Introduction to Innate Health
All human beings, indeed, all animate beings, want to be well. As humans, we want to feel content and have a sense of purpose; we want to live and act in the world creatively and with a sense of freedom; we want to love and be loved.
But so often we seem not to be well. So many of us seem trapped in physical, psychological or spiritual conditions which are painful and distressing and from which there seems to be little hope of escape or release. The approach of Innate Health offers a way to understand how it is that we choose and create our experience, regardless of circumstance. Instead of focusing on what is wrong, we turn instead to the moments when things feel right. In those quieter and calmer moments of 'rightness', we will find our wisdom and our clarity.
The core of this approach is the three principles of human experience, discovered by Sydney Banks in 1973. These three principles -- Mind, Consciousness and Thought -- give the means to understand, simply and directly, how we function as human beings, how it is that we in fact have the power to choose healthy experience instead of being victimized by circumstance.
As Elsie Spittle says in her small and valuable book “Wisdom for Life,”
The principle of Mind is a universal creative energy. Consciousness is the ability to be aware of this power and to understand how experience is created. Thought is the capacity to draw on this energy in order to create our experience of reality. We can use this power to create a vast spectrum of experiences, from joy to depression, from contentment to discontent, and from faith to fear. The choice is ours and does not depend on external circumstances.
The following brief outline of this approach to wellbeing is by no means exhaustive. We present it here only to give a taste of what is involved. If fully made our own, the revolutionary power of the three principles used actively in our lives can change everything.
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Listening
If we listen for insights instead of ideas, we will be able to slow down and listen so that we understand internally. If we listen for insights, then we can perceive and experience things in a new way. This is global listening, with the whole of ourselves, what some people call deep listening. It is a kind of listening that includes with it understanding in the core of ourselves, which leads to insight and real change. Innate Health must be heard in this way, slowly and deeply, not intellectually.
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Wellbeing
Wellbeing is an innate potential towards which we can grow if we understand how we generate our own perceptions and experience. Wellbeing is our natural condition that connects us to calmness, clarity and creativity. When we are more connected to our well-being, to our innate health and wisdom, we are more patient, more insightful, more aware of other people's reality, more compassionate, and more resilient and genuinely responsive to circumstances. We have less need to impose ourselves on others.
When we are less connected to our well-being, we are less patient, more anxious, less aware of other people's condition, less compassionate, and more rigid and reactive. We have a greater need to be 'right'.
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The Role of Thought
It is a part of being human that we constantly think. But we can choose which thoughts we 'entertain', which thoughts we give energy to, and which ones we simply let pass. In so doing, we choose our perceptions and our experience because thought given life and energy becomes perception and experience. This understanding of thought is one of the key insights in the Innate Health approach. If we understand deeply that we create our experience, regardless of the situation, by which thoughts we choose to give energy to, our whole understanding of human possibilities radically shifts.
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Experience and Circumstance
Circumstance is what it is. But we can choose our experience. We do this all the time anyway, but if we do it with awareness, then our experience will more and more be connected to our innate health and wellbeing. We will have greater clarity and sense of ease, and be more in touch with a creative common sense.
The simple awareness that this is possible, that human beings can and do create their experience, sets in motion a process that sooner or later will direct us to a more and more persistent sense of wellbeing less and less affected by circumstances.
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More on Thought
Personal, insecure thought, consists of habitual and culturally defined thought. Usually, this is the basis for our reactive and defensive perceptions and experience, something close to 'ego'. Personal thought can have wisdom in it, but it is still habitual even if wise.
There is 'impersonal', creative thought. This occurs when we are more calm and open, when we are not feeling defensive and therefore more closed. When we give life to these thoughts, we are more in touch with our health and wisdom. Then we can respond to circumstances more in terms of our insights and common sense rather than in terms of habitual ideas and reactions.
Thought generates feelings; circumstance is not the source of feelings. The quality of our feelings is a barometer of the quality of our thoughts. Moods are perhaps accumulated thoughts that generate a feeling glob. When we are in a low mood, we can learn to handle ourselves gracefully and not expect too much. We can know that a low mood will pass. When we are in a higher mood, we can respond with gratitude, and assume that we will come up with better solutions and ideas.
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Choosing our Experience
When we give consciousness (life, energy, will) to thought, we create our perceptions and our experience. We can choose which thoughts to give life to and which thoughts not to give life to. It is a major insight to grasp deeply that we create our experience all the time and that we have a choice as to the perceptions and experience we create.
We mistakenly assume that experience is created from the outside, by the nature of circumstances. In fact, experience is created from within by the power of consciousness applied to thought. We can be aware of this or not, but the fact is the same: consciousness applied to thought creates our perceptions, our feelings, and our experience.
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Principles in General
We need principles in order to be able to function better in all circumstances. Gravity functions whether we know it or not, but if we know about the principle of gravity, we will be better able to use it creatively and positively. Human psychology has not understood basic principles and therefore we have created many, many systems of psychology and psychotherapy. Using principles, we can basically educate everyone, no matter what their condition in life, about how they function as human beings. Knowing this, people can lead lives more directed by and toward their health and wisdom.
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The Three Principles of Human Psychology
a. Mind.
'Mind' is sometimes referred to as 'Divine Mind' or 'Universal Mind'. It is the spiritual element in this approach. It is basically a realm or field of infinite creative potential and, in itself, has no form, though it is the realm from which all form is generated.
Mind, in this approach, first begins to formalize through the other two principles, Thought and Consciousness. Mind is the source of all thought and of all consciousness, though for us these are two separate principles on their own.
(Note: Though some people might refer to Mind as 'G-d', we do not. According to our understanding, G-d cannot be limited by any description, no matter how universal and generalized that description might be. In a certain sense, even to describe G-d as infinite is a limitation.)
b. Thought.
Thought in human beings is constant, a particulate stream of possibilities of which we are more or less aware in any given moment. By itself a thought, though it does have a certain abstract form, has no substance. It is, as some people put it, smoke. A thought without attention or energy attached to it simply vanishes back into Mind as an unexpressed, unrealized possibility. Thoughts are only as real as we choose to make them. Thoughts are internal and have no necessary correlation or even connection to circumstances.
c. Consciousness.
Consciousness is the principle that most expresses our humanity. It is in this realm that choice -- free will -- is most dynamic and effective. Consciousness, in this approach, is the principle through which our will, our life force, that which impels us and drives us, expresses itself. When we apply consciousness to thoughts, we create our perceptions and our experience. We can be aware of this process or not, but this is how we generate what we call reality in each moment. The implications of this process are profound.
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Time: Past Present and Future
When dealing with what we often call 'issues', whether personally or in a therapeutic context, the usual approach is to explore the past in order to find out the cause or causes of the problem. However, in this approach, the past is as real a part of the present as we choose to make it. The past happened. But now, in the present, it is a thought. Therefore, we can give that thought as much energy as we choose. There is nothing to 'fix', only thoughts that need to be let go of.
The same is true of the future. The future is as real in the present as we choose to make it. The future, for the time being, is thought. We can create the future as a reality in the present whether through hopefulness or anxiety, whether through dread or decisiveness. But the future is still just thought.
This does not mean that the past did not happen, or that the future will not be. It means that our life is a dynamic instant in the present, enveloped in thoughts. The consciousness - the will, the life, the energy - that we choose to give to those thoughts, whether aware or not, is what defines our reality in the present. Through the principle of Consciousness we create our experience of the present.
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Relationships
Relationships form the fabric of our lives. As we come to understand that our experience is not coming from outside, but is generated from within, we will become more able to effectively relate to other people. We will react less, and respond more. We will have less need for people to be 'like us' because we will see them in their innocence instead of as a source of irritation or confusion. We will know that our feelings are generated by our thoughts and the energy we choose to give those thoughts, not by the things other people do or say. As we more and more live with this knowledge active and dynamic within us, our relationships will come to more and more express the openness, creativity and spontaneity that we are alive within us.
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Links
Sydney Banks
For the
Health Realization Institute
The Northeast Health Realization Institute: Jack Pransky.
Pransky and Associates in La Conner, Washington.
Elsie Spittle
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