The Wisdom Within

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

01Thought is like a magical paintbrush0:00

Thought is like a magical paintbrush. You know how an artist, he gets a canvas, and he gets a paintbrush, and he starts painting trees, and he starts painting rivers, and animals, and grass, and mountains, and he paints a picture. Well, when we’re born, we’re given three principles: the principles of mind, the principles of consciousness, and the principles of thought.

Mind and consciousness are like the paint. The brush is what you use, and the brush is thought. And you take your thoughts, and you paint the world you live in. If you paint a bad world, you live in a bad world. And somebody comes along and says, “Gee, that picture you’ve painted is pretty grim.” And they’ll say, “Well, that’s the only one I know. That’s been my life since the beginning. I’ve always painted this way.” They’ll say, “Well, why don’t you take that brush of yours, which is your thoughts, and go over that and paint a new picture?”

Someone will say, “Never. I’m not going to destroy my picture.” “Do you like your picture?” “No, I don’t like it. I like a better one, but I’m not going to destroy what I’ve already done.” But the ones that have the courage and go past that fear say, “Okay,” and they take the paint again and they paint over it, and they paint a different world. They paint blue skies and something really beautiful, and that’s it. And that’s what these doctors here are doing to their patients. They’re teaching them to paint a different picture with their thoughts. The whole thing’s metaphors.

02Beyond the words2:13

A lot of these wise writings throughout the world, they’re all written in metaphors, but if they’re taken as gospel, then you get lost. The gospel is not what can be said by words. The gospel is what is beyond the words. Beyond the words lies the beauty that you’re looking for: purity of mind, purity of thought, and purity of consciousness. Now, as human beings, you can’t be pure. It’s impossible. For the simple reason, even seeing the illusion, you’re not pure. There’s only one place you can find purity, and that is beyond time, space, and matter, where the divine mind lies. Only divine mind can be pure.

The personal mind is always impure, to different degrees. But the purer your mind is, the better picture you’re going to paint in life. What you’re looking for is inside you. If you want to listen to me, you can, but don’t follow. And this is what was happening when I first started in Salt Spring. Literally two hundred people a day. It was nothing for two hundred people a day to come off the boat to come and see me. And the one time I talked for three days and three nights without even going to sleep. And I started to realize this is silly, really silly.

And I would send them home and they’d get really put off. “You’re not much of a help. You’re sending us home.” And they’d have medallions of some guru that they were following. And I’d say, “Well, look, why don’t you follow this man that’s around your neck?” And they’d look down and say, “Well, I’m not getting anywhere.” And I say, “Of course not, because you’re listening to somebody else. Listen to that little voice deep within your own soul, because that’s where the answer is, deep in your own soul.” And as I said yesterday, soul is pure consciousness.

03Losing your soul4:51

Now, through the years, you’ve heard people say, “That man or that woman is losing their soul to the devil, and they’re going astray.” You know what that means? That they’re losing their level of understanding to their own self, their own ego. And that’s what the ego is. The ego is the dark side of life, because the ego is the illusionary carrier in this world. And this illusionary carrier tricks you. It wants you to get lots of money. It wants you to get lots of power.

It wants you to be number one. And this is what’s created all the problems from the very beginning of time. This is what creates wars. This is what creates all the atrocities that’s going on in the world today. Now, this ego is, the way I see it, this ego is starting to take over the world. It’s going into everybody. It’s going into the mainstream. And this is why all the wars are happening, all the atrocities. Now, what the world has to do is to start looking in another way and look inside and lift the level of understanding. Now, that’s lift the level of consciousness, same thing.

04Lift the level of consciousness6:25

You lift your level of consciousness, you lift your level of understanding, and when this understanding comes, it will not come from outside. It will not come from a book. It will not come from a lecture. It’s inside. It’s an innate wisdom that lies inside. Now, when I say inside, that’s a metaphor. What I really mean is this innate wisdom is that mind, that divine mind that you’re connected to. And that’s the secret of mind. The secret of mind holds all the answers that human beings are looking for. All mankind is looking for this wisdom.

Whether they know it or not. Some people even look for it through drink. Some look for it other different ways. Some try it through yoga. Some try it through meditation. Some try it. There’s thousands of ways to try it. But no matter how they try it, if it’s an outside trial, it’ll never happen. It’ll always happen inside. And that’s why a true mystic is not interested in you. They’re not ashamed. They’re not interested in you. They couldn’t care less, because you’re an ego. They don’t want to talk to you. But when they talk to you, they don’t talk to you, the little ego.

They talk inside. They talk into themselves, because we’re all one. And they talk to you inside. And they keep taking you inside. And maybe someday you will hear past the words, and you go, “Whoa,” just like what Chip was talking about. That whoa. You’ve got it. You feel this feeling, and it’ll never come from the intellect. It’ll come from a feeling. And if you are getting a good feeling right now, you’re getting it. If you’re getting a bad feeling, you’re not. It’s that simple. And people used to get up, curse and swear at me, and tell me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

05What happened to my mother-in-law8:48

And even though the rest of the crowd would say, “Tell that man to shut up.” But that was the way it was. You know, I’ve had three people ask me, “What happened to my old mother-in-law?” Remember that? Now, when we first got married, I was one of the nicest human beings in the world. But after her husband passed away, she started to disappear. She started to stay with us, and maybe, we thought maybe it was because she was staying with us. But I knew better. Even before the experience, I knew better.

I knew what it was, but I knew if I said, “This is what it was,” there would be a big argument, so I just kept quiet. I had this experience, and thousands of people are coming to see us, all these gurus and mystics, all these different kinds of doctors and therapists, etc., etc. All searchers are all coming looking. And a lot of them are changing. And the doctors are changing their practice. Then they’d phone me up and say, “Syd, do you know what happened in my office today? It was a miracle.” Then through time they would say, “You know, when this first started happening to me, I was really amazed at the miraculous changes in the clients. But now it’s just an everyday occurrence, and it gets boring.”

Now she saw this. She saw all the gurus. She heard all the stories. She was sitting with all those psychologists and psychiatrists. She was hearing all those marvelous stories. She saw Chip and Jan change. She saw Ken and Elsie change. She saw all these different people change, and three years had gone by, and she’s still determined that she’s going to do something about it. So by this time, Barb and I knew the score, so we would just softly smile. You know, we just knew this was Grandma. That was it. And Grandma, this is what she would do.

06Socrates and Plato11:14

She was a great reader, and she knew I had read almost zero in my life. She knew that. So she’d go down the library, and she’d get books on Plato and Socrates. And she’d read little excerpts from Socrates and Plato, and she would come up to me and quite sneakily—she wouldn’t say what it was—she’d just say, “Syd, what do you think?” And she would quote Socrates or Plato. “What do you think about this?” And I would say, “Well, Mum, Socrates, what he’s saying is absolutely dead on, but here’s Plato. I don’t think this is right.” And she says, “Oh my God, he’s got the audacity to even talk about that.”

07Catherine12:02

“Do you know what I’m talking about?” And I’d say, “No.” And she would tell me. So that was it. Now we knew this one lady, and I’ll call her Catherine. I would never give her right name. But she was an awareness group leader. And this lady, she had been taken to the mental hospital quite a few times. And sometimes she was taken from her group and put into the mental hospital in an ambulance. And the group would get a get-well card and say, “Dear Catherine, we hope you get well soon. We miss your wisdom.” This is true.

That’s a true story. Now, Catherine was a lady, middle-aged, so let’s leave it that way. And she wore old English tweedy clothes, big black shoes, bent over, and she was pretty well drugged up from her psychiatrist. And she was into those up-front kind of training where you really were up-front with everybody, and you didn’t care if you cursed and swore at them, and this is what she was like. And she would argue with me and really get after me time and time again.

And finally Grandma says to me, “You know, Syd, you’re crazy. Why do you put up with that woman?” And here, she’s just as mad as hell. “Why do you put up with that woman? She’s not listening to you.” And I said, “Well, Mum, if she has the courage to come and face me and talk that way to me, I must have the respect to listen to her. And one of these days, she’s going to stick her nose in too far and then she’s going to get chopped off.” She says, “Well, I don’t think so.”

“She’ll never listen to you.” And now this was the pot calling the kettle black, eh? So time went on, and one day Grandma says to me, “I’ll tell you what. I will listen to you if, that’s a big if, if Kathleen so-and-so ever hears anything.” And I said, “Oh, okay.” And it was a big maybe, you know. So it just so happens the very next morning, Barb and I went down to the village to get some groceries. When we come back, there’s a letter on the table and it’s saying, “Dear Barb, something’s happened to Mum.”

“She’s really frightened, and she phoned me up, and she wants to come and stay with us.” This is our sister-in-law. And of course Barb phones up the sister-in-law and says, “What happened?” You know what happened? We just got out the door, drove down to the grocery store, and there was a knock on the door. So Mum knows this woman really well. She opens the door, and here’s this very vivacious lady standing, very beautifully dressed and happy and smiling, and she says, “Is Syd or Barb home?” She says, “No, I’m sorry, they just went down for groceries.”

“Who will I say is calling?” She says, “It’s me, Kathleen,” and that freaked Mum right out. She had changed so much she didn’t recognize her, she didn’t have a clue who she was talking with, and it freaked her out so much she got afraid. Remember yesterday I told you it was fear? She got afraid, and she phoned my sister-in-law to come and get her. So that was it. About three days later, there’s a knock on the door, and I go and open the door, and who’s standing there but Grandma. And she looks at me, and she’s got tears in her eyes, and she says, “Can I come home?”

08Can I come home?16:40

And I said, “Of course you can, Grandma. How did you enjoy your vacation?” She threw her arms around me and held me for the longest time, started to cry and said, “From now on, whatever you say, I will listen.” Now, here’s something. Within maybe a month, I would see this seventy-year-old woman sitting, lecturing and instructing and helping professional doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists.

She was lecturing to them in a very, very nice way. Her voice had changed, her whole attitude to life had changed, and I was a hero. I finally made it. And I remember once there was this gentleman came from Australia, and he was a doctor or something, I forget what it is, and he got the whole spiel, you know, what was happening and everything. And he and I, I said to him, “Well, look, let’s you and I walk along the beach.”

So the two of us walked along the beach, and we’re talking about this, that and the next thing. And we get back, and it’s about three quarters of an hour, we walk in, and he said to Barb, “You know, I’ve been with Syd for three quarters of an hour and he hasn’t said anything yet.” And Mum said, “If you’ve been with Syd for three quarters of an hour, you just didn’t hear him.” And that was it. She turned out to be the most beautiful lady you’ve ever met in your life, and this is the laugh. The people that knew her prior would say to me, “How’s the old cock pheasant getting on?”

And I think to myself, “Who are they talking about,” you know? Then the new people that knew her would say that Mary was the most loving human being they’d ever known in their life. And I’ll bet you in here there’s a lot of people knew her. If anyone got up here and started talking about my mother-in-law, they would tell you she was the most beautiful, tranquil, loving lady. And then when she was about seventy-four or five at this time, and she died when she was eighty, and just before she died she said to me, “You know, Syd, the last five years of my life have been worth the seventy-five years prior.”

She says, “If I had known this.” But that five years that she got was so beautiful to her. This was her life. And she was. She was an absolute dream of a lady. And that’s that old battle axe I was talking about yesterday. That’s how powerful it is. We’ve seen so many changes in so many people. It’s unbelievable. People were told they could never be healed. And just like that, they’d be over. But it wasn’t just like that, they’re over.

09They jumped the boundaries of time20:30

They would jump the boundaries of time and go beyond modern-day psychology. People in treatment, they just didn’t get treated and become okay. They jumped the boundaries of time and go beyond even the therapist at times. Then the therapist would ask them, and they would explain to the therapist. Because, you see, it’s not the amount of time that you’ve been listening. A lot of people will say, “Well, I’ve known Syd for thirty years, and you’ve only known him for a week, so I know a lot more than you.”

That’s not true. And if that therapist ever said that to you, you know that that therapist does not understand the Three Principles, because there’s no time. Time’s an illusion. And if you jump that boundary of time, and you can find out in seconds what it takes somebody else thirty years. I know when I was born, I must have been a dandy in the last life. I was miserable. I honestly, I did. I led a miserable life until I was forty-two years old.

10I blamed my past22:04

Nothing, nothing out there was, the whole world was against me. The way I was born, adopted into a family that I thought didn’t have any love, and go on and on. I’ll tell you something. If I had gone to a psychiatrist, a psychologist, prior to this, they would have said, “Wow, do you ever need help because of your past.” And I blamed my past, just like most everybody in the world blame their past, just like how the psychologists are told to take them into the past to find out where it all happened. But when I found out what I found, I realized the past had absolutely nothing to do with it.

It was the way I saw it. Now, if you take my level of understanding now and take me back into the past and make me a little boy again, and I’m coming through life with the level of consciousness I’ve got now, I would have seen a totally different world. I would have thought different, saw different, acted different. I would have had tons and tons of hope. Because this is something I never had, was hope. And this is what the beauty of the Three Principles are. And that’s the beauty of these—your therapists that are here now. You give your clients hope.

You don’t say, “Oh, there’s no hope for you.” You’ll say, “Let’s get down to the P’s and Q’s and find out what’s going on.” You see the health in them, and you see that the only thing that’s making them sick is their own thought system. So if you can take their thought system, and all you have to do is change a thought, and the sickness is gone. The thought creates the sickness. The thought cures it. All you have to do is change it. And you read any of those wise books and they’ll tell you, forgiveness is one of the greatest things on earth.

11Forgiveness releases you24:25

Because you’re not just releasing the person. Mainly, you’re releasing yourself. Because if you go around with bad feelings and you don’t want to forgive anybody, you are suffering. And you know it’s hard to give it up, because I think you’re a stinker. You did this to me twenty years ago, and you’re still a stinker, and I don’t want to give it up because I’ve said a lot of horrible things about you. But more important are thought horrible things about you, and I feel guilty, and I don’t want to give it up. But the moment you give it up, there’s a release, and you’re free.

You look at the person and say, “They weren’t really a stinker. They were just lost.” Then you’re free again. If I could go back in time, I would tell so many people in this world that I liked them, and I cared for them, and I loved them, people I disliked all my life. Because I now see, whoever it was, they were lost just like me. And that’s very important. It’s not just them that’s lost. I was lost. And when I found my way back home again, I saw that they were suffering like I used to.

And when you see somebody suffering, how can you go and hurt them? How can you go and have bad feelings when you see the person suffering? It just doesn’t make sense. So you take the suffering away from the people that you like, the people that you know, the people that want help. And this is what you therapists, and the people working in jails, the people working in the streets here, they’re trying to take away the suffering from people. And you’ll never get it from the intellect. Never. Never. The intellect’s a joke.

The intellect is what the ego uses to go through this life. What you’re seeking is beyond the intellect, beyond the world. It lies inside. And as I said before, like I’ve heard people say, “Inside means your heart. Inside means your chakra. Inside means in your head.” Inside is a metaphor. Inside really means that you’re connected to this greater power called divine mind, and that’s inside, because it’s not in this outside world.

It’s inside. And inside really is outside, and outside is really inside. It’s an opposite. You have to go the opposite way. That’s why you have to turn around and look a different way. I mean, I’ve met lots and lots of therapists, and they’ll say, “You know, Syd, I see all your friends doing all these beautiful things, and it’s incredible, and I’ve seen you do it, but we don’t do it that way. We do it our own way.” And I say, “Well, is it working?” “No. But this is the way we were taught, and this is the way we’re going to keep doing it.”

They’re not listening. They’re not listening to themselves. If they listened to themselves saying, “This is not a success,” then they would have to say, “What is?” and look around. But they’re determined that they won’t look. And again, you know what that is? Being a prisoner of the ego. And the strange thing is, the ego in reality is non-existent. It’s a delusional thing created from your own head. And how do you get rid of anything created from your own head?

Change your thoughts. Okay, let’s go to the mystical side of life. I mean, what am I talking about? I’m right there. But let’s go another direction. In my books, I talk about mind, consciousness, and thought, all being illusionary. Now, the reason they’re illusionary is because the whole world is a divine illusion. That’s simple enough. So therefore, everything in it is illusion. And I had some physicists come up to me and say, “Would you come up and explain why you’re saying mind?”

12The physicists, and the Dixie cups29:42

“I’m not with it. Why everything’s a delusion: time, space, and matter.” And I said, “Okay.” And so I visited them, and they were absolutely beautiful people. They were so nice to me, you wouldn’t believe. They knew I didn’t know beans about physics. And they knew within five minutes they could lose me just because of the vocabulary. But they were very, very nice. They wanted the truth, so they asked me. And they said, “You know, Syd, for many years now, physics have been saying that time is an illusion.”

“It’s only man-made. What do you think of that?” And I said, “That’s true. It’s only an illusion.” And one of them says, “Well, the latest one is space is an illusion.” And I said, “That’s true. It is.” And they said, “Well, would you explain to me how space is an illusion? Because we see space, the space between you and I right now.” So I got on the board, and I put the Three Principles, and we started talking about the Three Principles. And I said to them, “What do you want me to put, universal principles or divine?” And they said, “Whatever.”

And one man said, “Well, put divine.” So I said, “Okay.” So I put divine mind, divine consciousness, and divine thought. I started talking about them, and these physicists, all of a sudden they started talking. They said, “You know, you’re talking Eastern mysticism.” And I said, “Oh, really?” And they started talking about Eastern mysticism. And the other one would say, “You know what you’re talking about,” and they would keep going into different subjects. And it was super interesting for Judy and I to listen to them. But they were connecting that these principles hold everything. And they were coming out with the most elaborate statements.

So we got back to space being an illusion. And I have to admit, what I said at the beginning, the grace, if you want real space, is between here and here and the Scotsman. And I said, “But truthfully, I got two Dixie cups,” and I held them up, and I said, “What is between these Dixie cups?” And one said, “Space.” And I said, “No, there’s no space.” And they said, “Why?” Now listen to this. This is why I told you about beyond space and matter, there’s a formless energy, and this formless energy is turned into form, and that’s what we call creation.

Nothing in creation doesn’t have a form. Literally, there’s no such thing as nothingness in this form in this world. So we got the Dixie cups, and I said, “What is this Dixie cup made of?” It’s that formless energy turned into a form, the form of a Dixie cup. And so is this one. And in between the illusionary space, there’s energy, there’s dust particles, there’s all different kinds of things in between, but they can’t see them. But it doesn’t matter.

There’s still a form. So here’s a form, in between’s a form, and the Dixie cup’s a form. So there’s no such thing as a space. It just looks like it. And they said, “Well, what about time?” You know how the great mystics of the world have always talked about, put a lot of emphasis on the now. And this is where these doctors of this world today are having all their success, is because they take everybody back to the now. And there’s no such thing as the past. It’s an illusion. It’s historic illusion.

13Only now exists34:22

So the only thing that exists is the now. Yesterday doesn’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t exist. Only now exists. Since I said that statement, that doesn’t exist. Only the now. It’s always just the now. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now. You’re living in the now all the time, but your memory, your mind, your thoughts again, here we go, are holding on to this memory and dragging it through time, and you’re dragging an illusion through time.

Now the wise person comes and chops that off and says there’s no such thing as the past. Forget it. There’s only the now. And if you can come to the now, you will find your mental health. You will find the absolute secret of all things, what you call divine mind. Now just before Judy and I left, those physicists, all this stuff was on the board, and one physicist said, “You know, Syd, the great physicists of the world today, you know what they’re looking for? It’s something called God mind.” He says, “What do you think of that?” Now listen to this.

14The essence of mind35:52

All I did was got a piece of rag, and I put everything on that board off, and all I left was divine mind. I said, “This is the mind you’re looking for. It’s not an understanding of a mind. It’s finding the essence of mind.” And when you find the essence of mind, you find the essence of life. When you find the essence of life, you’re home, because you will travel from this world to the world before. That is, you will travel from the form to the formless. Once you find the secret to the formless, you know the secret to the form.

Here is where you see in the singular. If only thine eyes be single, you will see the truth. Oh, you know, folks, I know a lot of you are leaving. You’ve got your suitcases packed, and I really think we’ve had enough. And I would like to thank you all for coming here this weekend, and I wish you all Godspeed through life. Thank you.