The Illusion of Thought By Sydney Banks

I have to explain a little about why Sid Banks was— his view of psychology was so radically important. Yeah. So helpful in my mind. So necessary in terms of every science evolves, and it evolves when one person has a completely new viewpoint about how things work. And so it creates a paradigm shift. And a paradigm shift is a fundamental shift in how we understand a science. Remember I said all of psychology for 200 years was focused on improving thought content feeling content, behavior content. All of those things are things that have already been created. So we talk about, "What are you thinking? What have you been thinking? What were you thinking? What are you feeling? What were you feeling? What happened yesterday? What was so hard? What happened when you were a child? What were you feeling? What was that like for you? What are you feeling now? What did you do? How did you do it?" What can we do to help you improve and change your behavior? So it's important to understand that before even trying to understand where Sid was pointing, to understand what happened to him. Could I explain? Because he had two major revelations. Both of which I feel like continue to unfold and reveal more and more to me as I, for myself, experience the truth of what he saw.

Maybe you could speak a bit about who he was. In the first episode of Beyond Skepticism, I had Michael Neal with me, and he spoke a little bit about the story and who he was. But for those listeners, who weren't there. Could you explain a little bit?

Yeah, he had a very difficult childhood. First of all, grew up in Scotland, poor. Um, it was not probably the healthiest family he grew up in. He was adopted at birth. Um, challenging childhood to say the least. He left school at the end of 9th grade because he needed to get a full-time job to work to help support his family. They were that poor. He became a welder. At one point, he moved from Scotland to British Columbia, to Vancouver, and was working there in a pulp mill. And he was a welder, and he worked as a welder. So, man from Scotland, 9th grade education, while they're not really exploring psychology, not really exploring spirituality, didn't read about those things, or he was curious maybe but never really got involved much in them. So ordinary man.. And his wife kept trying to help him because he was so insecure. By his own admission, he was very introverted, very quiet, very insecure. Really nice guy, but very, very insecure. And his wife was always trying to help him self-improve, right, so that he could be happier. Yeah, she got him involved in Toastmasters, thinking that would— it's learning how to do public speaking. It's an organization where you meet, and the first assignment was just think about something you can talk about for a few minutes with people, and that just talk for 3 minutes. He had a panic attack, basically. He couldn't do it. It was too hard for him. He said, "This won't work. This isn't going to help me." And so he left that and tried a number of different things. And then his wife said, "There's a psychologist coming from New York City to Vancouver. He's famous." This was in the early '70s. I think we should go. He says, there's no way we can afford it. He signed up for it and then called them up and said, no, we can't come. It's too expensive. Signed up for it again. Canceled. Signed up a third time and they said, oh, Mr. Banks, yes, it's you again. Okay. So he went to this. And it was in the early '70s, which is when I started psychology. Yeah. And at that point in time in the evolution of psychology, there was a lot of emphasis on you've got all these painful old repressed feelings within you. You have to go inside and find those feelings and cathart them in order to be healthy. So there was a lot of pounding pillows and getting your anger out and punching things as a way of expressing your upset and a lot of that. And so the guy in this workshop was advocating that. Tell your partner what you most like about them. It's very important you learn to be fully honest with your partner. And so very quickly, this very shy, introverted man is going, this is not for me. This is not— this is— I can't do this yelling, screaming, getting it out. And he was saying to his wife, we made a big mistake. We got to go home. And During a break, he went for a walk on the beach, and another man joined him, and he talked. And Sid, he said, Sid, it doesn't seem like you're getting much out of this. And he says, I'm not, I'm not. And he said, uh, why not? I mean, this, this really can be helpful. And he says, I'm too insecure. So he goes off, this other guy, and later he comes back and he said, Sid, I've been thinking about what you said about you "Too insecure. That's the biggest crock I've ever heard. That is just not true. You just think you are." Now, you never know when people are going to have big insights. What Sid heard, or what he realized in that moment, was that every single bit of his unhappiness and insecurity Every bit of it was just created by his own thinking in the moment. And that when you're not thinking it, that happiness isn't being created, so it doesn't exist. So it's like when we have a nightmare at night and we wake up and we realize, oh, It was just a dream. Thank God it's not real. I'm not really being chased by a bear that's trying to kill me. It's just a dream. Well, he woke up from his daymare that he was insecure and that every time he'd get upset and be thinking about things, he realized that thinking is what's creating what I'm feeling. When I stop thinking and it doesn't exist, This is a very different way of understanding. Psychology is that the sole source of everything you're feeling is thought in the moment. And if you're thinking it, you're feeling it. And if you're not thinking it, it's an illusion that doesn't even exist. It's like a mirage.— it just disappears. It's not even true. It's made up. It's a temporary construct at best. He was so impacted by how deeply he saw the truth of that, he didn't sleep for 3 days and 3 nights. Because all of a sudden every single bit of his life made sense. Every single bit of any human's life. In this workshop He looked around and he saw people thinking up their own suffering and not even knowing they were doing that. So he saw their innocence. I later on heard from friends that he would walk down the street and see people thinking up unhappiness and not realizing it. And he would have so much compassion he wanted to hug every person. He was a hugger. Right? So that was his first insight. Now that alone is— when I started to see the truth of that, it changed my life because no one had told me. I'd been a psychologist 10 years. No one said every moment of your experience is created from thought. Every bit. No exceptions. You know what? Everyone was saying, "What are you feeling? Oh, it's caused by your environment. You're in a stressful environment, no wonder you feel stress. It's caused by other people and what they say to you." So if somebody says something to you and you get angry, it was caused by the other person. As if their words can somehow create experience in you. It's caused by your past. It's caused by your personality. It's caused by your genetics. It's caused by your DNA. It's caused by your parenting, how you were parented, how you were raised. And here's Sid saying, "No, there's only one cause for what you're Whatever you think, you will feel. No exception. If you think sad, you'll feel sad. You think anxious, you feel anxious. You think loving, you feel loving. It's changing moment to moment for everybody. And yet, once I started learning that— I traveled the world and I would ask people, "What are you feeling?" And we have all kinds of feelings. I have all kinds of feelings. I still do. But the next question is interesting: Where do you think it's coming from? I've never met a single person who said, "Well, it's obvious. It's just what I'm thinking in the moment. It's a thought-created temporary experience, an illusion." Because we've been exposed to the many, many different theories, understandably, by a psychology that's not based in the creative nature of experience. So Sid has his first experience. All of a sudden he's seeing every human being as a thinker, and he can't help but to have compassion for anyone who is stressed, unhappy, suffering, because they innocently misunderstand where it's coming from. Yeah, this is huge, Michael.

Right. Now, let's take it as true that all we ever experience is thinking, is thought.

Wouldn't—

like, the first question that comes up is, where does that thinking, where does thought come from? Isn't it possible that maybe those psychologists had a point where the environment and the past may have a role in shaping that thinking that we then experience?

There's no question we have memories. Everybody does. At times, it's normal for memories to be activated. Happens to everybody. How involved do you get in that thought? How much truth and reality do you attribute to that thought? Like, I could have the thought, "I'm stupid." If I have that thought and it comes into my head and I spend the next hour thinking about that, for an hour I can create misery. If I have that thought and think it's absolute truth, then I start thinking any thought I have must be true. So, I can have horrible memories and I can think that's who I am, that's my reality, that's what truth is, and you start believing. So, the single source of psychological suffering is a thought comes into your head that's filled with judgment or some, what we might call, negativity. Not judging it, but— and then think it's true. If you don't think it's true, the thought comes into your head, "I'm stupid," and it's just like a bird flying through the sky. Doesn't hurt the sky, doesn't hurt our minds, doesn't hurt who we are, doesn't touch who we are. It's just a passing thought. It's a low-quality thought. These are natural cycles in nature. You inhale, then you exhale. They're different. You eat food, you eliminate waste. They're different. So the waste is a natural part. Every human being goes up and down in the quality of their thinking. Cycles of that. It's normal. We call those moods. Everybody has moods. Sid Banks did. Everybody. I've never met anybody who the quality of their thinking— Health is going through a low mood without taking that thought to be truth and you come right back up again. Unhealth is when you come down into a state where your thinking is more judgmental, more critical, more negative, and you get involved in it, and you stay involved in it, and you think that that nightmare you're creating is truth. That's suffering. That's suffering.