60. My Kindle Highlights from One Thought Changes Everything
We are living an inside-out experience, not an outside-in.
Hello, and welcome back. In the previous issue I shared, I Tried Mega-Millionaire Alex Hormozi's Weird Solomon Journal Technique—Results Surprised Me, and in this edition I share my personal highlights from the book One Thought Changes Everything by Mara Gleason.
NOTE: This book isn’t for everyone. It might be for you if you are interested in mindfulness, Zen, or psychology.
By the way, I’m Kevin Kruse, founder and CEO of LEADx and NY Times bestselling author of 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management and 11 Secrets Successful People Know About Goal Setting. Welcome to Success & Significance - my take on health, wealth, and relationships (my “3 to Thrive”, read more here). Hit the Subscribe button below to join over 20,000 members who get weekly practical advice and wisdom from the world’s most successful people.
In One Thought Changes Everything, author Mara Gleason writes about her discovery of a philosophical and psychological system originated by Sydney Banks known as The Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Ultimately, it’s a framework that overlaps the great wisdom of Buddhism—quieting our mind leads to transcendent experiences of oneness, and all of us are living an inside-out experience, not an outside-in.
Here are the highlights I created while reading the Kindle version of the book.
What I came to discover in my journey of learning about the three principles of mind, consciousness, and thought, which you'll read about in the following pages, is that all of human experience is a personalized, thought-divided experience of an underlying, impersonal energy that connects all of us.
And for many of us, the older we get, the more we define ourselves by our thinking and the more tightly we tend to hold onto our thinking. This "holding on" is the root of all human psychological suffering, like stress, depression, isolation, and so on.
On the flip side, experiences of peace of mind, flow, freshness, and insight visit people when their thinking is quieter, less prominent, less important, less divisive.
When our mind goes quiet, we feel the energy behind life without the fragmentation and personalization of thoughts. In that silence lies a spiritual universal truth. We are all one. We are all OK. Only your thinking can tell you otherwise.
new understanding of the mind and how it creates our experience shows us that we are only ever in a thought-created experience, and therefore, we are only ever one thought away from a whole new reality.
people came to understand how their experience of life comes about: that it is coming from them, not happening to them (reversing many people's assumptions about life). The understanding gave them profound new insight into how we can naturally access new thoughts in any moment, and thus new experiences.
“Thought creates our world and then says, 'I didn't do it.'" - David Bohm
In an attempt to state it strongly and succinctly, if you have an experience of something, it has to be in your thinking.
To reiterate, thought is behind all our experience. Without thought, we cannot have an experience. It's as fundamental to our life experience as our heartbeat. "I think; therefore, I am."
We don't live in the feeling of an external world. We live in the feeling of our thinking.
In order to feel anything, we have to be conscious. Dreams are a fascinating demonstration of how consciousness brings our thinking to life as a feeling in our bodies.
I'll give you a visual, as that can be helpful. Many people assume that we are like cameras, walking around taking snapshots of the world out there. Whatever is there, our "camera" is objectively capturing it. But in truth, the mind works more like an old-fashioned film projector. From the human mind, via thought, we create a picture of life and project it out onto the screen of our experience. We live in a movie of our own making. Mind is the power source, thought is the film, and consciousness is the bulb that lights it up.
The first domino is the realization that 100 percent of our experience is coming from the inside-out, rather than the outside-in.
The second domino is the realization that thought is just a transient energy. Essentially, it's not real.
"This too shall pass." But learning that it's not just a nice-sounding phrase, it's actually a principle of human experience, makes our life experiences much less frightening and stressful. All experience is borne of thought, and no thought is permanent. If you give your mind the opportunity, it will self-correct.
The only thing that can make you have a shift in state, or a shift in feeling, is a shift in your thinking. You are only and always living in the feeling of your thinking. And no one outside of you can do your thinking to you. If you want to correct a bad state of mind, just stop blaming it on something outside of yourself, and realize that if you don't breathe more life into a thought, it can't continue without you. As Sydney Banks, the man who originally articulated the principles, used to say, "The life of a thought is only as long as you think it."
Mind (which is the intelligence or the energy of all things), consciousness (which is what makes us aware, and allows us to feel), and thought (which is the content we have come into our mind that creates a picture of the world). They are like the elements that combine to create our experience moment to moment, but they're so seamless and invisible that it looks like it's the outside world determining our experience.
When people begin to look inside and consider that it's all an inside job, it makes them more reflective and less reactive.
people start experiencing states of what you might describe as ease or flow, presence or clarity.
It's the same reason money can't make you happy. If it was in the money itself, all rich people would be happy. And we know that's not the case. Essentially, what makes people happy is where they allow their mind to relax. Where their thinking goes quiet.
So I would try to push negative thoughts aside. But even that created some work. Some distraction. Some noise in the system. Since learning about the principles, I've realized that all thought is just a temporary form in your mind. Negative or positive. It's all just an energy taking a form and then dissolving again. If you don't pay attention to any of it, you kind of just start to fall into this wide open space. It's raw energy.
I found it incredibly freeing to learn about the special effects tricks that "thought storms" can play on us. Knowing that a flashback is just an incredibly powerful illusion caused by thought, made to feel real by consciousness, was comforting to them. And that if left alone, all thoughts will pass.
"Everyone is doing the best they can, given the thinking that looks real to them." - Sydney Banks
So we aren't living in a feeling of the world outside of us, but rather we are living in the feeling of our thinking.
Until the next issue, remember…
Impact > Income,
Kevin 🙏
If you liked this post, you’d love my books. Consider grabbing 15 Secrets Successful People Know About Time Management or 11 Secrets Successful People Know About Goal Setting or Great Leaders Have No Rules.
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Some of my favorite HEALTH related things: Nutribullet Blender (use it 2x a day!), Vega Sport Protein Powder, No Cow Protein Bars, Neuriva Brain Health, G Hughes sauces, and a chiller bowl to put fruit and vegetables on the counter all day to snack.