Light and Darkness

A young woman questioned me the other day after watching the news. She had seen a  little girl from Syria, bandaged and bloody, asking why her government would do this to a child.  In the same broadcast, she saw horrifying images of a fiery explosion set off by a father who attacked his two little boys with a hatchet, then immolated himself with them.

She asked: If there is innate health in all people, how do these things happen? Aren’t some people altogether evil? How can you say leaders and fathers who brutally murder families for no reason share the same humanity as the rest of us?

This is an important question. If we do not see the answer, we lose all hope for peace and understanding in the world because we lose all hope for change, no matter what. If there are truly evil people who are different from the rest of us, then we are doomed to fear, conflict, and judgement.

To understand brutality and cruelty, we understand that the power to think and take our thinking as real is the absolute and only power we have to navigate life. We either live at the mercy of that power, or we live at the source of it. Either events, people and circumstances “make” us react, think, feel and do things, or we determine how we respond and what we make of events, people and circumstances. It’s that black and white. Outside-in: Circumstances create our lives. Inside-out: we create our lives. Outside-in: we are engaged in a constant struggle to get circumstances to conform to our thinking about what it would take for us to be OK. Inside-out: we are engaged in a constant process of shaping our own happiness in relation to changing circumstances. Outside-in: When things  beyond our control do not turn out the way we think we need them to, there is no limit to what we will do to try to force them into line so we can feel better. Inside-out: Things beyond our control are not the determinants of our well-being or peace of mind; our own thinking creates our state of mind and we can change from within to sustain our own ease.

The irony is, both scenarios are born of the same fundamental principles. If we think life is pushing us around, we live in the reality we have created with our own thinking, a reality in which we are victims of circumstances, doing what we have to do to survive life. If we think we are strong and resilient originators of our own experiences, then we live in the reality we have created with our own thinking, a reality in which we are creators of experience, using our minds to understand and respond to life. If we see that the power to think and take our thinking as reality is the point, then we have the freedom to decide how we will be in relation to life. Victim or originator? Pushed around or finding our way? Suffering in the storm of insecure thinking, or living in the light of wisdom?

How does this explain brutality and cruelty? Those who are enmeshed in thinking that life is controlling them are always to some degree, and often to a great degree, insecure. They live in the question, “Who knows what will happen next and what it will do to me?” They are at war with circumstances. They move to another city to get away from a place they think is bringing them down. They lash out at people who annoy them, or hurt them, or question them. They blame people and things. They get angry. They hold grudges. They take revenge. If they are in a position of power and they get insecure enough, they use their power to crush whatever they don’t like because it looks to them like that is what they have to do to survive. Because the answer is never outside of themselves, because the answer can only be within their own thinking, there is no stopping point. The more extreme the action they take to get relief from their insecurity, the more extreme the next action will be. It will go as far as fratricide, or genocide, or self-destruction because insecurity breeds insecurity; the failure of a small step to bring relief only feeds the dark thinking that is driving the person to desperation. The more upset one becomes, the more it looks like that upset is coming from the outside.

Why do so many people who have committed horrendous acts “see the light” after they are shut away in solitude? Removed from all the turmoil of their lives, in a safe and quiet place, their heads can clear, their thinking quiet down. In a moment of quietude, they
“realize” what they were doing. If someone can step in and explain to them where thinking comes from and how powerful thinking is, they can reconnect with the resiliency that was always there, obscured — even totally blacked out — by the storm of thought roiling through their minds.

In that, we all share the same humanity. We share the infinite, universal light of resiliency, wisdom, peace of mind. We have the ability to form thoughts; there is no limit to our thinking. If we use it to make up a painful, negative reality and get totally caught up in that reality, we can lose sight of the light, forget that we are thinking our way through life. We can fall deeply into darkness. But the light is never extinguished, even when it is invisible.

Even those we deem hardened criminals, hopeless cases, can (and do) change once they awaken to the way thought works: We use the energy flowing through our minds to form thoughts and then we become conscious of those thoughts, which appear to be real. Without understanding, we do not know that what appears real is no more than the illusion of thought in action.

Should We Look Before the Fact?

It happens to all of us. We think we’re just about to find what we’re looking for, and instead, Poof!, it eludes us again. It’s hard for all of us to give up the direction we’ve picked to look a different way.  I thought of this last week when I was sure the keys to my car were somewhere in the house. It passed through my mind that maybe they were in the car in the garage, but I didn’t even look there because I was so sure I was on the right track searching in the house, searching the same places again and again, ever more determined.

Researchers keep looking for proof of the usefulness of altering brain chemistry with medications as a cure for depression; researchers perpetuate the idea that we just haven’t yet found the perfect drug. It has been estimated that 50% of people on medication for depression do not benefit from that medication. Discussion of the puzzling efficacy of the Placebo effect has persisted since a respected study showed that administering Placebo to depressed patients produced entirely different brain responses than those produced by drugs, yet an unexpected 38% of the Placebo participants improved. In a recent discussion of the subject, Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, called the attribution of depression strictly to chemical imbalance “an outmoded way of thinking.” Yet it persists.

Maybe the keys are just not in the house?

Clarity is elusive.  We have become adept at studying brain activity and brain chemistry after the fact, but we have not found the key to what is before the fact. We have no scientific explanation of what generates emotional upset and creates the  chemical imbalance for which we seek a cure.

What answers do we have? (1) The brain is plastic and subject to inexplicable changes in chemistry and activity. (2) People respond variably to external input; it is impossible to determine a clear-cut cause and effect response to outside-in stimuli. (3) We do not have a universal explanation for brain changes.

What questions might we ask? (1) Are we looking in the right direction, given that the after-the-fact studies have led to increasing confusion? (2) If brain activity is constantly variable, should we be investigating healthy variability, rather than seeking artificial stability? (3) If we discovered the impetus for that variability, would it be easier to understand why the outcomes are so unpredictable?

Those are questions that teeter on the edge of the perceived boundary between science and spirituality. Yet, increasingly, science acknowledges that the study of human psychology involves spirituality as well. While it would be unfair to characterize the study of spirituality in psychology as “mainstream” or “hard science,” it would also be unfair to suggest that spirituality is not easing into the conversation and being taken to heart, especially in mind-body medicine. Increasingly, speculation appears in studies suggesting there may be “innate” processes not yet well understood,  or that there are dimensions of human resiliency beyond the reach of current science. Are they edging towards a different place to search?

The missing idea is that our emotional states could be created from the inside-out, not the outside-in. How people respond depends on their use of thought and on their state of mind, regardless of outside stimuli. The flow from formless energy to form is internally constant; the variable is the infinite variety of what is created. The ups and downs of experience make sense because experience is after the fact, an artifact of our infinite imaginations. Forming the thought, imagining form out of the formless,  is before the fact.

Everything puzzling and confusing about our current pursuit of understanding falls into place when we see it from the inside-out perspective. We use the formless energy of life to create thoughts. We are aware of our thoughts and experience them as real. Depending on our degree of awareness of our own psychological strength, we see more or less clearly that experience is coming through us, not at us. When it’s obvious to us that we are the thinkers of our own thoughts and the creators of our experience, we are buffered from ill effects. We can move through bouts of negativity and the ups and downs we feel, understanding that they are illusionary and temporary, that all our experiences come and go as our thinking changes.

This understanding would render chemical intervention superfluous over time. Such intervention might be helpful to quiet the mind sufficiently to be able to look and see and recognize the inner logic. But it would not be a long-term requirement because we would realize that it is within us to find and create real peace naturally.

I often feel like I am watching two trains racing towards a common destination from opposite directions. The science train racing from outside-in is moving towards an unexplored new place. The spiritual train racing from inside-out is moving towards a meeting point where it will surprise those who have not yet seen it and didn’t know it was coming. The journey offers promise of joyous meeting because the intent of both is simply to keep moving towards the deeply desired destination of peace of mind.

Yes, but …

Those of us who work in the field of Innate Health are unconditionally certain that all people have innate health, vibrancy and resiliency always accessible, even if rarely accessed. Why are we certain? Because everyone in this work has seen it for themselves, through moments of inner quietude in which we experienced insights that are deeper and more compelling than the intellect.

These are not apocalyptic moments. They are simple. We find ourselves with a quiet mind in a positive feeling state into which the logic of our spiritual nature tiptoes and whispers, “There’s nothing wrong with you, or anyone. It’s your thinking about what’s wrong that seems real, but it isn’t.”

We often find ourselves hearing a chorus of “Yes, but …” as we point in the direction of the simplicity and ease of the world that originates from our spiritual strength, neutral, pure and impersonal, empowering the creation of our lives on this earth through Mind, Consciousness and Thought.

“That’s a nice idea, but what about people diagnosed with mental illness? There’s something fundamentally wrong with them, isn’t there? “

“It sounds good, but I’m not like other people. I have had a horrible life. I don’t know anyone in my circumstances who could be happy.”

“I wish it were easy, but I’ve tried and tried and tried to understand the Principles and I just can’t ‘get it.’ I think my brain is wired differently.”

I have come to see this as a figure-ground problem. We’ve quite innocently grown up assuming that being upset, anxious, insecure — feeling bad –  is the ground, the fate of humanity, on which we try to impose a figure of feeling better. The Principles describe a total reversal of that assumption. Being at peace, calm, secure — feeling good — is the ground, the very spiritual essence of who we are as human beings, and feeling bad is a figure we impose on it with our own thinking. Feeling good is the essence of the human spirit; feeling bad is what we think up to cover up that good feeling and become temporarily dispirited. But our essence can’t be eliminated, only obscured, because it just is.  And we can’t think our way back into it because it is both before our thinking and at the source of our ability to think at all. Our thinking is  always changing; it is the way we define our lives. Our core spiritual nature is unchanging; it is the formless energy that generates our lives and our ability to create them.

So there’s a paradox in our work. On one hand, there’s nothing to fix, or to do. Everyone has what they are looking for. Peace of mind is a natural psychological state. On the other hand, people who have come to believe in their thinking about what is wrong struggle mightily to look beyond that, and we respect their struggle, even though we know it could dissolve into thin air at any moment with the flicker of an insight. How do we find the balance? We don’t support the struggle, but we understand that it feels very real to the person who is struggling, that the isolation and hopelessness of all the “Yes, buts” is a painful emotional state not subject to rational discourse. Once we acknowledge it, the less we talk about it, the better. The only “tool” we have is our certainty that Innate Health cannot be lost, and that no one, at the core, is damaged. So we see the health in everyone, regardless of the state of their struggle, and we know that we are all the same. No one gets through life without struggle, without moments of losing touch with the strength at their core. No one gets through life without moments of lightness, when the strength shines through. It all seems equally real at the moment it is paramount in our thoughts; it all disappears as soon as our thoughts naturally move in a different direction.

We are set up to generate fresh thinking, moment-to-moment, but we are able to hang onto old thoughts, too, because we are the thinkers of our thoughts. We have the power to use our own minds, our ability to think. Recognition of that power, of the changeable, optional nature of thinking,  sets us free and leaves us at peace, no matter what is on our minds.

Seeing that is the key to peace of mind. We are never stuck in any one state because our thinking is always subject to change, but our spiritual nature is constant. The figure is always the illusion.

Peace on Earth?

Many people long for peace on earth, but few truly believe it is possible. Count me among the few.

If people saw that peace of mind is deeper than their opinions and more powerful than their thoughts…

If the insight spread like the dawn around the world that peace arises from an internal experience, and is not imposed by external pressures or arrangements…

Then peace would be a natural state, the logical and intuitive outcome of spiritual stillness. We could take it for granted as easily as we now take war and chaos for granted. We accept war and chaos because we generally operate from the innocent thought that there must be winners and losers so the strong can prevail and enforce peace. The world is missing the point that you can’t “make” peace with dominance and rules and fences and treaties and weapons. Force cannot generate peace; force sets up an uneasy system to contain insecurity — temporarily. Insecurity generates stress, anxiety, fear, selfishness, distrust of others.  In a setting ruled by the internal experience of insecurity, there is no true or lasting peace, only the shaky illusion of security dependent on unreliable external factors. No ease; it keeps people on edge.

Peace is only an insight away, though. A moment in time and a realization that changes everything seems simple and obvious when it is our moment in time, our realization. We’ve all had those moments, when something we were really sure about crumbled and a whole new reality appeared, just like that. I remember one from my youth that was stunning to me, and changed my entire understanding of life.  I was in 7th grade. I loved grammar because it was orderly and predictable. Things were what they were and stayed in their place, in nice, diagrammable relationships, like good children. Nouns were nouns, verbs were verbs. Then, in late fall, my English teacher introduced the concept of gerunds (verbs acting as nouns), and a seismic shift occurred in my world.  An amazing thought popped into my head, transporting me way beyond grammar. Nothing is predictable or certain. The deeper you look, the more “facts” are like quicksilver.  I “saw” in that moment that it makes no sense to get attached to “predictable” realities; they aren’t what they seem to be. It was clear and clean. OK, I’d been wrong about what was what.

When I was 22, I had the privilege of teaching English and civics in a missionary school on Okinawa. My students were mostly displaced from strife-torn areas, seeking safety on an island that was under the control of the US. One, originally from North Vietnam, wrote an essay for a civics assignment: “When I was little, the French were our enemies. They went away and the South Vietnamese were our enemies. Then the Americans were our enemies. But now that I am here on Okinawa, living happily with all kinds of people, I realize that enemies are just friends we don’t really know yet.” Powerful insight.

Think back. Life is full of these experiences. For me, fast-forwarding to the year I learned about the Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought that explain how we create our own ever-changing realities, leads me to another astonishing insight. I am making all this stuff up. Everything I assume about my life is just my thinking. With that one insight, I set myself free from all kinds of opinions and judgments and ideas about what should be, releasing a huge burden I had carried for years as quickly as one could drop a 50-pound sack of potatoes and stand up straight.

And that is how peace can come. One soul at a time, insight by insight, washing across the earth in a series of gentle, illuminating insights, as individuals find peace of mind and set aside the darkness of chaos to enter the dawn. It is within the power of each of us, all of us, to find the wisdom that sets us free to see beyond the illusions of insecurity.

Here’s To New Adventures

On December 20, I will leave my office at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee for the last time and step into a new life adventure. I have loved my work and my time at USFSM and cherish the friendships I have made here, but my heart is with the global promise of Innate Health and its potential to help mankind. If you are a follower/reader of this Blog who has accessed it through the IPPL web-site, please make note that you will be able to continue to access it directly, at http://ippl2010.wordpress.com. I will continue to post frequently to Peace of Mind Matters.

One of the unanticipated benefits of dropping the burden of insecure thinking is that you lose your fear of change. I think often of a good friend of my parents, with whose children I grew up, who worked for the U.S. Government for 35 years and then retired. Every time our families got together, for years, he would engage in wistful conversations with my father about what he really wanted to do with his life. But he never found the courage to leave a secure, well-paying, good position and heed the call of his dream. He would step up to the entry of a new life, and then his mind would fill with what-if’s, and worries, and he would step back. He died regretting that he had never lived his dream.

My Father, on the other hand, lived by inspiration. Over the course of his life (he still had incomplete consulting projects under way when he died at 80), he stepped into the work that touched his heart and soul at the time, and seemed to love everything he undertook. His energy and enthusiasm for contributing his talents never flagged, and he never let circumstances (even money and prestige) stand between him and his heart. He died fulfilled, his life enriched by an wide range of work and life experiences.

Security is an internal experience, unrelated to where we’re going or what we’re doing or what’s happening around us. People who live at peace, in a grateful state of mind, awake to the moment, seem to stumble constantly  into unanticipated opportunity. And they have no fear of taking on new challenges. People who live in stress, in an upset state of mind, distracted by their worries, anxieties or regrets seem to miss opportunity altogether, or sidestep it when they glimpse it, overriding their inspiration with negative thinking about what could go wrong.

This is just another aspect of life in which peace of mind matters. Change is natural and delightful to those at peace. Change is unnatural and frightening to those who are not at peace. Without realizing that change will happen with or without them, they cling to the known and feel left out and disconnected.

It’s easy to see this playing out at the personal level. But it’s true, too, of whole societies. Much of the social, cultural and political distress that we suffer is really the attempt of insecurity and fear to put the brakes on the forward momentum of evolving ideas and institutions. The more individuals are mired in insecurity, the more difficult social, cultural and political life becomes for everyone because the flow into the future is dammed up by the force of those who want to hold onto the present or return to the past.

This can change in the blink of a thought, and that is my hope and commitment. It’s comfortable and easy for people to wake up to the realization of what they’re creating with their own thinking, and see that allowing their thinking to settle and flow naturally will set them free to embrace change.

In the words of Sydney Banks, “Discard the restless, haunting ghosts of yesterday and set yourself free to live the beauty of today.”

The Happiness Factor

Evidence is mounting that the prevention and treatment of chronic disease states is not only enhanced by the elimination of stress, but empowered by the experience of happiness. A good brief  summary is in the Harvard Public Health Review. There is an evolving body of serious medical and psychological literature  that points towards the health significance of a proactive intention to create happiness. Happiness bolsters the immune system, promotes well-being and longevity, and fosters healing.

The Harvard article points out that the toll of toxic stress goes far beyond poorer health for individuals. Population-wide, the cost of chronic diseases related to these conditions is enormous. “Imagine if we could enact a policy that would reduce heart disease by just 1 percent,” suggests Harvard’s Jack Shonkoff. “How many billions of dollars and how many lives would that save? Now what if we could also reduce diabetes—which is growing in epidemic proportions—and even stroke?” The point, Shonkoff says, is that society pays a considerable cost for treating chronic diseases in adulthood. Reducing toxic stress early in life may actually get out in front of these diseases to prevent them. I would add that reducing toxic stress at any time of life is a benefit. Science indicates the effects are immediate.

As research increasingly shows that the prevention of chronic disease is a critical factor in reducing the health care burden of nations, policy makers are looking to craft health systems that generate and reward preventive strategies. Dramatically changing the stress profile of individuals and communities is one important aspect of this change. At the same time, eliminating toxic stress altogether is a promising approach emerging within the field of Prevention. The ideal is at last intersecting with the possible.

At the strictly human level, all of this is critically and urgently important because people are sick and tired of psychological suffering. People are exhausted from immersion in stressful, anxious, angry, upset, circular thinking that entraps them in an endless loop of unhappiness. People are desperate for relief from the pressure of chronic stress — for clarity, for peace of mind, for certainty that they can manage their own lives.

For the last half century, we have looked “outside” for answers. How do we improve people’s lot in life? How can we provide access to more positive influences? How can we “fix” the circumstances that we have automatically blamed for human psychological suffering? Quiet voices from across the ages have consistently called to us to look the other way, to look inside for what we seek. And now, there is a logic, a simple, direct explanation of human psychological functioning that sets people free and reconnects them to their own true resiliency, that is sweeping across the globe.

You can watch the first in a series of discussions about it that will unfold on Manatee Educational Television month by month here. You can watch remarkable stories of transformation and change across the whole spectrum of human endeavors that have emerged from it here. You can learn more about it in a free program offered November 4 at USFSM, Less Stress, More Joy.

You will discover you are not learning techniques or methods or outside-in fixes, but realizing something you know already, deep-down. As Sydney Banks, who discovered and articulated the logic of the Principles that explain our experience,  expresses it:

“The wisdom humanity seeks lies within the consciousness of all human beings, trapped and held prisoner by their own personal minds. Wisdom is not found in the world of form, nor in remote corners of the globe. Wisdom lies within our own consciousness. Only you have the golden key to your soul and the wisdom that lies within.” (The Missing Link, p. 129)

To do, or not to do?

It started in high school. I began accumulating books about what to do. Five Things You Can Do to Get into The Right College; Three Steps to a Great Complexion; Four Techniques to Build Confidence; Ten Secrets of Women Who Reached the Top — that sort of thing. From succeeding in school, to picking the right mate, to choosing a career, to enhancing my appearance, to getting ahead at work, to keeping on schedule, to preparing quick healthy meals, to rearing intelligent children — I raced through life ducking a constant hailstorm of process advice. Do this. No, do that. No that’s not the right idea any more. Try this. No…

For years, I was befuddled. It seemed like I had a head full of solid advice about any life situation I could imagine, but when the chips were down, when I needed to face up to something right away, I couldn’t remember the advice exactly, or it didn’t work out as I thought it would. I was always teetering on the edge of not knowing what to do and looking for more and better advice. I thought wisdom was something wiser people than I must have. I thought the best way to navigate life successfully was to seek out really smart experts and do what they said to do. I was a little resentful when I practiced one technique or another for a while, only to read an article or hear on the news that some new idea had supplanted that technique, and now it was useless. (Coffee is good for you; no, coffee is bad for you – only drink Decaf; no two cups a day are OK; no all coffee, even Decaf, is a risk factor for stroke; no women can avoid depression with four cups a day…)

In mid-life, after years of stress and anxiety, I saw that believing that other people know how to live my life better than I do was a huge cosmic joke I was playing on myself! I immediately wanted to give that enormous pile of how-to books away, and then I had to laugh at myself for that, too. I trashed them. Why would I perpetuate the silliness by passing them on to others? Why wouldn’t I, instead, pass on what I had seen that set me free from all the expert advice to find my own wisdom and common sense, and feel confident that I would know what to do when I needed to know it.

Simply speaking, I recognized that I was the thinker of my own thoughts, using the tremendous power we all have to create my own experience of life. For years, I had been using my own gift of thinking for myself to make up a lot of insecure ideas about whether I knew what I was doing, whether I was capable of making the right decisions, whether I was smart enough to handle this or that. When I cleared my head of all the clutter of self-doubts and memorized ideas and just looked fresh, in each moment, at what was in front of me, I would get my own insights about what to do. I could trust them if they occurred to me, in the moment, in a calm state of mind and a good feeling. When I felt tense and insecure, it was best not to trust my thinking and look, instead, to quiet my thinking and calm down, then revisit the “problem” in a different state of mind.

Simple? Well, yes. Exceedingly simple. We have the power to make up our life moment to moment and we see what we’ve made up as compelling and real. We use that power more or less wisely in more or less secure states of mind. Easy? Well, yes and no. Not as an intellectual exercise. But exceedingly easy when it’s just plain obvious and you know it in your very core. I’m making it up and seeing it as real. I can make up anything. If I just turn my back on thinking that emerges from worry and tension and distress, I’ll quiet down naturally. Then I’ll have better quality thoughts.

What brought it to life for me was not just hearing about it from others, as if it were some more good advice, but really seeing it for myself, experiencing an insight that there was a deeper logic at work than I had ever realized. The “others” who guided me towards that steadfastly, relentlessly refused to give advice, ever. But they consistently created an experience of safety, calm and quietude, and demonstrated faith that I was no different from anyone else — anyone could see their own way to their own answers. They showed no interest in knowing the details of my insecure thinking, politely suggesting there was no point thinking or talking any more about what was confusing to me.  My mind would settle down and I’d allow the frenzied dervishes of thinking to whirl on by, and then get new, clear ideas for myself. It was thrilling to experience that. And my mentors were quick to let me know it had nothing to do with them. They were only pointing out something I already had, something I already knew, something that was the same for me as it was for them and everyone else in the world. We are the thinkers of our thoughts. Nothing but our own minds can put thoughts into our head. We live from the inside-out. We all create thoughts and experience in exactly the same way, but we all use that creative process differently.

As one of the best of all mentors, the late Sydney Banks, put it in The Missing Link, “The solutions to outwardly complex problems created by misguided thoughts will not arise from complicated analytical theory, but will emerge as an insight, wrapped in a blanket of simplicity.”