Because thinking is how we make our way through life, we don't realize that we are always making a choice which thinking to follow and which thinking to turn away from. When we get caught up in negative thinking, and keep focused on it to try to get out of it, we are innocently holding it in place. That leads to defining ourselves as negative. We come to expect it. With understanding of how thought works, we can decide to quiet down and turn away from those thoughts.&n...

Why does it matter that we know we are always creating our own experience of life and that only our thinking generates our reality. No two people create the identical experience. Realizing this provides us valuable information about how to sidestep disagreements, how to understand other people better, and how to "read" our own and others' moods and reactions. When we know that thinking is a creative power, we recognize it is a spiritual gift that allows us to change, and fin...

"Ego" is whatever we think about ourselves. Believing those thoughts can result in acting on idiotic ideas. Such thoughts are illusions we create about what we are or how we should be. Our thoughts appear real as we're thinking them, but they are no more than illusions we have created. There is no need to be frightened by illusions that will disappear as soon as we stop thinking them and turn our thoughts elsewhere. We all live in the same reality, but our experi...

People often think that the Principles explain why we are tempted to act on negative past thoughts when they come to mind. We try to assign blame, or rationalize that we were insecure at the time. We engage our intellect (our memories) to see how/why thinking and behaviors we wanted to put behind us came back. We find ways to use the Principles to sidestep accountability and acceptance of what is. We miss the possibility of going deeper and learning from fresh insight....

It's true that the only "reality" we experience is created by our thoughts. But it's not an excuse for acting on any and every thought we have. We've heard people who have exposure to the Principles say things like, "Yes, I probably shouldn't have done that. But when it came to mind, it was so real and compelling to me." We can't forget we have free will to act or not to act on any thought that comes to mind, and we have wisdom to guide us towards or away from our thin...

Many people struggle with decisions. What to do, what to do? The usual approach is to mull it over; consider all the options, think carefully, solicit a lot of information. Our tendency is to engage our intellect in analysis of pros and cons, advice and considerations. This kind of thinking is exhausting and frustrating. For every pro, we can think of a con. There are always new ways to look at an issue. We easily forget to depend on the gift we have ...

People sometimes assume that if they really "saw" the Principles, they would always be happy. The truth is, understanding the Principles that describe how we create experience does not lead to any particular emotional outcome; it simply leads us to accept the rollercoaster of life's ups and downs and the range of emotions we feel as they occur as natural and ever-changing. We do not need to think ourselves into reaction to our own states of mind and responses to life events. ...

Innate Health is a description of the effect of The Three Principles in action. Everyone has Innate Health; it is the pure spiritual energy of creation that is aliveness in us. It is the pure energy we bring to our experience via our power to think. The Principles have no role in what we think; they describe that we think. Innate Health is the state we experience when we are in the present moment, with a quiet mind. It is "innate" because it is natural, neutral l...

It seems like anxiety is a plague of contemporary life. Anxiety is a feeling generated from our habit of constant access to an overload of information and entertainment, and the fear of missing out (FOMO in today's internet shorthand). We've lost our appreciation for stillness, for quiet moments of appreciating beauty and the delight of presence in the moment. We check our phones constantly; when we have a little time, we often open up a game or puzzle, rather than noticing ...

The higher the IQ a person has and the more they have depended on analysis and retention of information, using what they know to "figure out" what to do moment-to-moment, the harder it is for them to trust insights — fresh ideas that just pop up for us. Many of us have rejected helpful ideas we've had, inspiring new thoughts, because we hadn't analyzed the situation sufficiently to believe we could trust an unexpected insight, even if it made sense. Once we understand the way our ...