Three invisible forces are quietly building every experience you have

Joseph Nguyen credits an understanding first described by Sydney Banks with explaining, at the most basic level, how any human experience gets built at all. Banks proposed that every experience we have, no matter the content, is assembled from three principles working together: Universal Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Remove any one of them, and there is nothing to experience.

Universal Mind, in this account, is the intelligence behind all living things, the same force that lets an acorn become an oak, a planet stay in orbit, or a cut on your finger close itself without instructions from you. Many traditions have given this force different names, God, Source, Infinite Intelligence, but functionally it's described as the energy from which everything, including thought, originates. Nguyen argues that when we feel connected to this, we feel whole and at peace, and when we get lost in our own thinking, we feel cut off from it, which is where feelings of separation and loneliness come from.

Consciousness is what allows any of this to be perceptible at all. Without it, Nguyen writes, our senses would have nothing to register, since there would be no awareness to receive what they pick up. It's the mechanism that brings raw material to life for us.

Thought is that raw material itself, the substance we shape into the specific experiences we have. To make the relationship concrete, Nguyen compares it to a DVD, Consciousness, and Universal Mind working together like a movie night: Thought is the disc holding the information, Consciousness is the DVD player and television that can turn that information into something you can actually watch, and Universal Mind is the electricity powering the whole system, invisible but necessary for any of it to run.

The practical use of this framework, according to Nguyen, is that it locates the source of our suffering precisely: not in events, not even in thoughts themselves, but in what we do with thought once Consciousness brings it into view. It also explains why new insight can arrive that has nothing to do with our personal history, since Thought's source is described as Universal Mind rather than our own accumulated experience.

Start by simply noticing, for a moment, that you are not only seeing whatever is in front of you but aware that you're seeing it, since that awareness is doing separate work from the seeing itself. The next time a strong feeling shows up, trace it back to the thought running just before it rather than assuming the outside event alone produced it. Pay attention, too, to everything running in your body without your instruction, your heartbeat, your breathing, a scrape healing on its own, as a small daily glimpse of an intelligence operating beneath your personal effort. And when you feel stuck for a new idea, remember that fresh thought is described as coming from beyond your own stored memories, so waiting quietly can serve you better than forcing an answer.