As part of my ongoing Dieting Hobby, and my personal weight and food struggles, I've been investigating and experimenting with the Three Principles concept, which involves a shift away from the techniques of traditional Psychology.

The following article is an interesting, and thoroughly researched, overview of these concepts by a Cal Poly professor. He does not appear to a "practitioner", nor does he seem to support or to oppose the "Three Principles", and I find his outside perspective to be of value.
 

A Unified Field Theory of the Interior Life  (The 3 Principles)

         by Robert Inchausti, PhD

“Everything rests on a few ideas that are fearsome and cannot be looked at directly.” —Paul Valery

Sydney Banks (1931–2009) was a Scottish welder who had a mystical experience in 1973. He wrote a few books about his spiritual revelations and gave lectures. More importantly, he transformed the lives of a cadre of “post-therapy” psychotherapists who recast his ideas under variety of names, most notably “Health Realization Therapy” and “The Psychology of Mind.”

Banks’ ideas are currently experiencing a new resurgence under the moniker “The Three Principles.” Put simply, “The Three Principles” are a way of looking at the relationship between mind, thought, and consciousness that offers a kind of unified field theory of the interior life. Human beings are experience-generating animals, but the individual experiences we generate are the product of thoughts. It is our thoughts that shape the formless unknown into meaningful events and images. This is both a useful and disorienting thing since the process of human thinking takes us away from the limitless potential of absolute reality for the sake of a single, limited event or interpretation.

As a result each one of us lives in small, separate, psychological worlds of our own making. The problem is that we innocently believe that these worlds are outside of us, shaping our lives, when they are actually created from the inside out. When we move more deeply into these little worlds by thinking, we move even further from reality (limitless potential) into various narrow, imagined roles, needs, and identities.

This is really not something we can overcome. Human beings, by nature, must give up consciousness to engage in tasks and projects, and so end up innocently assuming their perceptions reflect reality when they are almost always and inevitably what the psychologists call projections.

We take our moods and insecurities as directives to think harder or take even more control over our lives — lives which we have already cut down to fit our small, particular culture-bound ambitions. The better road to mental health and happiness is to see these uncomfortable feelings as a signal to question our beliefs in order to rise to a higher level of consciousness.




According to Banks, our ins...

                 

I’ve been researching the Three Principles concept and how it might be useful to me in my struggles with food and weight. This has led me to reflect on the issue of beliefs… the beliefs that we all carry around with us.

A belief is just an idea that, for various reasons, we have picked up and entertained. Basically, we’ve picked up a thought and repeated it inside our heads so many times that we come to believe it is true. When people hear or see something a great many times, they often mistakenly consider it to be Truth.

We are often totally unaware of many of the beliefs we carry around, and even when we see how they limit us, we are not inclined to let them go.

If we feel really threatened we can think some seriously stupid things in order to defend our Beliefs. Like: “I’d rather be dead than be fat”.  Even if we don’t mean it literally (although some people do), and that statement merely resonates within us, there’s no mistaking the fact that a Core Belief is inside us, which is a belief we are willing to fight for.

We tend to protect our beliefs because even when we know they limit us, they give us a feeling of safety. Sometimes we don’t care how strange we might act, or how miserable we make ourselves, just as long as we feel safe.

We have blind spots about many of our beliefs. Deep down inside we might know they’re there, but at best, we only can get a sense of them. They hide in the shadows of our minds, creating confusion with whispering voices. While not all beliefs cause discomfort, it could be useful to be able to see the ones that do.


Recently, I heard a Three Principles person say:

…That the first step to freedom from our limiting and unwanted beliefs is to see them; that when they become clear to us, it is easy to determine which ones we might wish to keep, and which ones we want to get rid of.

…That once we see the true nature of such a belief, it goes away all by itself,…. because it is merely an idea, made of thought. And because beliefs=thoughts have no life of their own they hold no power over us once we decide to let them go. It is like having unwanted guests in your home, like thoughts, the best way to get them out of your home is to stop entertaining them. A thought cannot think itself.