Things seem to be moving too fast for us to truly savor life in a peaceful, satisfying manner. So we suffer from the shallows. In a recent podcast, one of our finest living mystics described this conundrum:
“Day by day, life in today’s world is complicated and demanding. It’s not easy to keep up with everything that it’s asking from all of us. And sometimes you can have the feeling that you’re being dragged along, like skimming over the depth of your own life. And you also can get the feeling that you’re suffering from depth deprivation. You can also get the feeling you don’t give yourself the chance to feel the deprivation, because the cell phone went off.” James Finlay
The wonderful mystic, Sydney Banks (1931-2009), shared his discoveries primarily with mental-health professionals, educators & social workers, because he understood how pivotal his message was for all human beings, regardless of any beliefs.
Below, a brief excerpt from two of Banks' students' book introducing Banks' powerful teaching:
“Sydney Banks: A Breakthrough in Understanding Human Beings
Syd was born in Scotland, had a ninth-grade education, and was working as a welder in a pulp mill on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Syd thought of himself as being insecure. He lived with the weight of his insecurity, which led him to be quite serious.
Most of us are familiar with the experience of insecurity. Insecurity is a feeling of uncertainty, doubt, and discomfort. It can be a subtle sense of tension in our bodies: tension in our face, neck, shoulders, or stomach.
We can also experience insecurity as a feeling of stress or upset. It can take many forms such as fear, anger, or unhappiness. Often, if we stop and sense within, we can notice this tension somewhere. It can become such a constant companion that we eventually acclimate to it and no longer pay much attention to it until it becomes very strong in our experience.
Can you imagine what it would be like to have one insight that would relieve you from the burden of your insecurity?
Sydney Banks’ First Major Insight: It’s All Thought!
In 1973, when Syd was 42 years old, he went to a marriage enrichment workshop. There he met a psychologist who was also attending the workshop. During a break in the workshop, they had a conversation. Syd mentioned how hard this workshop was for him because he felt very insecure. To that the man replied: ‘Syd, you are not insecure, you just think you are.’ In that moment Syd had his first powerful realization or insight.
My whole world just exploded in front of me.
It was so simple that it just broke me through into
separate realities and it was so devastatingly beautiful that
all my problems dropped away.
They all started flashing past me
as just fantasies because I started to realize that
insecurity was thought …
All of a sudden to find out that it’s all thought, just thought
manifesting into a feeling. That realization was so beautiful
that I never slept for three days and three nights.
“The Best of Two Worlds”
In a flash of insight, Syd realized that every bit of his feeling was created from thought. He said he felt like a bomb went off in his head and a lifetime of insecurity lifted from his shoulders. What he realized was that all of his insecurity and unhappiness was just a temporary thought creation.
After this insight, Syd looked around him and saw people everywhere thinking up unhappiness, and innocently not realizing that it was being created from their own thinking! He realized that feelings were not caused by the past, or by circumstances, by other people, or by anything other than thought. He realized that feelings are always and only generated from the power of Thought. And he realized that feelings are created from within, not caused from outside of us.
Syd’s experience and insight has relevance to every one of us. In a sense his story is the story of every human being. We all live in our own personal reality that, moment-to-moment, is being created from the power of Thought, and we don’t realize it most of the time, if at all.
But like Syd, every one of us has the ability to wake up to the fact that our insecurity is just a temporary Thought-created experience, an illusion.
Insecurity comes and goes as our personal thinking comes and goes. In this sense, our insecurity is just an illusion. It has no enduring substance. It is not a part of us. It is not who we are but is only a temporary construct. Syd saw that all thought content is an ‘illusion’ in the sense that it is not a permanent truth, but only a transitory interpretation.
Syd knew that every one of us is able to realize, or wake up to, the creative power of Thought, be free of its limitations, and return to our well-being.
Sydney Banks’ Enlightenment Experience: It’s All One!
Not long after his first insight, Syd had a profound epiphany - a rare and spontaneous enlightenment experience.
Syd was talking to his wife and his mother-in-law when he felt like he lost all sense of self, of them, of the room, and found himself shrouded in white light. In those few seconds he experienced entering and going through this shimmering light.
From this experience he realized that all of his life is pure formless energy manifesting into all that has form. He also realized that all existence is ‘the same energy whether in form or formless.’ He realized the great oneness of life. After a few seconds he came back into awareness of his surroundings and was filled with intense feelings of love and understanding stronger than he had ever felt before. The depth of his experience is a very rare occurrence in the history of mankind. He turned around to his wife and his mother-in-law and said: ‘I am fee! I’ve come home!’
Syd was an ordinary man. He had a life changing insight followed by a profound epiphany that not only radically changed his understanding of life, but are relevant for, & give hope to, every single human being.
His realizations are about the essential nature of human beings and how every moment of our psychological experience is created. Syd knew that people could realize this for themselves. He recognized that every insight anyone has about these fundamental forces, or Principles as he liked to call them, would raise their overall level of well-being.
We (authors: Dicken Bettinger & Natasha Swerdloff) have experienced the truth of this, both in our own lives and in the lives of countless thousands of people to whom we have presented these fundamental Principles.”
Dicken Bettinger, Natasha Swerdloff “Coming Home: Uncovering the Foundations of Psychological Well-being” Independently published, 2016.
Below, the transcript of a wonderfully deep, subtle & meaningful interview with Linda & George Pransky, who were students & close collaborators of the mystic Syd Banks, since 1976:
“People change through realization. You don’t change through willpower. You realize something, and when you realize something, your beliefs change, your understanding about life changes in such a way that you change. Realization comes with a feeling of your spirits going up and your experience of, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s true!’ It’s this kind of explosion.
A good example is people who smoke. They’ll say, ‘Oh, I know I need to stop smoking.’ And then, all of a sudden they’ll go, ‘Oh my God, I really do need to stop smoking!’ And then they stop smoking once they have that realization of ‘I really do need to stop.’ At first, it’s just an intellectual thing. And then it’s organic, your whole being understands the meaning of something - it’s a thing of the heart.
My first realization was around moods, because I really struggled with moods. And then I realized they weren’t a big deal, but I had made them a big deal. And the realization that they weren’t a big deal, that they were normal, everybody had moods, that I didn’t have to be afraid of them, my whole experience of moods changed, such that I knew I had them, but in my experience they were now in the background rather than foreground. The realization was a game changer in terms of moods. Before the realization, I would try to run from my experience of a mood. I’d feel my mood dropping, and I’d try to literally run from it. But then I realized it was no big deal if your mood dropped, it was just a temporary psychological experience.
Realization is something everyone’s wired for, but it’s not on our time frame. You can’t will it to happen, it just happens spontaneously, and usually when you least expect it. It’s something deeper than willpower or efforting. Getting all caught up in your intellect trying to fix yourself or change yourself just gets you into a big snarl. Change doesn’t happen from the intellect it happens from a deeper aspect of your mind.
Interviewer Mark McCartney: How can we not interfere too much with the very natural process of realization?
Enjoying life, gratitude for what we have instead of focusing on what we don’t have, is the platform for insight. But people think that if they really dig into their problems and really think about them, and get really serious & intense about them, then I’m going to get an answer. You would think that would be the way, and people do think that’s the way.
But it’s the opposite, which is confounding to people’s minds. In a way, the more you free your mind, the more space & freedom in your mind, the better it does, creates a platform for insight, the better off you are.
Yet when people want an answer, where they feel like something’s wrong, or they feel like they need to fix something they attack it with their desire, their want, their need, their intellect, their insecurity, and it just doesn’t work that way. It works the opposite.
To have such opposition or will for something in us to be different, is a difficult way to cultivate ease or gratitude, when we’re so focused on having to change something, and soon as well. This desire & attachment to the change, being down about the fact that you haven’t changed, all get in the way of change.
Accepting how you are, and forgetting about yourself, allows you to change. It’s the opposite of what people think.
I think people can have an understanding of life that fills the void that they feel. Because when you have a question, you feel a void. I’ve always had a lot of faith – not religious faith, just faith in life. And the other thing I have going for me is that I’m comfortable in the unknown, in not knowing. So that really helps me because I’m not in a hurry to find answers. I can get reflective, and when I get reflective, the answers come to mind. That’s what really helped me to have a nice life. Faith allows answers to come to mind in their own sweet time. Faith is trust that the answer will emerge. It’s an absolute game changer because it allows you to be patient, because faith is really another form of patience.
So when you feel you’re up against it in life, if you understand that the only thing that’s wrong is you’ve lost your faith, all you’ve got to do is regain your faith.
You could use the word trust interchangeably – trust in life – that life will help you, that you’ll get the help you need, the answers you need, whatever you need, that it will come to you.
"The most important question a human being needs to answer according to Einstein: 'Is the universe a friendly place or not?' ... If we believe that the universe is unfriendly ... peace will be elusive at best." Joan Borysenko PhD
It’s not an intellectual thing, it’s deeper – I feel it in my bones, in my heart – I feel this. It’s an example of a realization, because you realize the function or the place of faith. And then the realization allows you to make it real for yourself. Because there are plenty of people who say they have faith, but it’s not a realization, it’s a belief. So, it doesn’t give them the comfort or the security that they’re looking for.
Trust in the sense that life is emerging makes it much less of an intellectual engagement. Our intellect is always struggling for answers. That’s not where answers occur. The intellect is nothing but questions, but there are no answers there. Answers come from an understanding of life. That’s what helps human beings – when you get a deeper understanding of life. That does something for people.
Interviewer: This seems so counterintuitive to how life seems to be picking up pace it seems, even in the sense of information and transfer of information, and people’s sense of relationship, I think even with time, but this sense once again that – I’m sure people who are listening have the experience of trying to find answers to life through their intellect which often just seems to create more questions or perhaps even more discomfort even.
So the experience would be where you slow the intellect down, because the intellect can get a lot of momentum. And so you start to slow the intellect down and then time and your life slow down, and you feel better, more connected to the moment, to your life, whatever your life is in the moment. You feel connected and drawn into life, rather than drawn into the intellect. Being drawn into life - that’s where satisfaction is. There’s not a lot of satisfaction for most people in their intellect. For some people who love to think, there is. But in a lot of what we think about, there’s no satisfaction.
When you think about it, life is a feeling. There’s a ‘feelingfulness’ to life, to living, to being alive. You might say, an ‘awakeness’ to the moment. As you kind of fall out of the intellect, you just get locked into the feeling of life. And the feeling of life is lovely and it’s ordinary. It’s the ordinariness of just having a meal, or talking to your partner, or having a cat, or taking a walk, or working. Or getting into what you do in the moment when you’re talking to people, and there’s just a nice feeling to it.
Interviewer: With that sense of feeling of life, how does that mix in then with your realization about your mood – that you don’t have to resist your mood, because it’s a normal part of life? Because some people think that in order to be drawn into life, there needs to be an absence of discomfort in a very psychological or mood sense. I really love ‘being drawn into life,’ and ‘feeling life,’ I think that also offers a potential for feeling whatever life is.
People react to their experiences that they don’t like. I reacted to my experience of mood which I didn’t like, so I would react to it, and my reaction was kind of blown out of proportion, was dramatized, so I would have a big, unpleasant reaction, and that was my life for however long that reaction lasted. Now I would not call that as being drawn into life, I would call that reacting to my experience that I didn’t like. So when people start to understand that they’re going to react to some experiences in life, it’s normal to have experiences that you react to, and everybody’s different. Your experience that you would react to, for example seeing a spider you might get all freaked out; I might see the same spider and think, ‘Oh, how cute.’ So people’s reactions to the same thing can be different. It’s our reactions to our experience that take us out of that feelingfulness with life. That’s okay, it’s human. In my experience, the best thing that I can do is just get over my reactions as fast as I can, not hold onto them.
What I struggle with is being harsh and impatient. In my 30s I realized that about myself. If I was patient, that feeling would go away, and I’d be in a whole different feeling. So when I would react to my harshness, if I just got patient with that experience, it would go away. My reaction to not liking my experience was the only problem, was the only thing that was happening. It was so simple.
Instead of using the word 'patient,' when I get into an experience that I don’t like, I 'get quiet with it' – 'be with the experience quietly.'
Life is always going to be a full-contact sport. So everybody is on their own about that. So in order to have a peaceful life, you have to have a lot of faith and you have to roll with the punches.
Interviewer: My initial response always to getting angry was to get angry at myself for being angry. And good luck with ever escaping that I guess. For you George, how did you begin to cultivate this quiet?
Well I had a realization about reactions. I realized that all I was doing was reacting to life. Instead of living life, I was reacting to life – to the fact of living. And that was a huge change for me.
I always thought Linda was a very moody person. Then all of a sudden, she changed and took responsibility for her moods, and that solved everything.
It’s very, very simple, and yet it’s an endless conversation with yourself in that to the extent that you react to your experience, you get caught in it. And what happened simply is I stopped reacting to my moods. And then I no longer looked like a moody person, nor did I have the experience of being a moody person only because I stopped reacting to my moods.
What she did instead of reacting to her moods, she got quiet and just had them. She went through the experience with them quietly. She wasn’t kicking & screaming with them.
I work with a lot of people who have anxiety. They get the experience of anxiety and they just get all completely caught up in it because they think it’s wrong, it’s meaningful, and there’s something wrong with them, and they don’t like it, and they’re embarrassed, they don’t want to have it. They have so much thinking about their experience of anxiety that it just mushrooms. And they become more anxious, and they identify with it, and then they become afraid of it, and they hear the footsteps of it, and it becomes a lifestyle of anxiety. It’s a lifestyle of anxiety when it could be just a passing experience. That’s the choice: is it going to be a passing experience - OR - is it going to become a lifestyle?
That’s what human beings are up against. Where are they going to go? My moods were a lifestyle until they became a passing experience.
Interviewer: How do you invite people into anxiety not becoming a lifestyle?
Some of the questions I ask them is, 'Why does it matter if you have an experience of anxiety? Why is it such a big deal? What’s wrong with having an experience of anxiety?' That question cuts to the heart of the issue.
Then I tell them that the problem isn’t the actual experience of anxiety, the problem is all the extraneous thinking they have around it and the meaning they make of it, and how much fear they have around it.
So there’s this little experience of anxiety that they don’t like, or maybe it’s even a big experience in the moment, but then it’s all wrapped in these layers & layers of extraneous thinking. And that’s the problem – the layers & layers of thinking & meaning they put on it. What does it say about me? What if somebody sees me anxious? All this is just layers of thought they put around the experience of anxiety. So I just pull it all apart with them.
Interviewer: The problem with a lot of our discomfort is having a problem with the initial discomfort. [[[It's well-known that people with anxiety are anxious about their anxiety; people with depression are depressed about their depression etc]]] How would you suggest people reconnect with their sense of faith, what would that look like?
People have to realize that they are a lot more powerful than they think, and that they live in mental health – the basis of who they are is mental well-being or mental health. And the only thing that gives them the illusion of being broken is broken thinking. People can get a lot of broken, very negative thinking and they loose their well-being.
But once they get rid of their broken thinking, clear their minds, they naturally reconnect with their own mental health, their own natural resiliency and own personal power. And everybody has natural resiliency, innate mental health, and personal power. And what happens is their intellect tricks them, they get bad habits of thinking that they believe in, that makes them think & feel broken. And they have to clue into that, that they’re their own worst enemy in that regard. Some of their thinking can be their own worst enemy.
Interviewer: How do you find people engage with this almost acknowledgement that it’s my broken thinking right now?
Well the truth of it is, it’s not going to help anyone to blame their experience on the outside. It never helps, even if it looks true, it never helps. And it never helps to justify. What helps is to just see what you experience, what your thinking is doing to you. Understanding what your thinking, perspective, belief, the way you’re looking at it, is doing to you. And your understanding will naturally clear it.
There’s a lot of justification – Well I wouldn’t feel this way if … or I feel this way because … and it just holds your negative experience in place. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t matter. What matters is people want to feel better. Everybody wants to feel better. It’s nice to feel righteous indignation and yes, everybody agrees with you and it feels great, and you can relish that for a bit, but it’s not going to help you. You have to eventually take responsibility for your own experience and how to get out of it. It’s going to take a toll on you. It’s going to wear you out. So you just see how to find your way out of it, no matter who’s right.
And you really have to give up ‘right & wrong,’ stop looking at ‘right and wrong,’ because that just puts you in this ping pong game. Let’s table ‘right and wrong’ and just look & see how to make it all better.
Well, the thing about human beings is they know the difference between a good feeling and a bad feeling. Every human being knows the difference. A child knows the difference. If you can know the difference, you always can head towards a good feeling, a better feeling. It’s built into us to feel good, and we just have to go back to it.
Interviewer: Irrespective of what may be acceptable, I know how something made me feel and I know just in the feeling, if it doesn’t matter if people say, ‘Oh, you were right, you did the right thing’ or that was acceptable or not, I have a built-in sense within me that, ‘Oh, when I did that, that didn’t feel okay.’ If we’re living the felt experience or if we’re living our lives, not just reacting and we’re feeling the experience of our lives, to me it doesn’t matter what external people are saying, whether they’re validating me or disagreeing, I know what I felt.
What is a good life for you?
Just being alive, just living life is a good life. Living life and meeting it, and being resilient about it is a good life. Being reactive to things and then rising above it, coming out of it, knowing that you can come out of it, knowing that you can rise above your reactions and get into a nice feeling again and enjoy your life – that’s a good life.
Some people get caught in their reactions and they’ll stay there, and then they’ll come out and get caught in another reaction and stay there, and they just live from reaction to reaction. That’s no fun. Or they get caught in righteous indignation and they just won’t leave it. They’re just angry at life and don’t allow themselves to be resilient and pop out of it.
I think that a good life is when people can follow their own inclinations. I think people have the inclinations that will lead them to a good life - trusting themselves and listening to themselves and following their own inclinations. And you can see that in young children, six years old or younger. That’s what they do. They don’t even know it but they just do it. That’s their inclination.
I think ultimately, ultimately, we all want to be just ordinary. That’s the key. If you want to be special, you’re going to feel pressure. So to be ordinary, you don’t need to deal with any pressure. If you’re willing to be ordinary, then you’re not going to feel pressure in life, and life is going to be good to you.
But people don’t understand ‘ordinary,’ because they have ideas about what that looks like. You can be an ordinary cardiovascular surgeon. So it’s not like, I should be ordinary so I shouldn’t get a higher education. They have a lot of thinking about what that looks like. But it’s not that. It’s the feeling of just being yourself and just not trying to be more than what you are.
Interviewer: We often see these external metrics, where we compare our lot to somebody else’s, where often the trick at times in this life is realizing that your own unique imprint or fingerprint of whatever it is you are, or constellation that you are, has never been before. You are one of 110 billion people that apparently have existed on this planet. That’s pretty special even if you’re just your ordinary self."
How People Actually Change with George & Linda Pransky - What is a Good Life? #65 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKs-kmf-t7A (below)
