Formless and Form

Transcribed by machine and corrected by a reader against the recording.

01I found this great nothingness0:01

I believe the physicists nowadays are starting to honestly believe that there is such a thing as a formless energy. But one of them may find it, and if he does find it, he’ll find it from within himself. And when he comes out, I guarantee when he turns round to his associates and say, “I found this great nothingness. I found the essence of life, this no-form energy.” You know what they turn round and say to him? They say, “Ah, you’ve gone religious on us.” All things are created from formless energy.

From this formless energy comes creation. The formless energy takes form and we call it matter. And that’s what life is. It’s matter. All matter, no matter what the form is, is all basically stems from the same spiritual energy. That’s why if you took, no matter if it was a stone, or water, air, no matter what element it was, you take it and you really refine it and it will go down to the same spiritual energy. Because that’s what life is, spiritual energy.

02The divine illusion, and no judgment1:28

It’s a great illusion, the divine illusion. This is where a lot of your Indian gurus will talk about the great illusion. That’s what they’re talking about. The formless is formless, period. Non-existent to us. As to death, you go back to this formless state, this heavenly state. Everybody. I know some people say that God judges, and you’ve got to go through this judgment on death. I can assure you that is not true.

If you have a God that’s non-judgmental and pure love, I’d like to know who is going to judge you. And on death, you go from the physical to the great nothingness. The great nothingness is nothing. There is nothing. It’s just a void. It’s just zero. No judgment. I would argue until—well, I wouldn’t argue, but I would discuss this till the day I die—that there is no judgment. And this puts a lot of fear in people. I don’t know who brought this out originally, who was going to judge, but to me it was put there for fear.

And if you can take this fear away, it takes the fear away of life and death, because it’s non-judgmental. And that’s exactly what I’m talking about, non-judgmental. There is absolutely—when I went through this experience, you know how they say you’ve got to die to live? Well, that’s what I’m talking about. The experience I went through was the experience of death. I know that. But it wasn’t a physical death; it was a spiritual death. And when you have a physical death, you’re gone.

03Cold Mountain3:44

That’s it. It’s finished. But if you have a spiritual death, what they call a spiritual death, you’re here to tell the tale about it, and that’s what I’m doing. I remember the first time I ever got a glimmer of this. I wasn’t one to go to awareness groups, not at all. I knew nothing about them. And somebody suggested that Barb and I go to a place called Cold Mountain, just off Vancouver Island, because there was some incredible doctor from New York was going to be there. And I thought, “Well, he might be able to help Barb and I.”

04There’s no such thing as insecurity4:27

So I went, and it was disastrous. It was really disastrous. Everybody was fighting. They were going back in the past, cursing and swearing at each other, and I thought, “Wait a minute, we’re better off than they are.” And I was just about to leave, and that evening, this young fellow came up to me and he said to me, “You know,” he said, “the other evening you told me that you were an insecure person.” He says, “And I’ve never heard such nonsense in all my life.” And now what I heard was beyond the words. What I heard him say was, “There’s no such thing as insecurity.”

It’s all created from thought. That’s what I heard. So I got all excited and I said to him, “Have you any idea what you just said?” And he said, “Of course I do. I don’t make idle chatter.” And I knew he didn’t because he had just told me ten minutes prior to that how insecure he was. So what happened was I got this inspiration. I got this knowledge all of a sudden coming to me that all, most of my insecure problems were all created from thought. And I was so excited. For three days and three nights, I didn’t sleep because I was falling in love with the world.

05Falling in love with the world6:01

Not with my wife, not with my children, but with the world. It was a universal love. And I lay in bed night after night, and beautiful. It was really beautiful because all this wisdom was coming into me. And on the third night, my late wife and I and the children decided to go to see the grandma in Salt Spring. We got over to Salt Spring, we were sitting in the kitchen that evening, and I was reading the Sun paper, and I heard the two ladies talking in the kitchen, and I listened to them, and this is the first time I realized what cosmic humor was.

I burst out laughing because of what they were saying. I knew they didn’t know what they were talking about. Well, the two ladies got really mad at me and they came back into the kitchen, they come in the living room, and they said, “May I ask what’s so funny?” And that made me laugh even more. And about five minutes went by and the two ladies were sitting in the living room and I stood up to try and get off the hook, so to speak, because I knew I had two women mad at me. And I went to talk to them, and instead of talking to them, I swung round and I looked out the picture window, and it was this. I was sucked down a tunnel. Then there was white light all round about me buzzing.

06The white light, and the meaning of Mind7:35

I was in the center of this white buzzing light, and right there and then I knew I had realized the true meaning of God. Nothing great, just the meaning of God. At the same time, I realized the true meaning of mind. Mind and God being the same. And I thought, “Oh, that’s what people have been trying to teach since day one.” That’s why they’ve got churches all over the world. This is what the psychologists and therapists of the world have been trying to look for. And right there and then, I started to cry.

07I’m home, pet. I’m free.8:19

I turned round to Barb and I said, “I’m home, pet. I’m free. I’ve made it. I’ve conquered this world. This means to say that you and I will be traveling all over the world helping people. There’ll be people from all over the world come to see us, and there’ll be millions of people getting healed, not through me, but through these other doctors and therapists.” And it started to happen. I could never more, no more explain it to you than fly to the moon. All I can do is give you a rough account of what happened. And all I’m saying is very simple realization, the realization, the true realization of what God really means.

And what God really means is the, to me, is the energy of all things, whether in form or formless. When it’s in form, we call it creation. When it’s formless, we call it spiritual. And we are all spiritual beings turned into form. Now, if I had gone back into my old friends and said to them, “Look, I just realized the secret of mind,” and whatever, they would have thought I was crazy. So I didn’t say anything at all. But the change in me was so drastic, they honestly thought I’d had a nervous breakdown because I was talking so strange.

And I had to go along with that. I live in a totally different world now than I did right up until I was forty-three years of age. And here I am, sixty-eight, and I’m still trying to give it out. And I give it to anybody in the world who wants it. I’ve tried every way I think possible. Well, actually, it wasn’t what I expected. I thought it was so simple. What I’d realized that I could just go to any psychologist and tell them, or any preacher and tell them, and they would realize what I was talking about. But it wasn’t like that at all. It was the extreme opposite.

08Like sticking a pin in a tiger10:42

It was like sticking a pin in a tiger. And I calmed down a while, and for ten months I really did nothing but just look and see what other people were doing. And after the ten months were finished, I never expected to leave my work because I’d been there fourteen years. And one Friday I was working away, and all of a sudden I realized I have to go to Salt Spring. I have to leave. There’s no doubt. So I went in and phoned my late wife, Barbara, and she agreed, and I put in a month’s notice and came here. And everybody thought I was crazy because I had no money.

I had no way to support myself, but I knew deep in my heart, I had the faith. I knew that everything would be okay, and I didn’t know how it was going to go out. I didn’t know anything about it. Then from nowhere, people started to come from all over the world. Gurus came from India, priests came from Tibet, ministers came, psychologists came, psychiatrists came. But to be truthful with you, there’s very, very few people realized what I was talking about. They had a suspicion that what I was saying was the same as them, but they were all caught up in their old ways of believing that something in the past was more valuable than the now.

And what they didn’t realize is that what they were looking for, they already had inside them. And that’s what was so devastating to my friends because they knew I didn’t have an education. They knew I didn’t know anything about psychology, psychiatry, or philosophy or theosophy. And when it started to come out in me, it was flabbergasting to me. It was exciting, it was amazing, and I didn’t know how it was going to work. But I remember the first time anybody ever came to me at all. And one day there was a knock on the door, and it was raining.

09Are you Mr. Banks?12:58

I remember that, and I walked to the door, and here’s this young lady. And she said to me, “Are you Mr. Banks?” And I said, “Yes.” She says, “Well, I hear tell you can help people.” And I honestly thought she had the wrong Mr. Banks. And I said, “I’m sorry, you must be mistaken. You must be meeting someone else.” And she repeated, “Are you Syd Banks?” And I said, “Yes.” She says, “Well, it’s you. It’s you I want to see.” So we asked her in, and she told us all these horrible tales about her past. And I remember saying to her—the first time in my life it ever happened—“Well, dear, I’m not a therapist, and I don’t want to talk to you about your problems.”

“That’s up to the doctor. But just listen.” And whatever I said, I don’t know what it was, but it was very, very spiritual. And within no time at all, that doctor went back to her, that girl went back to her doctor and said that she didn’t need him anymore and thanked him because she just realized all her problems were created from thought. And that was it. And that was probably twenty-three years ago. And that lady’s still in beautiful condition because it’s a world of thought. It’s a psychological world. It honestly is. It’s a psychological world.

10The missing link: Mind, Consciousness, and Thought14:27

We all see through our own psyche. And it’s a world created from divine thought, because that’s what life is. It’s a divine thought suspended within the boundaries of time and space and matter. That’s what life is. And we go through this life via our own thinking. That’s why we’re thinkers. And if you can honestly see the connection between what I call the Three Principles, mind, consciousness, and thought, these Three Principles together create our reality in life. Absolutely. That is the missing link that psychology, psychiatry, and a lot of therapies throughout the world have been searching for since day one.

They are the missing links: mind, consciousness, and thought. Mind is the universal intelligence of all things. Consciousness gives us the ability, the power of universal consciousness gives us the ability to see and react to creation. And thought is the universal power that we use to guide us. And if you can take your thoughts and take them back from whence they came, take them inside to your own wisdom, this will cure many, many mental sicknesses.

And I’m telling you right now. What you’re looking for is contained in those Three Principles. I know somebody that’s found four principles. I know another therapist that’s found eight principles. Well, that’s impossible, because the Three Principles are the Trinity, and the Trinity covers all things. One said emotions was the fourth. But you can’t have an emotion without a thought. You can’t have an emotion without being conscious, and you can’t have an emotion without having a mind. So that is not a principle.

That is the result of a principle. That’s why I wrote that book, The Missing Link, because I heard that those people were coming out with those ridiculous statements that there was eight principles. And that’s why I wrote it, to make sure it went in black and white before anything was lost. I hear the other people taking thought and they cut it into segments, and one person says eight segments are the perfect amount. Now, why he came up with that idea, I don’t know. But you can’t break thought into a segment, because thought, divine thought, has no form.

How can you cut no form into segments? Now, what they’re talking about is what they’re doing with their thoughts. You have an angry thought. You have a sad thought. You have all these. You have a jealous thought. You have a spiteful thought. They’re all created from divine thought. Divine thought you cannot. It’s just a power. It’s a gift. See, they all work from those three same components: mind, consciousness, and thought, plus our free will. That means to say you have the freedom to use those components as you wish, to think as you wish, to see as you wish, to feel as you wish.

11You’re a free agent in this world called life18:30

You’re a free agent in this world called life. And that’s why everybody varies. We all use the same Three Principles, but the free will is the variation. That’s where the difference comes in. And some people say, well, they don’t have a free will. Of course they do. I mean, you take during the Second World War, if you were put in a concentration camp or something, well, you don’t have the freedom to think out loud or to say what you want, but you do have the freedom of thought. I mean, you can live in, say, a communist country where you’re dictated, there’s a dictatorship, but you still have the freedom of thought.

Not the freedom of speech. That’s a man-made thing. But the freedom of thought, that’s a God-created thing. That’s the difference. It’s simplicity. Everybody looks for something complicated. They want to try and figure out why their marriage isn’t working. What went wrong? Where did it go wrong? Why did it go wrong? And they’ve got all these different complications, these coming in, and they try and analyze them and figure them out. No, no, no, no, no. All you have to do is to realize your thoughts are creating what you see.

It’s a world of thought. It truly is. I mean, I still have my past, and I remember good days and I remember bad days, but I don’t let the bad days control me now. Whereas right up until this experience, that’s what was happening. This is why I was an angry person. I was disappointed with life. I thought life had done me a bad turn because I didn’t get an education, because I was adopted. Many, many things I could call to make me an unhappy person.

But once I realized all it was was thought, my entire life changed. Then if I went back to my childhood, where I thought I had a kind of poor upbringing, poor me, poor Syd didn’t have a chance because I was a working man, because, because, because. When I look back now, I see it with beauty. I see my parents with beauty, my adopted parents. I see where I lived with beauty. I… I see my whole past that way. And because I see that, I’ve uncontaminated myself from the past.

12It comes as a feeling21:36

And now I’m living with no contamination. That’s the way I see it. It comes as a feeling. If you realize what I’m saying and you get a nice feeling, you’re getting it. That feeling is the positive proof that you’re getting it. Now, I’ve had people, you know, I’d be giving a lecture, and someone would say they didn’t understand what was being said, but it felt good. Now, I’d say to them, “Well, that’s it. You’ve found it. You’ve found that nice feeling. Hang on to that nice feeling, and the information will come later.” But you’ll never get it from the intellect.

Never. Truth can never come in from the outside in. It comes from the inside out, because you’ve already got it. And if you look at the words of the wise from the beginning of time, no matter who you think it is, they’re all saying the same thing: “Look within. There lies the answer you’re seeking.” It’s inside. It’s that innate mental health that everybody in the world has, if they can get their own personal thoughts out the way. Now, I know that a lot of people will say, “Well, consciousness. I’ve been at conscious raising groups.”

You know, they’ll tell you that. But what they become conscious of is the mess the world is in. And that is one stage too late. You’ve got to find what is causing the troubles throughout the world. And what is causing the troubles through the world is lack of consciousness, lack of being conscious of who you are, what you are, and how you relate to the world you live in. If you can become conscious of the divine gift that’s inside you, mind, consciousness, and thought, if you can become conscious of that, then this will help you throughout your life. Absolutely. There is no doubt. Can’t be a doubt, because this is what the world is. It sees Three Principles in action.