The Yellow Tricycle: Part 1

When the van doors were thrown open, none of us could believe the sight. Row upon row of toys, each one of them up for grabs for whomever could lay their hands on them first. 

And as my eyes slowly adjusted from the bright sunny day to the cavernous van interior, suddenly there it was - half-buried under a mountain of teddy bears, off to one side at the back. 

A beautiful yellow tricycle - pristine, magical and glowing. 

The yellow tricycle of my dreams…

Subject and Object 

We’ve all had experiences like this, where certain objects seem to stand out more than others. They seem to possess heightened qualities and exert an unusually strong pull on the mind. 

Our normal sense is that we’re simply picking up and responding to a special power within the object itself. But is that what’s really happening at such times? 

We’ll return to this snapshot from my childhood in what follows, because it helps to capture something both practical and profound about the workings of the mind. 

But first we need to explore the important question of where our experiences come from, and precisely how they are produced within the perceptual field.

While there are many theories about this subject, universal principles that are practically applicable are surprisingly hard to come by.

In contrast, the modern scientific method has discovered many ‘natural laws’ such as gravity, electromagnetism, the solar centric system, and micro-organisms that are harmful to human life. 

These are examples of apriori facts in nature - phenomena that existed prior to their discovery and that are independent of personal or cultural belief systems. 

Once discovered, each of these natural laws provided humanity with a basis for remarkable material development.

But in the field of human psychology, similar quantum shifts are yet to be seen. Broadly speaking, we still lack a paradigm that’s 100% reliable in improving mental health, relationships and performance. Theories and ideas abound, but definitive practical improvements are lacking. 

I’d like to suggest that the reason for this discrepancy may be found in an all-too-often missed element of experience.

Experience and the perceptual field

Throughout history, mystics and contemplatives have asserted that our subjective experience is mind-mediated to a significant degree, and many of the founders of modern science actually arrived at similar conclusions.

Hermann von Helmholtz, for example, was an 18th century physician who made significant contributions to a wide variety of scientific fields. But he is also well known for the discovery of a more experiential ‘natural law’ called the theory of ‘Unconscious Inference’. 

Helmholtz’s research discovered that human vision is always necessarily incomplete - containing blindspots and missing details which are creatively filled in or inferred by the mind. So many of the things you think you’re seeing ‘out there’ are actually created ‘in here’.

Modern day neuroscientist Anil Seth has arrived at similar conclusions, arguing that our subjective version of reality is only ever the brain’s ‘best guess’ about what’s happening within the perceptual field.

And this picture of a mind-mediated reality was mapped out and developed in great detail by the influential thinker Sydney Banks.

Banks - a welder by profession with only a basic high school education - had a direct and life changing insight into the fundamental laws governing human experience, which he called ‘the three principles’ of universal Mind, Consciousness and Thought. 

These three principles have proved invaluable to many, because they reveal something universal and factual about human experience. 

At the heart of all of these is a paradigm shift that shows how the mind is always involved in our experience of reality.  

To illustrate what might sound like a complicated idea, let’s return to my childhood story in part 2 of this article. Click here to read on.