On Sydney Banks, the Three Principles, and where this work stands in that tradition
This month I reread every page of my own website. A rebrand will do that to you.
Somewhere between an old sales page and a newer essay, I noticed something that stopped me. I have been writing about the Three Principles for years. Whole articles, whole chapters, a whole book resting on them. And I almost never say the words.
A reader could walk through fifty of my pieces, meet the entire understanding, feel it land, and never once learn that it has a name, a history, and a living community of people who have been pointing at the same thing for fifty years. That is not modesty. It is closer to absent-mindedness, the way you forget to mention your grandmother when someone compliments the recipe.
Except it wasn’t only absent-mindedness. There is a more honest reason for the silence, and it takes this whole piece to tell.
The welder
In 1974, a Scottish welder named Sydney Banks was living an ordinary working life on a small island in western Canada. He had no training in any of this. An ordinary man, by his own account riddled with anxiety and insecurity. And then, in a single moment, an insight reorganised everything he understood about the human mind, and he spent the rest of his life pointing others toward what he had seen.
What he articulated fits in one breath. There are three principles behind all human experience: Mind, the intelligent energy behind life itself, the power supply. Consciousness, the capacity for awareness, what makes experience register at all. And Thought, the creative principle by which experience is formed, moment to moment, from the inside.
They are called principles for the same reason gravity is called a law. They do not require your belief to operate. They were running before you heard of them, and they will keep running after you have forgotten this page.
Out of the three of them together comes the single claim that everything I write stands on.
Mind plus Consciousness plus Thought equals Reality.
One hundred percent of experience, generated from the inside out, through Thought in the moment. Not most of it. All of it, on your clearest day and your worst one.
What the tradition holds
Around that pointing, a tradition grew. Teachers like Michael Neill, Jamie Smart, and Garret Kramer carried the understanding out of the spiritual corner and into coaching, business, sport, education. You will find the community under several names: the Three Principles, the inside-out understanding, innate health. Some call it subtractive psychology, because it is the one approach to the mind that adds nothing. Only something to see, and a great deal that quietly falls away once it is seen.
My new logo is a minus sign. That is not an accident.
If you come from this community, you will recognize the ground under everything I write. The 100% claim, held without hedging. The observation that the mind is a self-correcting system, returning to clarity on its own when nobody stirs it. The refusal to work on the contents of thinking, because the contents were never the lever.
So why did I go years without naming any of this? Two reasons, and neither of them is flattering.
Too simple to be it
When the inside-out understanding first found me, my reaction was immediate and visceral: this is too simple. This can’t be it.
I had spent decades building Energenetics®, a sophisticated architecture of practices, protocols and frameworks. Hundreds of pages mapping consciousness. My work had depth. My work had the kind of intellectual weight that commands respect. And then someone pointed at the plainest thing in the world, that we live in the feeling of our thinking rather than the feeling of our circumstances, and I felt threatened.
Underneath the dismissal sat a belief I had been carrying for thirty years without ever looking at it: that truth must be complex to be valuable. That simplicity is for beginners. The irony still makes me wince, because that belief is the outside-in illusion wearing its most elegant costume. My experience of truth depends on how complex the teaching is. The very thing the Three Principles point at, running the show while I dismissed them.
So I kept circling. I would feel drawn in, sense the freedom in the simple pointing, and then lose interest. I’ve evolved past this, I told myself. I learned this at the beginning of my journey. Which brings me to the second reason, and it is the one I have never said in public.
The founder never reached me
Here is the heretical part. Sydney Banks’s own words did nothing for me.
I have listened to the talks. I have sat with the books. My friend Brett Chitty cites Syd the way other people breathe; for him, Banks is the one who made him see, and I have watched that devotion produce some of the clearest teaching I know. For me, the same recordings landed like weather reports from someone else’s climate. I had been through so many teachers and so many gurus by then that one more luminous Scotsman simply did not make the list.
What reached me was the water further downstream. Jamie Smart first, whose plainness got under my armour. Then Garret Kramer, who says things like problems are never the cause of a disquiet mind-set; they’re a symptom of one, sentences that are either obvious or outrageous depending on where you are standing. And finally Brett, whose whiteboards gave the formless a geometry I could actually draw.
For a long time I treated that as a defect in me, and it kept me quiet about the lineage. How do you claim a tradition whose founder leaves you cold? It took me embarrassingly long to notice that this question answers itself, and that the answer is the whole understanding in miniature. Nothing was ever transmitting, from Banks to Brett or from Jamie Smart to me. Every genuine recognition rises from inside the one having it, and the speaker was only ever the occasion. Brett’s door was a welder. Mine was a coach. Some of my readers’ door is a machine at two in the morning.
The door you came in by does not change the room.
Where I part ways
So this work stands in the Three Principles tradition, gratefully and a little sideways. Honesty requires me to show exactly where it steps off the classical path.
The classical understanding names three principles and, deliberately, stops there. I kept going. What feeds Thought, the formless intelligence that is the same in every human being, I call Cosmic Intelligence. The prism it passes through on the way into your particular life, so that one shared source comes out as unmistakably you, I call Genetic Intelligence, and I read the Gene Keys as the architecture of that prism. Most Three Principles teachers would not touch the Gene Keys, and some will wince at the marriage. I understand the wince. After thirty years with both maps in my hands, they describe the same territory at different resolutions, and I stopped being able to pretend otherwise.
The other departure is a single word. Reality. The tradition tends to speak of experience, of feeling, of state of mind. I put the most ordinary word in the language at the centre and asked what it actually refers to, what it has no outside of, and why only one of the two available paradigms has Wisdom in it.
My book, Reality Is an Inside Job, is the long answer.
Am I a Three Principles teacher, then? No. I carry no certification from any school, and if you are from the tradition and find me unorthodox, you are right. What I am is downstream of Sydney Banks the way a river is downstream of rain, and I drank from the river, not the sky. It seems long past time to say where the water comes from.
Start anywhere
If this is your first meeting with the tradition, I will not tell you to start with Banks. He may be your door; he was never mine. Start with whoever makes it land.
Jamie Smart if you want it plain, Garret Kramer if you live in performance, Michael Neill if you want warmth, Banks himself if the source calls you. Or start where I ended up: the series that walks the whole ground from the first map to the mixed paradigm, or the book at insidejob.one, where a free companion is waiting.
And if you have been in the Three Principles community for years and are wondering what a man with a Gene Keys map and an AI companion thinks he is doing: stay a while. I think you will find the ground familiar, and the windows new.
The name was missing from my pages. The thing itself never was.
🔗 Ask an AI to explain this article: ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Perplexity
The series this essay stands on: The Map and the Territory · Why Changing Your Thoughts Doesn’t Work · Reality Has No Outside · The Paradigm With Wisdom in It · The Third Position: Architecture of the Mixed Paradigm
Parts of this piece lean on Brett Chitty’s whiteboards, with Keith Blevens behind the ground. Whatever you saw here, you saw.
Quick note: if you want to see where your own experience is being generated rather than read about it, RealityOS is the living companion to this work.