You can read Part 1, here: The lead-up
And Part 2, here: Thought realisation
There's a conversation I have shared with you before, between Jamie Smart and his friends Jan and Chip Chipman, who worked personally with Sydney Banks.
They'd been really struggling with their relationship—on the verge of splitting up—before they were pointed in this direction and had some insights of their own.
And within that conversation, there's a very interesting statement from Chip, about what happens after we see something around the Innate Health understanding, as happened to me, when I found my daughter's lost ballet shoe and had a strange realisation of my own.
Here's what Chip has to say about the process of change, within their relationship, after he'd realised for himself that our entire experience of life comes from within, and is made of Thought:
“Looking back, I can't see one specific thing, or habit, or argument, or anything that we consciously changed … When you have an insight, you don't have to go through all of your head and correct this habit and that thought… in a sense, it momentarily wipes the slate clean and your thoughts are automatically re-ordered. You automatically see the innocence of everybody around you; you automatically see that everybody is operating at the end of their thinking.”
You can have a listen to this 4 minute clip from the conversation, where he's talking about this, here:
I couldn't love this one phrase any more, if I tried:
“Everybody is operating at the end of their thinking”
It's another way of articulating this Key Message of mine, that is pretty much the starting point for any exploration of the 3 Principles:
It also goes a long way to explaining why this ‘automatic’ aspect of the real world fallout from insights, that Chip talks about, makes total sense.
It's because what an insight, or realisation does, is changes the ‘what makes sense to us’ aspect of this equation… therefore ‘what we are doing’ will change of its own accord.
It's pretty cool. Like being shown how something actually works for the very first time, and the way you interact with it being changed as a result, from that point onwards.
No notes, no ‘having to remember’, no applying, no trying… just change. Because of how you now see things differently.
💗
Career change happens within
This is what started to happen to me, in the days that followed the ballet shoe incident. My thoughts had started to be ‘automatically re-ordered’ and what resulted was a series of mini-realisations, that constituted a re-examination of all the things I had taken for granted in the past, that no longer looked true.
This is the beauty of Principles (i.e. universal, irrefutable laws):
1. Constant – they're always in play
2. Explanatory – they explain past situations & behaviours
3. Predictive – they predict the behaviour of something in the future
Given that I was in the immediate run-up to delivering a keynote at the Careers conference I'd been speaking at for the last decade or so, my own materials, and how I shared them with the audience, were suddenly a bit up in the air.
😬
A semi-frantic rewrite of some of my slides was underway, but mostly, I couldn't keep up with the IMPLICATIONS of seeing for myself (put simply) that we are always feeling our thinking, not our circumstances.
That's when I had another quite large (for me, in the context of my life) insight: I realised that I had already been sharing these principles, in my own special way, for the last 12 years, in these conference talks.
😮
I even used to begin each keynote with a slightly bombastic statement, there primarily to keep the conference organisers happy, and avoid the impression that I was overtly encouraging people to leave medicine:
“This isn't a talk about leaving medicine, even though I did. What I'm going to share with you today is applicable to any career change, be that moving on to something completely different, choosing a different speciality, or even just working differently, where you are right now.”
There was only one problem with me saying this, each and every year: I didn't truly believe it!!
🙊
You see, I'd spent my entire working life moving from one thing to the other; of quitting when I didn't like something, and endlessly seeking the ‘right’ job or career that was going to ‘make me happy’.
Those were the experiences that had been gathering dust in my own Thought System 📦, therefore that was all I could really see, in people's futures.
So although I used to faithfully trot this statement out as my opening gambit each October, in the back of my mind, there was a naughty little voice saying,
📦😈: “Yeah, you tell ’em that, Giles, but it's not true, is it? If they really want to be happy; if they're really going to feel fulfilled in what they're doing with their lives, they're going to have to leave the NHS.”
Until a moment of insight, just two days after the ballet shoe incident, when I had another forehead-slapping realisation:
Given that we experience our thinking, not our circumstances, people can have a completely different experience of the exact same thing… including their career!!!
This changed everything.
Ignorance and innocence
I feel like I've written “unbeknownst to me” a fair bit in this series of Daily Reminders, but with the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to overstate the role of the invisible, wheels-turning-in-the-background aspects to all of this.
Life change is peppered with antecedents, which I'm guessing is why people are always saying things like “nothing happens without a reason”.
- 46 years of ‘Giles-ing’ led up to the 17 Days of change
- Being confused, but curious enough to keep listening to Jamie's podcasts led to the discovery of, and my opening up to, the notion of ‘effortless’ change (i.e. via insight alone)
- Looking concertedly in the direction of the 3 Principles and hearing, over and over again, that 100% of our experience is created from Thought, led to a profound realisation about that, during an everyday interaction with my daughter
- Seeing for myself that we are only ever feeling our thinking, not our circumstances, led me to seeing the whole domain of ‘circumstances’ in an entirely different light, itself leading me to fresh new ways of appreciating the process of career change.
And, unbeknownst to me, the realisation that people don't have to change career, in order to experience a changed career, was about to lead to the biggest insight yet – the one that makes me view my entire life as before-and-after that day…
I was about to have an experience of Innate Health.
Until next time…
💟
Giles
p.s. If you want to reflect on this one, then take some time to look back and examine some of the big changes you've been through in your life. What were the antecedents? Could you have predicted them? Can you find evidence of things changing because of seeing things differently?
And the biggie: Are you open to the idea that things are already changing for you, right Now?
Related
Giles P Croft
Giles P Croft