Mind, Consciousness and Thought in plain words, and five pictures that show how every experience is made
He made me so angry.
This job is draining me.
I’ll feel better once this is sorted.
Almost everyone talks like this, and almost everyone believes it. Something happens out there, and a feeling follows in here.
The Three Principles say it has never once worked that way.
Every experience you have ever had was made inside you, through Thought, in the moment you had it.
Not most of them. All of them. The anger, the tiredness, the relief you’re waiting for.
That is the whole claim. Everything on this page is about what follows from it.
If you have spent years managing your reactions and they keep coming back, nothing is wrong with you. You were working on the wrong end of it, and almost everyone you could have asked for help was working on the same end.
Where the Three Principles come from
In the 1970s a Scottish welder living in Canada, Sydney Banks, had an insight that changed his life, and he spent the rest of it trying to say what he had seen. What he said was that there are three principles behind all human experience.
Mind, the intelligence behind life itself. The power supply.
Consciousness, the capacity to be aware at all. What makes any experience register.
Thought, the creative principle by which every experience is formed, moment to moment, from the inside.
Together they describe how experience is made, in everyone, all the time. The people who carry this on today call it the Three Principles, the inside-out understanding, or Innate Health. You’ll also see it called inside-out psychology.
I’ll be honest about my own relationship to the name. I came to this the long way round, through more frameworks than I’d like to count, and for a long time I barely used the words “Three Principles” at all. I still mostly don’t. What I write about is the fact, not the tradition. I’ve written separately about where my work sits in that lineage, and where I part ways with it.
But the fact has a name. If you searched for it, this is the page.
What it is not
It isn’t a technique. There’s nothing to practice and no exercise at the end.
It isn’t positive thinking, and it isn’t CBT. Both work on the content of thinking: catch the unhelpful thought, put a better one in its place. The Three Principles point at the principle that turns any thought into experience in the first place. Swapping one thought for another leaves that untouched, which is why changing your thoughts never quite finishes the job.
And it doesn’t say the world isn’t there. Chairs, traffic and other people exist, in the dimension of matter. What the principles describe is how your experience of any of it is made. That experience has no outside. Nothing in it ever arrived from anywhere else.
It’s a description of how experience works, the way a round earth is a description of the earth. You don’t have to believe it. It’s either seen or it isn’t.
Five pictures from a whiteboard
My friend Brett Chitty teaches the Three Principles with a marker and a whiteboard. He draws the mechanism more plainly than anyone I know.
This summer I wrote five articles, each built on one of his pictures. Each one follows its picture a step further than the whiteboard goes. You can read them in order, or start with whichever title sounds like your week.
1. The Projector Doesn’t Care What’s on the Film
The clearest picture I have of how experience is made. A cinema: light at the back of the room, the film crossing in front of it, the projector, the screen where you live.
Most people who hear that thought creates experience go straight to work on their thoughts. But a personal thought is film. The Principle of Thought is the projector, and it plays whatever crosses it with the same total conviction. My own addition is the lens, your particular design, which is why no two people’s experience has ever been the same.
Start here if you’re new to this.
2. You’d Have to Know It Before You Thought It
Why nobody can control what they think, at any level of practice. To filter a thought you would have to know it before it arrived, and the knowing is itself made through Thought. There is no gatekeeper upstream. Noticing a thought always comes after it.
Read this if you’ve spent years trying to catch your thoughts early.
3. You Can’t Hand Someone an Insight
You sent the article that changed your life to someone you love, and nothing happened. Then years later a stranger’s paragraph moved the floor for you. Nothing transmits, from any teacher, book or machine. They are all occasions. Seeing that lets you stop recruiting people, and the conversations get better.
Read this if there’s someone you keep trying to help.
The confidence you build has to be maintained, because built things wear out. The tiredness afterwards is the tell. The other kind isn’t built at all. It comes through on its own once the manufacturing stops, and it comes through your own design, so it will never look like anyone else’s. The same holds for patience, love and resilience.
Read this if you’re tired of topping yourself up.
Late at night, going through your head for the one thought that will settle it. The settling was never a thought, so it was never in the pile. The searching is the churn. When it goes quiet, what you were looking for is what’s left.
Read this if you can’t stop looking for the right thought.
What all five are pointing at
Every experience is made inside, through Thought, in the moment.
None of it was ever coming from where it looked like it was coming from.
That sounds like a loss the first time you hear it. It turned out to be the opposite.
Because the place it is all made is also where everything you were looking for already is. The steadiness. The fresh thought that arrives in the shower and settles a problem you’d been chewing on for a week. The wisdom that turns up when you’ve stopped straining for it. None of it has to come from anyone. It is already in there, in everyone, waiting to be found.
I’ve been writing about this for years, and that part still astonishes me.
The five articles above are about the Three Principles from the inside of an ordinary life. If you want the same ground from the other side, as two ways of using the same mind, I’ve collected that series under inside-out and outside-in.
Questions people ask
What are the Three Principles?
Mind, Consciousness and Thought. Sydney Banks described them as the three principles behind all human experience. Together they explain how every experience is made from the inside, moment to moment, in everyone.
Who was Sydney Banks?
A Scottish welder living on Salt Spring Island in Canada, who had a profound insight in the 1970s and spent the rest of his life describing it, in talks and in books such as The Missing Link and The Enlightened Gardener.
Is the Three Principles a therapy?
No. Many therapists, coaches and teachers work with it, but what it describes isn’t a method. It’s how experience already works, whether anyone knows it or not.
How is it different from CBT or mindfulness?
Both work with the content of thinking: changing it, or watching it. The Three Principles point at the principle that makes any thought into experience. That’s a different place to look, and it’s why no technique is needed.
Does “inside-out” mean I create my circumstances?
No. Circumstances happen in the world of matter, and your thinking doesn’t arrange them. What’s made inside, through Thought, is your experience of them.
Where should I start?
With The Projector Doesn’t Care What’s on the Film. Or, if you’d rather have all of it in one place, with the book below.
🔗 Ask an AI to explain this article: ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Perplexity
The pictures behind these five articles come from Brett Chitty’s whiteboard. He credits Keith and Valda Blevens-Monroe for much of the ground beneath them, and the understanding itself goes back to Sydney Banks. The extensions, and any mistakes in them, are mine. Whatever you saw here, you saw.
If you want the whole thing in one place. Reality Is an Inside Job lays out the one fact under the Three Principles from start to finish, in plain words, with nothing to practice. Paperback, ebook and audiobook. Its small, free companion, The Gifts of Separate Realities, looks at what that fact changes in an ordinary life.