How to find the peace your mind keeps searching past - Dicken Bettinger
Episode 550, released 31st May 2026.
Lian and Three Principles teacher Dicken Bettinger explore what mystics across every tradition have pointed toward for centuries, why the mind's natural state is already meditative, and how psychological suffering comes down to one root cause.
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Dicken Bettinger, Ed.D., received his doctorate in counseling psychology and has worked during his career as a licensed clinical psychologist. Dicken’s entire career has focused on psychological well-being. In 1986 he met Sydney Banks, who shared a profound new understanding of the human mind called the Three Principles that unifies our connection to a deeper intelligence called wisdom and our psychological nature. While living in Vermont, Dicken co-founded one of the first Three Principles training, counseling, and education centers. Later Dicken served as a senior staff at Pransky and Associates in La Conner, Washington for 16 years, where he developed and led corporate and university leadership trainings, team development, and cultural transformations.
In 2012 Dicken founded his private practice, 3 Principles Mentoring. He offers individual on-line mentoring, practitioner development, and advanced training programs. He enjoys leading group seminars in the US and Europe. Dicken serves on the Board of Directors of the Three Principles Global Community. He also values his time teaching war refugees from the Ukraine and Africa.
Dicken is the co-author of a book on the Three Principles called Coming Home: Uncovering the Foundations of Psychological Well-being and a forthcomig book, Life Can Be Easier Than You Think. Dicken has been happily married since 1969. He has two adult children and four adored grandchildren. He enjoys photography, hiking, canoeing, and exploring art and different cultures, and he values making new friends of all ages on his travels.
In this episode, Lian and Dicken trace a thread that runs through Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and the work of Sydney Banks: that beneath the noise of a busy mind, there is a silence that has never left, and that every mystical tradition has been pointing toward the same thing, just using different language.
Dicken shares how he spent years meditating four hours a day, recording dreams by flashlight, filling journals with techniques, before discovering that the meditative state he was working so hard to reach was already his natural condition, and everyone else's too. They look at what the mystics actually meant by "ecstatic," and how three piles of handwritten notes from teachers across every tradition began to self-organise into the same three movements: emptying, filling, and giving it away.
From there the conversation opens into what Dicken calls the one problem of human psychological suffering, what it actually means to fall out of your head into the present moment, and why wisdom has always been understood as something that comes through us rather than from us.
Listen if you find yourself thinking hard about how you feel, trying to work out what's wrong, and somehow feeling worse the more you think about it.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
Why every mystical tradition, across centuries and cultures, organised itself around the same three movements, and what those movements really describe
How the word "ecstatic" has nothing to do with euphoria, and what its original meaning reveals about awakening
What happens when someone who has spent years working intensively on themselves discovers that the state they were seeking requires no technique at all
Resources and stuff that we spoke about:
Visit Dicken’s website.
Join UNIO, The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls: This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
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Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan
Episode Transcript:
Please note: We are a small team and not able to check through the transcript our software provides. So you may find some words are out of place and a few sentences don’t make complete sense. If you do see something utterly ridiculous we’d love you to let us know so we can correct it. Please email any howlers with the time stamp to team@bemythical.com.
Lian (00:00)
What if searching itself is what can keep peace just out of reach? Hello my beautiful soul seekers. This week I'm joined once again, but after a very long time, by three principles teacher Dicken Bettinger to explore what mystics across almost every tradition have pointed towards for centuries. Why the mind's natural state is already meditative.
And how psychological suffering really does come down to perhaps one root cause. Dicken has spent four decades working at the intersection of psychology and spiritual understanding. He's a licensed clinical psychologist, co author of Coming Home, Uncovering the Foundations of Psychological Wellbeing, and founder of Three Principles Mentoring.
This was a bit of a different episode to usual in that it's return to our roots. Given the three principles is the understanding that twelve years ago, when we first began, this podcast was all about. And we have now barely touched on that for perhaps the last decade.
And so was fascinating for me personally to return to the three principles after all of this time. And who better to do that with than the wonderful Dicken?
We trace a thread that runs through Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and the work of Sydney Banks. That beneath the noise of a busy mind there is a silence that has never left, and that every mystical tradition has been pointing toward the same thing, just using different language. Dicken shares how he spent years meditating four hours a day, recording dreams by flashlight, filling journals with techniques, and before discovering that the meditative state he was working so hard to reach was already his natural condition and everyone else's too. We look at what the mystics really meant by ecstatic how three piles of handwritten notes from teachers across every tradition began to self-organize into the same three movements: emptying, filling, and giving it away. So listen, if you find yourself thinking hard about how you feel. Trying to work out what's wrong and somehow feeling worse than the more you think about it.
But first, if you've just arrived here, welcome. If you've come back, welcome home. And if you keep finding yourself here without subscribing, your soul clearly knows what it's doing. So honour that call, go ahead and subscribe. It's challenging to live in this crazy modern world wild sovereign soul is what we know will help. And so if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path, And your heart longs for guidance, kinship, and support. Come join us in Unio the community for soul seekers. Unio is the living home for the Wild Sovereign Soul Path, where together we reclaim our wildness, actualise our sovereignty, and awaken our souls. You can discover more and walk with us by hopping on over to wild sovereign soul.com/slash Unio or click the link in the description.
And now back to this week's episode, let's dive in.
Lian (03:14)
Hello, Dicken Welcome back to the show after what we think could be maybe a decade.
Dicken (03:24)
My gosh. It's so hard to believe. And it certainly doesn't seem that long.
Lian (03:30)
No, no, but how wonderful to be back here talking to you. So pleased.
Dicken (03:38)
Lovely to be here. Thank you.
Lian (03:41)
I was just sharing with you that we Jonathan and I actually both met you together at a retreat, a three principles retreat, we were at again, maybe 11 years ago, 12 years ago, probably 12 years ago actually. and it was back when I was doing my very first training with Rudy and Jenny, and you were one of the guest teachers. And if one is allowed to have favourites.
I think Jonathan, I would say you were one of our favourites. And when we were having a conversation recently about who would be lovely to have on the show, you came to mind as someone who, as as I shared with you, our paths kind of deviated over the years, in fact, it's taken many twists and turns, but kind of away from where we began, where In fact, all of our guests back then were all three principles teachers, facilitators, and so on. And as we were recalling you and our experience of you, we just had this tangible sense of your huge open heart. In fact, I recall a story you were telling us about, if I remember this correctly, I think it might have been your son or grandson and how he's involved in a car accident. And there's just a story that just brought everyone in the room present to so many different, you know, death and life and grief and blame and forgiveness and just so much. And we had this really strong sense of this show is ultimately about people living from soul, and our sense of you is just that. And then we were thinking, this could make such a interesting conversation because, and as we were just saying, I'm not saying I'm right about this, but our experience of the three principles teachings back then was on the one hand quite psychologised in certain circles, in others very much kind of honoring the spiritual, which you know really still is something so important to us, but a kind of a lack of focus on soul. And by soul, I mean kind of like that individual spark of a of, you know, it's a spiritual spark, but that individual spark in each of us. And again, even as we started to chat before we started recording, you were like, well, no, no, no. And was like, don't say anything, Dicken. Let's just wait until we start recording. And so it's not at all to say no one spoke about that, but it certainly wasn't our experience that this was the typical focus or lens that.
many teachers at the time were speaking about. There was a a focus, again, either very psychological focus or a focus on the spiritual, but much more that kind of sort of unified consciousness as opposed to that individual spark. And so it was like, well, if there's any three principles teacher we'd love to talk to about this, it's you for the reasons I've said.
So, with all of that said, I guess normally what I do is I might ask a question of a guest, something along the lines of.
Looking back to childhood or earlier life, where can you see that what you're doing now was almost like preceded back in childhood in some way? And so there is an interesting way that I'm going to ask you particularly, given the cop conversation of this is about the soul itself. when you look back, what can you see your soul was telling you in childhood?
that connecting the dots looking backwards, you can now see was a clue, maybe, or or a set of clues, of where you've ended up, where your life's taken you, how you've ended up serving in the way that you have.
Dicken (07:56)
I love that question. I I think everybody when they were really young had experiences of
getting out of our heads completely and touching something in our hearts and our soul that
was magical.
Lian(08:22)
Mm.
Dicken (08:23)
And I was fortunate. I spent almost there were no cell phones. I spent all of my time when I could outdoors.
Lian(08:31)
Ha ha ha ha.
Dicken (08:40)
And I had many, many experiences. Like for example, as a very young boy, I used to love climbing trees.
And I would go up to the top of trees and just hang out.
And All of that thinking fell away.
And there was just a sense of being so close to nature or a part of nature or one with nature. And I love that. So I sought that out as a child over and again. I would go off by myself, whether it would be going into a lake and before I learned how to swim on top of the water, I swam underwater because it was still and silent and magical and I would just become a fish.
and I remember one time being on the edge of a lake underneath a willow tree. So I could see out, no one could see me. And again I dropped into that stillness within.
And It's impossible not to experience beauty.
Like my wife is an artist and she knows that while she's thinking she doesn't drop into her soul and experience beauty, so she intentionally plays music or reads her favourite poetry or sits quietly until she is in that deep, soulful, beautiful, heartfelt feeling.
She will not paint until she's in that feeling. Because when I talked to her about it, she says, When I'm in that space, I don't have to think about what I'm painting, it just comes through me. And I want to capture the feeling of beauty in my painting that I felt when I saw. What I want to paint.
And I want people to see my painting and it touches them so deeply that they drop into that space where they experience more beauty too. So she says, My purpose in life is to help bring more beauty into the world.
Lian (11:42)
Wow. I I I'd say that's she's a fellow kindred spirit actually. I think in some ways that's mine too, in a different way.
Dicken (11:54)
And so artists have known that you have to get out of your head. Athletes have known, so later on in my childhood, I got I I just loved running around and playing on a team and being with other kids and I would often experience that same falling out of myself and being lived fully. Like I have a friend who's a professional drummer, musician. And he says, I'm playing sometimes and I'm thinking about my playing, he says, but sometimes the other guy shows up. I love that.
Lian (12:44)
I mean Yeah, that's such a lovely way to say it.
Dicken (12:50)
Sometimes when I'm talking in a conference, I'm talking from what I already know. And then other times it's coming from that deeper place and it's fresh and alive and creative. And it feels like I'm being lived. It's almost like that biblical notion, not my will but thy will be done. Yes. may wisdom have her way with me, is how I would say it. May wisdom have her way with me.
Lian (13:26)
Hm, beautiful.
Dicken (13:29)
You know, so I was deeply influenced because I touched something very deep, very spiritual when I was young. And so so much now as I look back on my life, I mean I studied the mystics from every single tradition.
I was only interested in psychology if it could help me have more of those mystical experiences.
Lian (14:02)
I didn't know that. I didn't know that. Because I recall some of your story and you shared some of it. How the episode we did together way back then was about anxiety and obviously, you know being free from anxiety. And so I knew some of your story, but I didn't know the story of you prior to the work you were in in terms of psychology. That's fascinating. So you had that clear sense that that's actually your kind of North Star. How how wonderful.
Dicken (14:38)
Well then I discovered meditation when I was young. I I grew up just outside of Rochester, New York, and Philip Kaplot, who wrote The Three Pillars of Zen, was in Rochester and I got curious about meditation and then in college a friend of mine invited a Buddhist monk to the university, and he was a vipassana teacher, and I studied with him for years.
But when I met my teacher, Sydney Banks, I was meditating four hours a day and going to three week silent meditation retreats because it became an opportunity to re experience what happened so simply and naturally when I was a child.
Lian (15:38)
Mm.
Dicken (15:40)
And I was very, very fortunate. I studied with meditation teachers in Buddhism, in Hinduism, and Judaism, in Christianity, contemplative monks. And at one point for my own just out of my own interest, reading mystics from all cultures, all traditions, what I was interested in the phrases they use to try and point toward soul.
Literally, that's what I was doing. And I would take out what in Buddhism they call pointing out instructions. It's when they don't teach to your intellect, they're trying to point you toward your soul. And later on I did that with my teacher Sydney Banks. But I took those phrases and I beg and I had tons of slips of paper. I mean and but they started to self organise into three piles.
One pile I called emptying, another pile called filling, another pile called giving it away.
Lian (17:10)
I love that. Mm-hmm.
Dicken (17:13)
So the emptying had to do with going beyond your conceptual mind. That's a prerequisite to experience what we're talking about, these soulful, heartfelt experiences. It's falling out of your head into your heart, falling in love is a metaphor for going beyond your conceptual mind. My teacher, Sydney Banks, would almost with every talk say you have to go beyond all concepts.
Lian (17:41)
Mm.
Dicken(17:44)
And one day that hit me so deeply it changed my life. I started going, do am I ever beyond concepts?
Ever, ever. Am I truly? I know when I was born as a baby I was. I had no concepts. So the Tibetan Buddhists call this state of mind newborn consciousness. And I looked out the window and said, Do it can I see that tree without any labels or concepts?
And I would look at things until there was nothing but that. It wasn't me and the thing and ideas about it. There was just perception. And I started experiencing
Lian (18:26)
Mm-hmm.
Dicken(18:39)
shift of identity from I'm my concepts to I'm the awareness of things. So every every mystic talked about going beyond concepts, letting go, surrendering, dropping into, falling, going beyond everyone. Everyone talked about when your mind empties You become sensitized to something deep within a feeling that can't be described because you're not in your intellect. Label it or describe it. It's not, it's beyond the peace, beyond peace, the love beyond love, the happiness beyond having, because there's zero label to it. It's often a word often used by mystics.
Lian (19:18)
Hehehehehe.
Dicken (19:38)
was you must become ecstatic.
And ecstatic doesn't mean just have a woo.
Lian (19:48)
Yeah.
Dicken (19:49)
No, ecstatic means standing. Literally it translates standing outside of or beside of. So you stand being ecstatic only means standing outside of or beside your intellect.
Lian (20:02)
wow. I didn't know that was there.
Dicken (20:04)
Really the meaning of it is to disengage. So teachers like Eckhart Tolle say the first step always in spiritual awakening is disengaging from one intellect because we're so identified with what we think and feel and the content of our experience. Right? So and this second filling is then you fill up with
Lian (20:25)
Yeah.
Dicken (20:35)
The feeling of you become sensitized to the feeling of just being.
Some people call it the feeling of being. Some people, spiritual teachers call it being a the feeling of being alive. Syd Banks called that the feeling. You're looking for a feeling. And he says there's no word in any language for the feeling I'm pointing you toward, because you're not there to label it.
Lian (21:02)
Mm. As soon as you try, it's then the idea of it again.
Dicken (21:05)
You're back in your head thinking about it. You're not in it. Yeah. You're not immersed in spirit. You're in your ego thinking about your soul, your feelings. That's not the same thing. Because the first one empty and then and then there's this infilling of spirit, of feeling, of breath, the in breath. Right.
And then always every single mystique said when there's emptying and filling, then you don't keep that feeling to yourself, bring it into the world, give it away. So they talk about service, being of service, they talk about loving kindness, they talk about kindness, they talk about radiating love radiating light, radiating beauty to the world, not conditionally but unconditionally. It's an unconditional love.
And so when I met Sydney Banks and he talked about the three principles, it was like thought. When you realise we have one problem as human beings is we get caught up in and identified with our conceptual world. That's it. That's the number one problem of any if any human being is struggling psychologically, I can absolutely guarantee you.
They're caught up in an idea, a thought, a belief, and they think it's true. I'm stupid, I'm dumb, I'm a failure, I'm no good, I'm this, I'm that, I hate this, I can't stand that, I need this, I I have to have this. Some thought people are caught up in so Buddhists say there's one source of suffering is clinging. And Christianity that's missing the mark. That's Missing the mark is an archery term. That's actually the Greek word for sinning is missing the mark. It's an archery term. The bullseye is in front of you, but you're you're you're shooting your arrow in the wrong direction.
Lian (23:29)
no idea that that's so interesting. Because Jonathan and I were only talking about this I think today or yesterday. I had no idea that the it was the literally the word for missing that's so interesting.
Dicken (23:44)
The original meaning of sin was not doing something horrible and wrong. It's the only sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit. It's looking toward the conceptual world and objects and things instead of looking toward spirit.
Lian (24:03)
And it comes from archery, which was literally missing the mark. That's so interesting. I love words and so I've so far you've pleased me endlessly by sharing two different words.
Dicken (24:16)
Right.
My wife used to joke with me, the only person I know who goes to bed and brings the I brought I would bring an etymological dictionary. I would trace these words that are used in spiritual teaching back to their original meanings. And it's very, very
Lian (24:39)
There's so much in there, isn't there? So much. Anyways, please carry on. So profound. But carry on.
Dicken (24:49)
So we've got emptying so if the one problem is holding, then thank God we feel tension, stress, or upset. It's letting us know we're we're getting caught up in our thinking period. In a way that's not healthy, helpful. And it's an invitation to return to spirit, to come drop out of our head into our soul. It's an invitation. It's not a curse.
It's not a problem. It's not wrong. It just means we have an intellect and we can use it wisely, but as soon as we misuse it, which involves getting caught up in what we might call negative thinking, starting to hold on to it, think it's true, and then act on it is how any of us gets into trouble. So the first thing is waking up to the fact That you're missing the mark.
Lian (25:52)
Hmm.
Dicken (25:55)
How often I do. Right? And but thank God because it's work the system is working perfectly. It's it's it like an a stress or tension or upset or being unhappy is like an alarm clock going off to wake us back up out of our thinking into the now. So Syd would say, if you really see thought, it'll bring you back to the now. The now Is the doorway?
to be to our connection to something spiritual, someone. So when people empty without trying, without doing anything, without technique, fundamentally they feel better. You can say simply, very simply, when people's minds quiet down and people are resting in the present moment.
Lian (26:43)
Yeah.
Dicken (26:52)
The tension created by their insecure thinking, their negative thinking, their personal thinking, when that quiets down, falls away. I've never met a human being anywhere in the world, any age, that when they don't become quietly present, they don't become friendlier, kinder, warmer, more open to possibilities, more creative. See that soul.
Lian (27:20)
Yeah, people.
Dicken (27:21)
These are characteristics. Sid says that the three fundamental characteristics of soul that have universally been talked about throughout the ages, the wisdom of the ages, is there is a silence. So silence is always there underneath the noise of our chatter, our conceptual mind, a busy mind, overthinking, which most people do. They keep thinking about things. They feel bad and they think about it. Right? With more understanding, you feel bad and you go, thank you. And you do less thinking, you fall out of thinking. You drop out of the noise into the silence that's always here within the peace that passes intellectual understanding.
Be still and know that I am God. It's like I was swimming in the ocean recently in Hawaii and on the surface it's there's it's very rough and you're getting thrown around by these big waves and you just go a little bit deeper and it's quiet. The noise is still up there, but you're not thinking you're not giving it your attention. Giving it your attention is missing the mark.
Lian (28:48)
Mm.
Dicken (28:49)
Looking so so mystics say look within. Don't look out at things and keep con your intellect will keep conceptualizing if you focus on objects.
Lian (29:00)
So, given you'd had all of that experience journey into those other mystical traditions, what would you say was different in what you were experiencing and learning with Sid that from what I understand created the feeling created a change for you that was different to what you'd experienced from those other teachings.
Dicken (29:40)
There is a distinction that I think is important.
Syd, like every other person who's had an enlightenment experience, knows that in the formless, that we're connected to an infinite field of formless energy that's full of intelligence, it's full of awareness, and it's full of creative potential. Even the physicists all agree with that now. Then when when they talk about the quantum field and the qualities Of the quantum field, they're still pointing toward that truth. Because it's truth. It's always been true. That this infinite field of life energy is the source of everything that takes form and exists. All right. So Sid says what I'm teaching is nothing new.
But what was interesting is Syd wet had a ninth grade education. He was a welder in a pulp mill.
He didn't have spiritual teachers. He was not a studying spiritual teachings. He did not have a meditation practice. And he had something that's recorded but extremely rare in the history of the world of had a spontaneous enlightenment experience with no preparation.
Lian (31:19)
And no concepts.
Dicken (31:21)
That's right. No school, no teacher with its particular teaching. He had a a direct, spontaneous experience of the oneness of life and the beauty of our uniqueness simultaneously. And because it happened to him that way, he didn't think that effort, technique, study was a requirement for having insights into truth.
Lian (31:59)
Mm.
Dicken (32:01)
So for me, Lian what happened? And I have utmost respect for other approaches, absolute, because I've done them and they were helpful, but this simplified things for me in a way nothing else had. I started learning that meditation is not something you do, it's our natural state.
All of us are meditators already. I can follow you around or anybody, and I can point out times when you drop out of your conceptual mind walking around or having a cup of tea or talking to a friend, and you drop into a quiet, alert, present, alive state of mind where you're just living from what is occurring to you. That's a natural meditative state.
And here I was working hard on myself. I was meditating four hours a day. I had trained myself to wake up at the end of REM sleep and with flashlight and pen, I recorded five full-length dreams to work on. I had affirmation notebooks, I had cognitive notebooks of challenging my thought content and reframing it. I had structured journals and unstructured journals and I had tons of techniques, but all of that takes energy and effort. So I was sleeping four hours a night and the rest of the time I was working on myself. Now my wife thought there was something wrong with this. You're obsessed with yourself.
I can't talk to you now. I have to go meditate. I can't, I have to work on my journals. I have to I have and I was reading several books a week on spiritual and psychological books every week. And my wife said, Dicken, you work harder on yourself than anybody I know. And I said, I thought it was a compliment. I really did. I said, Thank you so much. you know.
You need to work harder on yourself, Quisi, my wife, Quizy. You need to work harder on yourself. You have to meditate. You have now she's walking around so present and so loving and so compassionate. Honestly, it's unbelievable. I feel blessed to have come across this woman and that we've been married for fifty-eight years.
Lian (34:47)
my goodness, how wonderful.
Dicken (34:49)
I know, I know. And I keep falling in love with her over and over and over, all just morning out. Teenager around her. It's it's pathetic. It's just it it's just and and that's our birthright and that's available to everybody. And it's not
Lian (34:57)
Ha ha ha.
So lovely.
Dicken (35:14)
Technique dependent that people can have insights into how it's thought creating feeling. And I can tell you honestly, from teaching this to tens of thousands of people, if you ask someone who's stressed why they're stressed or upset or having difficulties psychologically, you'd be hard pressed to find a single person who says, Well, that's obvious why I feel that way. That's what I'm thinking.
Lian (35:43)
Hmm. Yes, it definitely it was such a I remember when I very first came across the principles and it was such a I I still remember I had one of those I guess quite profound and instant kind of big insights and it was it was just reading this single line that said something like thought creates your reality was something really simple. And it just was like it just exploded in my awareness. And it was that I could never see life again the same because it was like that seeing the role of thought. it was like I can't ever see anything the same after this. This changes everything. And I actually said, I remember saying aloud spontaneously, this changes everything. And the funny thing was though.
And I can still remember this looking back to those early days. It was like, how is it possible? This has been here all along, hiding in plain it like now I've seen it is so obvious. And yet I've never seen this.
Dicken (36:59)
It's the power of insight. We can intellectually understand all kinds of things and we're exposed. When I met Sydney Banks, I had been a psychologist for ten years. And there were four Yale University did a study in and as I remember it, there were four hundred and fifty different theoretical approaches to helping people.
Lian (37:23)
Wow.
Dicken (37:25)
Four hundred and fifty different, all based on different theories. So they had all all different ideas. There were no universal principles. And Sydney Banks was the first person who said after his enlightenment experience, I've discovered the universal principles behind all psychological functioning and it's only understandable if you understand the spiritual dimension of life.
Lian (38:01)
Hm, ya
Dicken (38:03)
Principles are the way formless the fundamental characteristics of formless life energy is that there's an intelligence that knows how to create everything that exists.
It's a formless intelligence that is a gazillion times wiser than our intellectual intelligence. Even at Harvard they're cat catching on to this. They're saying IQ is a very poor measure for how how intelligent someone is in terms of living their lives and and and having successful relationships and You can have an extremely high IQ and be totally caught up in and wedded to ideas and beliefs and concepts in suffering.
Lian (38:55)
Yeah, so true.
Dicken (38:57)
Right. So this fundamental nature of life energy is intelligent is conscious, so that everything that's created has awareness because it's created from a field of conscious energy. So every cell in the universe has awareness. I remember in biology in high school, a one celled paramecium knows how to find food and knows how to avoid noxious stimulation and move away from it and move that's awareness. One cell
Lian (39:43)
Mm. Wow. So magical.
Dicken (39:45)
And think of every cell in our body having awareness. It's like it's like remarkable. And and so that's why consciousness has been used as a word in spiritual teaching for centuries and centuries. And then Syd says, another quality though is this unlimited creative potential. And he called that the principle of Thought But he's not talking about thought content. He's talking about what creates every bit of our mental activity. Now it's really to me it's really simple and obvious now. W we're both on computers.
Lian (40:26)
Mm-hmm.
Dicken (40:35)
You this would not be called the computer if it wasn't connected to an energy source that brought it to life.
We're the same way. We're a physical being, but we wouldn't be called a human being. Being is the spiritual part, the energy part, the soul part, the alive part. It's what animates us. The word for soul in Latin is anima, which means that's where the word animation comes from. It's what brings us to life, brings our senses to life so that we can see and hear and feel and taste and touch. So when we quiet down, we become more like the qualities that are characteristic of the universe. We become more wise, we become more conscious, and we become more creatively responsive in the moment.
Lian (41:37)
As you may have noticed, our line dropped out right at the end. So Dicken and I didn't get the chance to say goodbye. But as a result of that happening, we agreed to firstly put the episode out because it was such a good one and we'd actually recorded for, you know, pretty much the amount of time we'd planned to anyway. But as a result of that abrupt ending, we agreed to come back and do a part two, which will be available on the podcast very soon. And we got into some very interesting gosh, I guess questions and maybe pitfalls, challenges that I witnessed back when I was part of the three principle community. And I know that people have shared my own sense of kind of things that had them perhaps move on from the three principles. So we got into that in that part two, which again is coming soon.
And here are three things that stayed with me from this conversation. Almost every mystical tradition across centuries and cultures organised themselves around the same three movements, emptying, filling, and giving it away. The language differed, but the pointing was very, very similar, if not identical.
The word ecstatic has nothing to do with euphoria. Its original meaning is simply to stand outside your mind or outside your intellect, outside that sense of this is how things are. And every genuine spiritual teacher across history understood that this was the prerequisite for touching something real. When someone who has spent years working intensively on themselves discovered that the state they were seeking requires no technique at all.
Something profound can shift. The meditative state was never an achievement. It is the mind's natural condition already present beneath whatever noise happens to be running on the surface. If you'd like to hop on over to the show notes for the links,they're at wild sovereign soul.com slash podcast slash five five zero
And as you heard me say earlier, if you're struggling with the challenges of walking your soul path in this crazy modern world and long for guidance, kinship, and support, come join us in Unio the community for soul seekers. You can discover more and join us by hopping over to wild sovereignsoul.com slash unio now. Let's walk the path home together.
And if you don't want to miss out on next week's episode, head on over to your podcasting app or platform of choice, including YouTube, and hit that subscribe or follow button. That way you'll get each episode delivered straight to your device automagally as soon as it's released. Thank you so much for listening. You've been wonderful. I'll catch you again next week. And until then, I'm sending you all my love and blessings as you walk your own wild sovereign soul path.