Paradigm shift – One thought away from happiness

How it all started

January 27th 2017, I was invited to a seminar by one of my coach’s friend; he had invited his guru all the way from the U.S to speak about something called ‘The Three Principles’. His name was Dr Keith Blevens and he is the founder of an institution called Single Paradigm. The talk had just begun but already something wasn’t right, the speaker spoke painfully slow and his speech was almost inarticulate. Very quickly I was bored to the point of wanting to leave the room, I’d never felt like this at a seminar, yet something deep inside of me told me to stay, I might learn something that I didn’t yet know.

The seminar was three days long and after the first day I had no feelings about it. It wasn’t until the second day that something out of the ordinary happened, I felt unusually calm, and my mind was quiet and totally present in the moment. That was interesting for me to notice as I couldn’t even understand what the speaker was talking about! He was talking about some sort of three principles that are the fundamental of all our psychological experiences in life; at that point I had no idea what it meant.

The third day had arrived and I felt the same feeling of peace as in the second day. After that day I decided to read more about these three principles and try to understand them since there was something (although I couldn’t put my finger on it) in there that had caught my attention. I was intrigued by this sense of quietness in my head that I was diving in for few days after the seminar had ended. Normally, I could normally get into a quiet space after meditating for 30 min or more but here was something different that I couldn’t articulate at that time. It wasn’t until a few weeks had passed, after doing endless research about these principles that I could really understand what was going on. I’m going to share some of what I discovered with you in the following lines.

After that seminar, my paradigm had shifted from believing in the well established Freudian perspective and re-training your brain techniques to an opposite direction that requires you to do nothing about your state of mind in order to change it. It was so confusing at the beginning for me to grasp these three principles as I was trying to understand them with my intellect (as I always did) and from what I knew already. But here it was different story; it was something that can only be understood by having insights (a sight within), cannot be explained by words because of their spiritual natures and cannot be put into form. So the only way that makes these three principles conceivable is to explain them by using metaphors and listening from a blank slate space.

My life has changed dramatically ever since I had insights into what these principles point at.  I had started noticing that the more I deepened my understanding of these three principles, the more my consciousness is raised, my head became quieter, my relationships with my family, friends and with people in general started getting richer and deeper, I start having more opportunities than ever before and everything I do is in tune with who I really am.

What are the three principles?

At this stage you might be wondering what these three principles are; here is how I define them:

1. The principle of mind:

Mind is the intelligence behind our intelligence, we’re all plugged into that and without it life wouldn’t even exist. It runs through everything.  It’s like a socket that gives energy to everything in life. It’s like the battery of a laptop, without it the laptop won’t work. We cannot be separate from it. It’s not the brain; the brain is biological but the mind is spiritual

2. The principle of thought:

Thought is what guide as through life, without it we won’t even have an experience of life. It’s like the brush that paints our experiences in life. I’m not talking about the ego thought yet I’m talking about the universal thought, the power of thought.  We literally cannot have a notion of who we are without a thought being included. We create our understanding of ourselves via thought. It’s a bit tricky to grasp this one as we are using our thoughts all the time.  As David Bohm said ‘thought creates the world and then says “I didn’t do it”. We are so immersed into it that we don’t see it. The best example I could give about thought is to think about the last time you had an amazing orgasm, your thought would take you there even if you’re not actually having an orgasm.

3. The principle of consciousness:

Consciousness is what brings our thoughts to life and makes us aware of them. Without it we won’t be able to feel our thinking. We literally live in the feeling of our thinking moment-by-moment. Remember the example I gave about orgasm to illustrate the power of thought, the feeling in your body is the interplay between thought and consciousness. In order to feel anything we have to be conscious. To give you an example about that I would love you to imagine a type of tea that you hate, if you put the tea bag inside the cup will you hate it still? I doubt that. It is until you pour water inside the cup that you start hating the tea. Well water is like our consciousness and tea is like our thought. Water brings life to the tea so we can experience it. It’s the same with our consciousness. It brings our thought to life. It like when you’re watching a movie in the cinema. The movie is projected into the screen, the same with our thought they are projected into the screen of our consciousness and experiencing them as a reality.

How the three principles can change your life forever?

The three principles are not a technique or something that you have to be good at to master but it’s something that is already within you that existed before the world of form and before time, space and matter. They are inherently impersonal and they work the same for everyone regardless of age, race, religion, gender…etc. They are creating your experience moment-to-moment. The more you deepen your understanding of how life works (you are living in the feeling of your thinking moment-by-moment) the more you see the implications of the three principles. The implications are; more peace of mind, clarity, better performance, you might start noticing that you have more time since you spend less time thinking your thought and living the present moment ( the reality you are built for), more productive, better decision making, deeper relationships with the ones that matter to you, confidence, leadership, natural sense of happiness…etc.

The way how our mind works:

In this part I would love you to put aside everything you already know about how the mind works and just listen and read for insights and not for more information to add to your brain.

We live in the feeling of our thinking second by second, which means that 100% of our feelings come from our thought in the moment and 0 % of our feelings come from somewhere other than thought in the moment. Our thoughts are so misleading that they convince us of the illusion that we are feeling the stuff outside of us but in reality we are feeling only our thoughts. One of my coaches called Jamie Smart once said ‘thought is the best special effects department there is. You’re living in the experience of your thinking before you know thought has anything to do with it’.

In order to understand more what I’m talking about I would love you to think about three things that happened in your life (good or bad) that you’re sure that your feelings of happiness or suffering came from them and then write them in both sides of the diagram below.

Now just read what is written in the blue boxes and look and the three things you’ve written. Everything after the red line is the illusion made by our thought and it can never work that way. Let’s say you’ve written ‘death of a loved one’ in both sides of the diagram. Now if you think that you’re feeling this circumstance this means that you will never feel fine until that person is brought to life again which is impossible. It only works one way. You’re feeling your thinking in the moment. When you have sad thinking you feel sad and when you have anxious thinking you feel anxious. It doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you yet it means that you have a thought in your mind and that’s it. The moment you realise that you’re only feeling your thought and not the stuff you are thinking about, you come back to reality again and you drop off the la-la land. This most of the time causes our ego to collapse and to see things as they really are not through our personal thoughts. It’s like when someone wakes you up from a nightmare. Once you’re awake you feel grateful that it wasn’t true and it doesn’t affect the rest of your day because you know the nature of dreams. The same with our thoughts, once you understand the nature of our thoughts that they come and go but they don’t stay there, that we live in a thought-generated reality, you find yourself calmer with a richer experience of life, and you know that your happiness can’t be found in the outside-in world but it’s always there within you. The only thing that comes in the way is our unrecognized thoughts.

The only thing you need to do when you feel bad

The only thing to be done when you feel bad is to do nothing. You might be wondering if I’m crazy, that we should do something about it, and that we need to find a technique or a trick to change our state of mind. Well, here is the good news; it turns out that we have an immune system for our mind like for our bodies that corrects us whenever we sidetrack and think negative. Your feelings are a good feedback mechanism to tell you about the kind of thoughts you’re having. The moment you realise that you’re feeling only your thinking and not your bills or your circumstances, that’s a sign of your wisdom telling you that the system is self-correcting itself. All the other techniques in self-development books and seminars that tell you how to feel good are just giving you more stuff to think about and that enforces the misunderstanding of how the mind really works. It’s like drinking salty water to quiche the thirst; in fact, it just makes you thirstier. Doing something about it is the same as trying to externally correct a self-correcting system which is seen as obsolete. The three principles are seen as a subtractive psychology as it takes a lot of non-useful thinking out of your mind. Our default mode is happiness, clarity, well-being, pure love, connection…Etc. When we wake up to the illusion of our thoughts taking form in the moment this is a good sign that our system is self-correcting itself and is coming back to its default mode. The only thing to do is to relax and let it do its job.

To sum up, whenever you feel any sort of bad feeling, no matter how hard it might seem, remember that you’re only one thought away from a totally different experience.

Big love,

Omar Ben