put down :-) for making life seem simple. While I’m (mostly) flattered, on reflection I don’t think that’s what I do. It seems to me that life is simple, and I’m reasonably good at not complicating it. And when things don’t look simple to me, it’s just a sign that I need to keep looking.

The question is, where do we look?

2. Go within

A more linguistically rigorous way of describing the inside-out understanding would be the “formless-form understanding”; a more colloquial way of putting it is that everything comes from nothing. The “no-thing” at the heart of everything is the formless spiritual energy of life. In this sense, the direction to go within is pointing us away from the material form and toward the spiritual, or formless.

In Syd’s own words from The Missing Link:

“Believe me, the subtle truth all people seek will never be found in the illusion of form called nature. Look deep inside your soul, this is where you will find the answer…

The divine truth that lies within each living soul never changes. It is eternal. The divine passes from formless to form, and as human beings we are both spectators and participants in this spiritual theatre called life…

When the wise tell us to look within, they are directing us beyond intellectual analysis of personal thought, to a higher order of knowledge called wisdom.”

So if wisdom is what we’re seeking, what is it we’re actually sharing?

3. It’s a feeling

One of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of trying to share the principles via social media is that the words tend to get disconnected from the feeling. Instead of the sweet sharing that inevitably happens when people take the time to really connect, listen, and reflect, I’ve found that online conversations often degrade into debates about who is languaging things correctly or “what Syd really meant”.

When I get caught up in those debates, which from time to time I do, I’ve learned to go back to the quiet feeling that’s always lurking just below the noisy babble of my thinking.

As Syd said in The Long Beach Lectures:

“You have to go beyond all concepts, and you will find it in the stillness of your mind, in the quiet chambers of your mind when you go from the known to the unknown, from the physical to the spiritual. When you hear beyond the word, an inner light goes on and it brings out inner knowledge and wisdom, spiritual intelligence, before the contamination of human thought… It is a feeling, you are looking for a feeling! Don’t listen to the words, look for a feeling.”

So if people aren’t meant to be listening for the words, what are we supposed to do in order to share the feeling?

4. Give it away

In my business, we have a phrase we use to remind ourselves of what we’re really up to in this work:

In one of Syd’s early recordings, he talked about filling up with feelings of love, quiet, and expansiveness and then giving them away. Like a fountain, even as you flow you are continually refilling your own reservoir.  And the more you fill to overflowing, the more that feeling splashes on to everyone around you.

By way of contrast, when we try really hard to make things happen or “make” people have an insight, we tend to wind up with less and less of the feeling which inspired us to want to share in the first place.

Which means if you really want to get good at sharing the principles, the solution is simple:

With all my love,