A plain, honest look at how human experience actually works. No jargon. No noise. Just something true that was always there.
Free to read. Free to share.
About
Your introduction goes here. A few honest sentences about what brought you to this understanding, what you noticed was getting in the way for people, and why you wanted to create something cleaner and simpler. Written in your own words, in your own time.
No rush. When you are ready, this is where it lives.
Read
The same understanding, written two ways. Start with whichever feels right. There is no wrong choice.
The Human Experience
Takes its time. Each idea is given room to breathe and unfold naturally. Written for anyone who likes to sit with something and let it settle.
The Human Experience — Condensed
Every sentence earning its place. The same understanding in its clearest, plainest form. For anyone who wants the essentials without any filler.
This is not a self-help book. It is not asking you to change anything about yourself, adopt a new belief system, follow a particular practice, or work toward some improved version of who you are. It is not asking you to do anything at all.
What this is, is a plain honest look at something that is already true. Something that has always been true. Something that, once you see it, you cannot unsee — and yet seeing it doesn't require any kind of special effort or particular state of mind. It just requires a willingness to look.
Sydney Banks was a Scottish-born welder living in British Columbia, Canada. He had no background in psychology, philosophy, or any formal study of the mind. In 1973, in the middle of an ordinary conversation, something became clear to him about the nature of human experience — about how thought works, what consciousness is, and what underlies all of it. He spent the rest of his life pointing to that understanding as simply and clearly as he could.
What he pointed to wasn't a system or a method. It wasn't a set of techniques for managing your thinking or improving your emotional state. It was something much simpler than that. He was pointing to the way things actually work — the basic mechanics of how a human being creates their experience of life, moment to moment.
One thing worth saying before we begin: this understanding is not something you need to believe in for it to be true. Gravity works whether or not you know about it. The same is true of what is described here. You don't have to accept any of it on faith. You are invited, instead, just to look — and see whether what is described matches your own direct experience of being alive.
Here is something that sounds so simple it barely seems worth saying: every single thing you have ever experienced in your life, you have experienced inside your own mind.
Not outside. Inside.
Think about that for a moment. Every conversation you have ever had, every place you have ever been, every relationship, every success, every disappointment, every moment of joy, every stretch of worry — all of it arrived in your experience through your own perception of it. Not through the things themselves, but through your mental experience of those things.
You have never experienced the world directly. You have experienced your perception of the world. Your experience of any given moment is always, without exception, created inside you — not delivered to you from outside.
Two people sit in the same traffic jam. One of them is furious. The other is calm, listening to music, quite unbothered. Same traffic. Same delay. Completely different experiences. Where is the difference coming from? Not from the traffic — the traffic is identical for both of them. The difference is coming from inside each person. From how each person is thinking about the situation.
The traffic jam itself is neutral. It is thought that gives it its meaning, its weight, its emotional colour.
Thought is not a window onto reality. It is a paintbrush that creates your experience of reality. Every single moment, your thinking is painting the picture of the world you appear to be looking at.
When you feel anxious, you are not feeling the threatening situation outside you. You are feeling your thinking about the situation. The anxiety lives in the thought, not in the circumstance. In every case, without exception, the feeling is the thought. They are not separate things.
If your feelings were caused by the world — by circumstances, by what other people do, by what happens to you — then you would be at the mercy of those things. Your wellbeing would depend on life going a particular way.
But if your feelings come from your thinking — and your thinking is something that moves and changes and flows naturally, the way weather moves through a sky — then your wellbeing is not actually at the mercy of what happens to you.
Thought is like weather. It comes and goes. It changes. It shifts. A storm does not require any effort to clear — it clears itself, in its own time. Thought does the same thing.
When you understand that thought moves naturally, you stop needing to manage it so much. You can recognise a difficult thought for what it is — a passing event in the mind, not a permanent fact about reality — and let it do what thought naturally does, which is move through and pass.
When you are frightened, the fear doesn't feel like a thought. It feels like reality. When you are convinced that something is hopeless, the hopelessness doesn't feel like a perspective — it feels like a fact. This is the nature of thought: it is experienced as reality. It never announces itself as just thinking.
The moment you recognise that what you are experiencing is thought — something eases. The experience doesn't necessarily vanish, but you hold it differently. It has less power over you. Not because you changed it, but because you understood what it was.
Mind refers to the intelligence behind life itself. Not your personal mind — the accumulated thinking of a lifetime — but something larger. The underlying intelligence that all minds draw from.
You did not design your own nervous system. You did not write the instructions that govern how your cells divide, how your immune system responds, how your brain processes language. There is intelligence operating in you that is not coming from your conscious thinking. That is simply true.
Beneath the busy traffic of personal thought, there is something quieter and clearer. Most people notice this in moments of genuine rest, or when a creative problem resolves itself without effort, or in a moment of unexpected clarity when something just becomes obvious.
Consciousness is the capacity to be aware. It is what makes experience possible. Before any particular experience — before any specific thought or feeling or perception — there is the fact of awareness itself. You are aware. That basic fact is consciousness.
Not all experience feels equally vivid. In moments of genuine peace, experience has a particular quality — clear, bright, alive. In moments of deep stress or mental noise, experience can feel dull, grey, heavy. What is changing is not the world outside but the quality of consciousness in that moment — which shifts with the quality of your thinking.
Thought, as a principle, is the creative power of the human mind. The ability to form ideas, images, interpretations, beliefs, stories. Every human being is doing this continuously. We are not passive receivers of reality — we are active creators of our experience of it.
The only issue is that thought is so seamlessly built into experience that most people never notice it is happening. They experience their thoughts as reality rather than as thoughts. And this confusion — this not-knowing — is the source of almost all human suffering.
A snow globe, when shaken, is full of turbulence. But you don't have to do anything to clear it. You just have to stop shaking it. The snow settles on its own. The human mind works in exactly the same way.
The way you feel about yourself, the conclusions you have drawn about your own worth, your own capabilities, your own fundamental okayness as a person — all of it is thought. None of it is a factual description of you.
Most of us walk around with a more or less settled sense of what we are like. This settled sense feels like self-knowledge. It feels like an accurate picture. But it is a thought-created picture that has been reinforced so many times, for so long, that it feels like fact.
The moment you genuinely see that the self-criticism, the self-doubt, the conviction that there is something wrong with you is simply thought — in that moment, something changes. Not because you challenged the thought. Just because you saw it for what it is. A thought seen clearly as a thought no longer has the same grip.
Wellbeing is not something you achieve. It is not a destination. It is your natural state — the state the system returns to when nothing is getting in the way.
When you cut your hand, you do not have to instruct it to heal. The body moves toward healing by itself. Health is the default. The mind works in exactly the same way.
When thought gets very busy, wellbeing gets obscured. Not destroyed. Not lost. Obscured. The way clouds obscure the sun. The sun is still there. And just as clouds clear without you doing anything, troubled thinking clears. On its own. In its own time.
You are not in the business of creating wellbeing from scratch. You are just removing what is temporarily obscuring something that has always been there. And the main thing that obscures it is taking your own thinking too seriously.
Low mood is not data. It is not telling you something true about your life or your future. It is showing you what your life looks like from inside a storm of troubled thinking.
When you are in a low mood, do as little as possible. Not because you are weak or incapable, but because the thinking available to you in a low mood is not your best thinking. Decisions made from low mood tend to be defensive, reactive, and short-sighted.
The mood will change. It always does. When it does, nothing will have changed in the world — but everything will look different. That difference tells you what the low mood was made of. Thought. Not truth.
Events happen. Real things occur in the world. Loss is real. Harm is real. Difficult and painful experiences are real. None of that is being minimised here.
What this understanding points to is not the events themselves but how we carry them forward. Because the past, as a living presence in your current experience, is made of thought. The original event is over. What remains is your thinking about it.
You are not your history. You are the awareness in which the story of your history appears. And awareness is not defined by its contents.
The words in this book are just words. They are fingers pointing at something. The point is never the finger. These words are pointing at something in your own direct experience — something you can verify for yourself, right now, simply by looking honestly at how your experience actually works.
The understanding is simpler than any description of it. And it is closer than any book can reach.
This does not ask you to believe anything. It asks you to look.
Everything here points to something already true about your experience. You do not need to adopt it, accept it on faith, or join anything. You just need to see whether what is described matches what you already know about being alive.
You have never experienced the world directly. You have experienced your thinking about the world.
Every feeling you have ever had came from a thought. Not from a circumstance. The circumstance was just there. The thought gave it its weight, its colour, its meaning.
This is always, without exception, how it works.
Thought is not a window onto reality. It is a paintbrush that creates your experience of reality.
When you feel anxious, you are not feeling the threatening situation. You are feeling your thinking about it. The feeling is the thought. They are not separate things.
When you are frightened, the fear does not feel like a thought — it feels like reality. This is the nature of thought. It presents itself as reality. It never announces itself as just thinking.
But the moment you recognise that what you are experiencing is thought, something eases. Not because you changed it. Because you saw what it was.
A difficult thought will not stay forever. Thought moves on its own. You do not have to clear it. You just have to stop pressing your thumb into it.
This is not suppression. It is understanding the nature of thought well enough to stop being alarmed by it.
There is intelligence operating in you that is not coming from your conscious thinking. You did not design your nervous system. You did not write the instructions that govern how your body heals itself. That intelligence is always there.
You do not create access to it. You simply stop obscuring it with so much busy thinking.
Consciousness is the capacity to be aware. Before any particular thought or feeling, there is the simple fact of awareness itself. You are here. You are awake. You are experiencing.
Thought is the creative power of the human mind. We are not passive receivers of reality — we are active creators of our experience of it. The only issue is that thought is so seamlessly built into experience that most people never notice it is happening.
If the source of suffering is thought, and thought is by nature transient — then no suffering is permanent. No state is fixed forever.
A snow globe, when shaken, is full of turbulence. You do not have to clear it. You just have to stop shaking it. The snow settles on its own. The human mind is the same.
The way you feel about yourself — the conclusions you have drawn about your worth, your capability — is thought. Not fact.
A thought seen clearly as a thought no longer has the same grip. Its power came entirely from being mistaken for reality.
Wellbeing is not something you achieve. It is your natural state — the state the system returns to when nothing is getting in the way.
You are always, without exception, living in the feeling of your thinking — not the feeling of the world.
Thought is always moving. No state is permanent. The system always tends back toward health.
Wellbeing is not a destination. It is what is already there when thinking settles.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. The story that there is — is thought.
That is the whole thing. The rest is just looking until you see it.