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(SQP-Ep.015 ~ Secrets of Life and Mind Revealed ~ Lesson 03 ~ w. Daniel Martinez Stahl)
Editor Note: Minor edits have been made from the original audio recording for easier reading.

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Intro Text: Welcome to the spiritual intelligence podcast, Awakening your inner power with Daniel Martinez Stahl, where we will explore, discover and integrate different aspects of our spiritual and human nature, so that we can all thrive and live life with more grace and ease, instead of struggle. 

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(Note: I would strongly recommend that you take a look at the written version of this course.)

www.LifeBeyondForm.com/courses/29002-free-course

Lesson 3: The Simplicity Behind Every Experience

Welcome to the Spiritual Intelligence Podcast once again, my name is Daniel and with me today is lesson three from The Secrets of Life and the Mind Revealed. It's a continuation of the program that I have available on my website at LifeBeyondForm.com. Hopefully you've been enjoying these lessons as much as I've enjoyed sharing them with you. I do want to let you know that I have a couple interviews scheduled for this week, so hopefully the next couple of weeks will be a conversation where we can discover and explore a little bit more and then we'll see where that goes from there. 

So, thank you again for your patience with me and like I say, hopefully you've been enjoying these preludes or these intermissions with these lessons that I've been wanting to put into audio for a long time. So thank you again very much.

So, in today's lesson, lesson three, The Simplicity Behind Every Experience, we start with a picture of a yellow and black butterfly that is standing over lavender flowers, which are purple, and just below that is a quote from Sydney Banks, “If the only thing that people learned was not to be afraid of their experience, that alone would change the world.” From Sydney Banks.

The reason that I wanted to include this quote in this section of the program is because it really speaks to the simplicity and the intention behind the entire course. My hope is that with an understanding of how the system of Life works, and of how your mind works, it will help you have a level of awareness and a transparency that allows you to recognize the elements that are at play in the creation of life moment by moment, and most importantly the role that you can play moment by moment in the creation of your life, and as a result influence and direct the quality of life that you want to live. And that's ultimately my goal. So I go back to this idea in this quote, if nothing else, if the only thing that you learn was not to be afraid of your experience because of anything that I've shared with with you in this program, then this program is a complete success. 

So, having said that, let's begin with the content of this lesson. So, the third lesson begins with, after the quote, begins with the section, The Three Basic Elements of Life, and so let’s begin with the actual content:

As I have already implied, this program is fundamentally pointing us towards the spiritual energy of life at the source of our experience, and inviting us to look within, towards our own spiritual self. In its simplest form, our experience of life is made possible when the Intelligent Energy of Life (or Life Force) manifests as the universal powers of Thought and Consciousness. They are all the same spiritual energy, but metaphorically represent three different aspects of the process. They all work seamlessly and instantly together, like basic elements, creating all of our psychological compounds from the inside out; including all our experiences and all our emotions, with no exceptions. 

My favorite metaphor for this description is that we experience the shadow created from the light of Consciousness shining on the object of Thought, which is all made possible by the intelligent Energy of Life.

And then I have an image where there is a light fixture that's shining on a ball and there's a shadow on the other side of the ball, and I have the Light of Consciousness, the Object of Thought and Our Experience written inside the shadow, and then below it I say, “All made possible by the Intelligent Energy of Life. 

Continuing on:

The Three Principles defined (the words are not important, it’s the meaning behind the words that matter):

• Universal Mind - the intelligent spiritual energy of all things, whether in form or formless (the life-force or energy of life)
• Universal Consciousness - the energy that makes personal awareness possible (used to observe and experience life)
• Universal Thought - the energy or power that makes personal thought possible (used to interpret and interact with life)

And now, I’m going to go off script a little bit here. Because Thought is probably the hardest Principle to understand because Thought represents a lot of different levels. It represents a lot of different aspects of thought, of how we interpret and understand the word of thought and Thought as a Principal is referring to the energy or power behind the gift of thought; the possibility of thought. 

So the Principal of Thought is the energy that makes it possible for us to think, for us to have a thought, and Thought also is describing, at the deeper level, the interpretation that we gave or make on the data that we received from our senses, which I implied in lesson one where I was talking about the Inside-out misunderstanding, or the Outside-in misunderstanding, and that life is inside-out, even though it appears to be outside-in. 

And I talked about how touch is instantaneously felt and experienced outside of ourselves, however, touch itself is the interpretation of thought, made to feel into a sensation by the relationship between Consciousness and Thought working together. I know that this can get a little tricky a little complicated. I'm sorry if I'm overcomplicating it. Sydney will always talk about going back to simplicity, and so the simplicity of things is that if we think of Thought as the interpretation of data, at the deepest level, and the energy that makes that interpretation possible, that would be the simplest way that I could define it or describe it. 

But again, the words really aren't that important. It's really looking at: what is it that we’re pointing towards? What is the meaning behind these words that we are trying to describe? We are describing a formless aspect of our experience which is impossible to define, and impossible to truly understand, and so we do our best to try and get our head around the descriptions that we give and the descriptions that we hear, so that we can look inside ourselves and attempt to connect to the meaning behind them. Again, I apologize I'm going really off-script here but hopefully this is helpful.

Going back to the text in the lesson:

These three spiritual elements represent what is commonly referred to as the Three Principles, originally described by Sydney Banks after he had an enlightenment experience in the 1970s. The Principles are universal and experienced at the individual level. Our personal mind is an expression of Universal Mind (the intelligent energy of life), our personal awareness is part of Universal Consciousness and our personal thought is made possible by the power of Universal Thought. Every psychological experience can be reduced down to these three Principles. 

One of my early teachers used to say that we experience the movie of life made by the light of Consciousness, shining through the film of Thought and that the projector is powered by the intelligent energy of life. That same teacher used to also say, “We live the feelings of our thinking, not the feelings of the world,” and I often substitute “the world” for our circumstances or our environment.

The Principles invite us to look towards the spiritual source of life, to our own spiritual self and our inner wisdom. There is something magical that happens when we begin looking within, towards the formless energy at the Source of our experience, as opposed to the content of our experience that has already taken form. 

As we begin to look towards the spiritual aspect of ourselves, we simultaneously deepen the understanding of our human experience as well. We begin to learn more about what it really means to be human and we become more accepting of ourselves and others. 

This understanding of how life works describes the inside-out nature of our experience, and helps us to remember that we are innocently and regularly fooled by the outside-in misunderstanding. Which, by the way, will always happen regardless of how deeply we see this, because that is part of being human; we are designed to experience life.

Understanding how the Principles work, helps us to navigate the emotional ups and downs of our lives with more grace, clarity and awareness, which in turn awakens our resilience and our challenges become more manageable regardless of the circumstances. It also reminds us of our spiritual nature, of our inner wisdom and ultimately helps us to live better and happier lives.

Our mind effortlessly begins to quiet down, which will be the subject of focus for one of the next lessons, and we are able to listen to our wisdom more easily. Our emotional thought storms are less dramatic and don't last nearly as long, and most importantly we stop being afraid of our experience because we begin to understand how it works and of our role in its creation.

The next section is entitled: Experiencing Thought in the Moment

As I began seeing the truth of this for myself, I began to notice differences in how I was responding to things. I didn't necessarily try to change, but I just found myself being more patient and compassionate towards myself and others. For example, things that would normally bother me simply didn't affect me in the same way or as often.

One of my most profound insights happened early on when I was upset at my girlfriend and all of a sudden I had the thought, “If it's true that we live the feelings of our thinking and not the feelings of our circumstances, then I'm not upset because of my girlfriend, I must be upset because of some thought deep inside me.” 

I then had a clear vision of going through the synapses of my brain, like connecting dots, in search of the thought that was causing me to feel the way I was. I saw my upset as being nothing more than a creation of thought in my brain. I saw how the meaning I gave to the situation was nothing more than an interpretation, based on some thought-created model, formed long ago, deep inside my head. The moment I saw this, my upset instantly disappeared. In its place, I felt a profound sense of peace and love. 

This insight helped me understand at an experiential level that my response is always created by my thought-based interpretation of the event and not by the event itself. It was something I had heard many times, but now knew to be true because I experienced it for myself. Again, I'm not saying this for you to try to recreate my experience but I just wanted to give you an example of an insight that came from looking in this direction, which completely changed my understanding of life.

It's worth repeating that the inside-out understanding does not say the external world doesn't exist or that it isn't real, but knowing that our experience of it is internally created changes our relationship with it. How we interpret the outside world and how we respond to it all changes. We often get more clarity around the external situation and are able to respond to it more effectively and appropriately.

The final section: What’s Next

In the coming lessons, we will go deeper into the significance of this understanding as it relates to how our mind works. We will unpack and highlight some of the characteristics of thought and some of the other elements involved in how we experience life. 

I look forward to having you continue on this journey with me. In the meantime, I invite you to consider what it would mean if everything I have been sharing with you were true:

• What would it mean to you and your experience of life to know that you are a spiritual being, working together with your body, to give you the experience you are having now? 
• How does your experience of life change knowing what you feel is due to the synergistic relationship between your thoughts and consciousness? 
• What if every emotion you feel is created through you, by the energy of life, as your awareness brings your thoughts to life? 

In other words, how would things be different if your experience of life were in fact a shadow of your thoughts and not caused by your environment or circumstances? Influenced, yes, but not caused.

I wonder what will be the first sign you notice that things have already started changing for you. Like I said, even the smallest level of understanding that comes from looking in this direction starts to have a positive impact in our lives. Mine was sitting on a bus and realizing I was not annoyed by one of my fellow travelers listening to his music out loud, which normally would have driven me nuts. 

Please reflect and play with all of this. Have fun exploring new possibilities, experiment with your awareness and see what you see. Feel free to ask questions and share any new insights in our Facebook community, The Spiritual Explorers. If you prefer, you can always send me an email or private message.

And I close the section, as always, with:

Soar & Explore w. Love

Before I bring this episode to an end, I wanted to highlight something that I've mentioned in previous episodes and that's the fact that the Three Principles are speaking of our experience of Life. They're speaking of the essence of existence, and as a subset of that existence is our human experience. So, as much as the Three Principles are profoundly powerful and helpful in helping me understand my humanity, helping me understand my human experience, they are fundamentally much deeper than that. They go to a description of the essence of Life itself. The essence of existence itself. 

Regardless of our spiritual or our human experience, the Three Principles still apply, and that's something that I find very powerful and also a lot of fun to play with as I reflect on these ideas and explore and challenge my own understanding of them. It is a very profound concept to think about: our essence of life, about the essence of life and existence itself, beyond our humanity. And as much as these Principles, like I say, are beautiful in describing our humanity, they are fundamentally a description of existence itself. 

So, hopefully this has been really helpful and really useful and you've enjoyed it, and as always, if you would like to get the full course, it is available on PDF and the link is in the description of the website, sorry, in the description of the episode. And you can also sign up to my course on my website at LifeBeyondForm.com. 

Like I said earlier, hopefully next week we're going to be having an interview, which I'm really excited to share with you guys and the week after that as well. And, I don't know if I'm going to be able to line up interviews for the third and fourth week, but inevitably at some point I'm sure that there's going to be a gap and I will come back to these lessons at that point. So thank you very much for bearing with me during this little gap in interviews. Hopefully, these lessons have been really helpful and useful and you've been enjoying them. And I know that I've said this before but it really is — I just want to emphasize the gratitude that I have for you guys for being with me and I'm really excited to share more things with you. My understanding of Life seems to be deepening and I'm questioning a lot of things, so it's really exciting to be able to share these things with you as time goes on. So, take care of yourselves, and as always Sore & Explore w. Love. Until next time, bye bye. 

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Closing text: Thank you for listening. Hopefully, you've heard something new that invites you to reflect, to go within, and deepen your own understanding of life, and of our universal experience. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow the podcast series on your favorite listening app, and share this episode with others that you feel would enjoy it as well. Until next time, may we all soar with inspiration, explore with passion and live with love. ❤️❤️❤️

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