It All Started with a Bird

By Judith A Sedgeman EdD

Judith Sedgeman takes us on a psychological journey that starts with the innocent childhood delight at the discovery of thought. She shows us how we unintentionally create insecurity and distress as we grow up, then face the anxiety and pressures of teenage years. As we enter adulthood, she demonstrates how we face the intensity of testing our knowledge and falling into the habit of "figuring everything out" to push ourselves to meet expectations. A business meeting with a potential client introduced her to a new way to look at mental well-being and the possibility that anyone, regardless of their circumstances, could find a "nice life," free from stress and distress. Thus she was introduced to the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought, an explanation of how we create our experience of life from the inside-out that is now spreading rapidly across the globe. As she learned more about this, her own state of mind and her business changed dramatically. Within a few years, she left the life she knew to join the pioneers bringing this new understanding to the mental health fields. Her stories reveal the challenges of overturning an existing paradigm, and the unshakeable commitment that generation felt as they found deeper and deeper mental well-being for themselves and realized they were sharing a secret that would set all people free from the prison of their own thoughts and point them to their wisdom, insight and common sense. The book shows how people's perspective can change from thought to thought, and how the power to reconnect to our spiritual strength to live from love and understanding is never lost, only sometimes obscured. Through compelling anecdotes that span seven decades of inner adventure, she leads the reader to see that the possibility for the future of mankind at peace, in harmony, is innate to us all, if we just discover it. Woven through the book is the presence of the unlikely and very private man, Sydney Banks, who first "saw" the Principles as a profound truth about life and his singular effect on those who worked with him to share his discovery. The story is uniquely the author's, set against the turmoil of the world in her lifetime, but it rings with universal truth that will touch every heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098369743

Book preview

Not?

Chapter 1

Why?

In June 2019, I was one of the pioneer speakers at a conference in London, representing a breakthrough in understanding human psychological functioning that has introduced a true paradigm shift to the world’s understanding of mental health. All of us who worked together with the unlikely person who discovered this fundamental truth almost fifty years ago are now in our seventh decade or beyond, and several of us have died. Thousands of brilliant, enthusiastic younger people are carrying on the work in a world very different from the world we faced in the 1970s and 1980s, when it all began.

I appreciated the respect we were shown at that conference. Still, I was taken aback by the assumptions of so many newcomers to the work that we elders were somehow special or had led especially charmed lives, and by the extent to which some seemed to think we weren’t just ordinary human beings who had stumbled into something that is, in fact, ordinary to all human beings, although long overlooked or obscured. I realized we all originally had that kind of expectation of Sydney Banks, our teacher, whose discovery we were learning to share, and recalled how quickly he stepped in to disabuse people of any notion that he knew something no one else could know, or that he had any particular gifts that made it more accessible to him. His mantra was, If this could happen to the likes of me, it’s obvious it could happen to anyone.

On the flight home from the conference, it occurred to me that most of us who had written books had written about the work, but not about our own human experiences with it and our own encounters with personal frailties and missed opportunities to learn. I started reflecting on my unlikely path into this work. Looking back over the years before I found this true calling, all the way back to childhood, I realized that my life was filled with clear evidence that the explanation of mental well-being we share with the world is, in fact, obvious, operational, and true, but easily dismissed, ignored, misunderstood, or overridden by analysis. Breadcrumbs of wisdom were scattered before me throughout the first half of my life, but I swept them aside or attributed them to luck, rather than recognizing that they might mark a clearer path through life.

I thought back to a medical conference presentation a client of mine had invited me to years ago because a famous, gifted leader in neurosurgery, then dying of cancer, was going to give his valedictory address. My client said, We don’t know what he’s going to talk about, but it is bound to be remarkable. He is a philosopher, as well as a pioneer, of neurosurgery.

At that conference, the speaker astounded his audience by choosing to talk about ten patients who had died under his care, and what he had learned from them. I looked around the room and saw many grown men teary-eyed. The effect was stunning, and yet filled with hope. Every doctor must face the possibility of the death of patients in their care, and yet each death holds the potential to advance the field. In less high-stakes environments, the lesson is that every failure is an opportunity to learn, to see beyond our current thinking, to discover deeper truths.

At this point in my life, I am blessed with the benefit of many years of opportunities to learn and the equanimity that comes with the accumulation of life lessons. That does not make me special, just old and experienced. I have always, with people I am fortunate to serve, tried to share stories from my own, often rocky, travel through life experiences, to help them see that we are all the same. Life is, as Sydney Banks so often repeated, a contact sport. The power to understand how we can learn from every hit, how we can use our own power to transcend any circumstance, is a gift innate to all human beings. Sydney Banks, in an unexpected moment of profound epiphany, saw this power absolutely. He stepped from that experience into a totally new world in his attempt to share what he had seen and help others to see it for themselves.

Those of us who joined him in that effort were, in retrospect, fortunate beyond measure to learn from the primary source of a breakthrough. At the time, that was not always clear to us, or easy for us. We were living in an era in which the prevailing assumption was that life comes at us, and that what happens to us determines how we feel or what we can do, a world we have come to describe as outside-in. Sydney Banks told us that assumption was entirely false. He described an inside-out experience of life, which puts the power to create the way we want to experience life, regardless of what is happening to us, squarely within our own purview. At the time, that was such a radical idea that it provoked mostly mockery, and sometimes resentment and anger. And yet, for the handful of us who experienced the profound truth of it for ourselves and saw our own lives transformed, it was the truth that set us free. We could not just let it go. We knew, despite all odds, that it offered a new hope for peace of mind to all of humanity. We saw how desperately that is needed. We never looked back.

This is my fragment of that remarkable story.

Chapter 2

It Starts

At the moment of birth, the virgin mind discovers creation,

and the duality of life is born. Henceforth, you live

in a world governed by thought.

Sydney Banks in The Missing Link

I am sitting in my highchair, my mother and father beside me. In front of me, just beyond my reach on the table, there is a familiar purple shape attached to a full glass of water. My father dunks the top of it into the water and releases it. It starts bobbing in and out of the water on its own. I am delighted. I love when he does that. Bird! my mother says. Yes, bird, my father says. Bird, bird. The bird is drinking water. Somehow, I suddenly know the shape is bird. I make the sound, Bird. My parents are pleased. I look out the window, pointing to two small brown feathery things perched on a bush, heads bobbing as they look around. Bird? I ask. Yes, my mother says, Bird. Those are birds, too. I am excited. Released from my highchair, I rush to the toy box and pull out a fluffy yellow stuffed toy with a fuzzy orange mouth. Bird? Yes, yes, my mother says. Bird. I rush over to my farm set and get a fat little white figure with wings and a long neck. Bird? Yes, yes, yes, my mother says, clapping for me. I grab a soft baby book with pictures and find the one I want. Bird? Yes, my father says. Very good. I run into the kitchen and pull my mother’s feather duster from the broom closet. Bird! I announce. My parents sit in silence, looking at each other. They don’t know. I am sure it is Bird, too, but my parents don’t know. I clap for myself.

Later, I am in my crib. Nap time. I am making the sound again and again with my eyes closed, Bird. There is nothing with me in the crib, but I can see birds. I feel a power surge inside me. I can name things and they appear to me. For the rest of my life, I remember this moment. It was the first moment that I became aware I could think things into my reality.

/

My mother, our big dog, and I are slogging through soft snow down the hill to our mailbox by the road. The hill is our driveway, but we cannot see the pavement. As far as we can look across the landscape, everything is covered in lumpy pillows of sparkling snow. I remember things there before the snow. I can see all kinds of things—fallen dogwood blossoms trailing like pink ribbons on the green grass, colorful leaves piled up to jump in, the dog chasing his yellow ball through the daisies, the path to the patio with big red roses on either side, my blue tricycle by the garage. Yet none of what I could see was there. Where was it? What was I seeing?

I ask my mother, How come I can still see the things that aren’t there now?

You mean like the flowers, the lawn furniture, and things outside our house? she asks. Yes. I can still see them.

They are all put away in your mind, where you can look at them again, she says. Like when we look at pictures from our birthday parties.

What is my mind? I ask.

It’s the place in your head that makes sense of your life, she says.

Does everybody have one?

Yes, but everybody has different stuff in their minds. Different things are important enough to keep for different people.

Later on, I am talking to my dog, as I often did, being an only child. Do you have a mind, too? I ask the dog. He puts his head on my lap and snuggles. I bet you do, I say. You remember who your people are.

That day stands out for me, too. It was the dawning of knowing that we do not forget, but things we remember are not really there when we see them.

/

My mother and I pull up the driveway to the house to find a workman with his toolbox, frozen in fear on the inside of our open front door as our dog barks and growls at him on the outside. My mother runs to the door and steps inside.

Put down your toolbox, she says, and he’ll let you go right out. I’ll bring it out to you. The workman looks uncertain, but he puts down the box. The dog sits down, and the workman walks toward his truck. My mother carries the toolbox out to him.

Why would you teach your dog not to let people leave with their tools? the workman asks her. That’s frightening.

We didn’t teach him that, my mother says. He made it up himself. He’s very protective. Sometimes we have to hold women’s purses when they walk out."

I am thrilled. The dog made that up!!! Now I am sure the dog knows what I say to him when I talk to him, even though he doesn’t talk back. He has ideas, too, just like me.

I daydream for a long time about the dog coming up with ideas in his own head about what he should do to take care of us. I wonder what stuff looks like to him when he thinks about it. How did he know that other people taking things out of the house might be bad for us?

I remember that day very well, too. It was the first inkling I had that there were no rules for what an idea should look like or be like, but an idea would have power for whatever thinking creature came up with it. I started watching bugs and worms and butterflies and wondering how they knew where to go next and what they were doing…but I was sure they did know.

/

Our soft white kitty, who curled up with me when I slept and played with me when I got her little squishy toys out, is not there when I get up one morning. I look around the house. I look on the patio where she likes to sit in the early sun. No kitty.

My father comes in from outside. A fox must have gotten the cat, he says to my mother Oh, dear, she says and then notices me right outside the kitchen door and stops talking.

What happened to kitty? I ask my father. He sits down and invites me onto his lap. My mother sits across from us.

You know how kitty loved to play in the woods behind our yard? my father says Well, other creatures live in those woods. We’ve seen some of them. You remember the deer? The beavers in the pond? I do.

Well, there are foxes and coyotes in the woods, too, he says. They are hunters. I think one of them hunted kitty."

Why would they hunt kitty? I asked. She wouldn’t hurt them. She just likes to play.

They are hunters, he said. They hunt for animals smaller than they are that they can eat. They don’t know that kitty is your pet. She looks like food to them.

They ATE kitty! I scream. I burst into a flood of tears. How COULD they?

It’s the way of the wild, my father says. They don’t know about animals who live in houses with humans. If they see a little animal in the woods, they are likely to hunt it."

Why would kitty go in the woods, then? I sob. She didn’t HAVE to. We feed her. She didn’t have to hunt for anything.

Kitty is an animal, too. She hunts mice and tiny creatures, even though we feed her. It’s in her nature.

Are we animals, too? I ask. Yes, I suppose, but we are human animals. We can figure things out more than other animals. We can understand things that other animals don’t. Humans would know not to hurt kitty.

Are there other animals that hunt us? I ask.

There are bigger animals that might hurt us if we frighten them, but they don’t hunt us.

I head off to look for the dog to be comforted. As I walk away, I hear my mother say softly to my father, But sometimes we hunt each other. I find the dog and lie down next to him. Don’t go to the woods, I beg him. Something there ate kitty. The dog sighs and licks my tears.

Later, I saw my father go way to the back of our yard to the edge of the woods with a shovel and dig a hole and put something in it. I know I will never see kitty again. For days, I am terrified by the recurring image of my cute little kitty playing with some twigs in the woods, not knowing that a big drooling animal was about to pounce on her and eat her. It gives me shivers.

I remember that terror because it was my first realization that there was danger in the world, and cruel things can happen, and there’s nothing you can do about it but think about it and feel afraid.

/

We have moved from the country, where I spent my first five years, into the city, right in town. We live in an apartment upstairs in a commercial building my father owns. Downstairs is a big drugstore with a soda fountain. On our floor, there is a beauty salon and an office. Our apartment takes up the whole back side of the building. I have my own big bedroom, which had once been part of a law office, and a whole wall of it is glass-enclosed bookcases. All my books are there, as well as a set of encyclopedias and some more grown-up books with lots of pictures that I have permission to look at. Right outside the door to my bedroom, in the living room, is something new to us, an upright piano, which I am learning to play. My Uncle Frank is my teacher. He visits us a lot. When it is time for me to go to bed, he plays my favorite song, Sunrise Serenade, for me. He never looks at the keys when he plays. He usually puts his head back and closes his eyes. He says his fingers know what to do.

I love my Uncle Frank, a sweet and gentle man. Whenever he plays the piano, no matter what he is playing, I feel a soft sadness. I feel like hugging him.

When I get a little older, my father tells me my Uncle Frank had started at Yale School of Music and wanted to be a concert pianist, but he had instead gone to war during World War I. He was in the artillery. He lost the power and sensitivity in his fingers that allowed him to play at a professional level. After he came back from the war, he taught piano lessons and cut hair his entire life. He did not talk about it, but his music expressed the unrealized and lost in his life.

When my father tells me the story, I cry. I have no idea what war is, but I knew there was something haunting Uncle Frank; I had felt it.

That conversation with my father stayed with me always. It was the first I understood that we communicate through feelings, and that feelings carry the messages of life even without words.

/

Having spent most of my early childhood alone, frolicking in the fields of my own imagination, I discover I love preschool, then kindergarten, and then first grade. So many things to play with. So many children. Music. Dance. Art. Activities. I am exploring a lively part of the world I had never seen before. My world is expanding so fast I am sometimes exhausted by it, but always excited about it.

One day, shortly after I start second grade, one of my mother’s friends asks me about school. I tell her I really like it. Is there anything you don’t like about it? she asks. Nobody likes everything.

It has never entered my mind not to like anything. That’s not something that had come up in our family. I don’t know how to answer the question, so I just leave the room. But I can’t stop thinking about it.

Nobody likes everything? Why not? What does it mean not to like something? I feel unsettled; I feel pressure to come up with something I do not like. I do not know how to do that. I think and think. I am sure I am missing something I should know.

After a couple of months in second grade, I come down with measles, and I become really sick, so I have to stay home from school for several weeks. For most of that time, I am confined to my room, with my books, my toys, and my imagination. No one could come to see me because of the measles. I create amazing fantasies every day. I imagine my whole room is under the ocean, and I envision all kinds of gorgeous sea creatures and see them swimming around me. I make up stories featuring my dolls and stuffed toys. I have a wonderful time playing with my own thoughts and looking at books and visualizing fantastical things.

When my mother starts talking to me about going back to school, I decide I do not like that idea. Finally, I found something I could dislike. I like being at home, free to read and draw and play and make up things on my own. I do not like the idea of going back to school every day, sitting captive in second grade.

I refuse to go back to school. I cry and yell and have a tantrum whenever they bring it up. The Saturday before I am to go back, there is a knock on our door and my father asks me to answer it. Two big burly policemen in full uniform, with guns, are there. They ask if my father is home. I take them to my father, and they grab him and handcuff him, saying, Are you the father of the girl who won’t go to school? He seems quite fearful. He tells them yes. Well, then, one of the policemen says, you’re going to jail. It’s against the law not to make your children go to school. They start to drag him toward the door.

Wait, wait! I cry out. Don’t take my Daddy away. I’ll go to school, I promise. The policemen tower over me, glaring at me. Are you sure?

Yes, yes. Please don’t hurt my Daddy. I’ll go. They release my father. We’ll be checking in on Monday, they say menacingly. She’d better be in school.

On Monday morning, my father walks me to school. We go to the Principal’s office first. She asks me why I had decided I didn’t like school. I tell her I like reading my books at home, and all the stories I could make up. I say school is boring because I already know what the teacher is telling us. The Principal and my father ask me to wait in the outer office and they have a conversation. When they come out, she walks me right past the second-grade classroom to third grade and introduces me to the teacher. They are reading The Weekly Reader and talking about things going on with other children all around the world when I join the class. I love it from that moment on.

Not long after, I learn that the two policemen are friends of my father, and they had cooked up the drama to get me back to school. My father tells me that he didn’t want to deceive me, but it really was the law that children had to be in school, and he was looking for a way to make it my decision to go back, rather than forcing me, because he wanted me to like school.

At first, I am angry, but then it seems really clever to me. I think how my father had confidence that I could make up my own mind, and how nice it is that he realized I was just bored and needed to move up a grade to be challenged.

I think how I had learned what it is to decide not to like something, and how that didn’t feel good at all. But now I understand like and dislike.

We go down to the drugstore to get an ice cream cone. My father buys me an Archie comic book, a rare occurrence. He thinks reading comics is a waste of time.

I have always remembered that story because it was the first time it occurred to me that liking and disliking were just your choices, unrelated to the things you decided you liked or disliked.

/

My father has been telling me about a party we are going to soon to celebrate the Bar-Mitzvah of one of his best friend’s oldest son. He describes it to me in a way that makes it seem both important and holy, and also really fun. I have met my father’s friend, but I have not met his children. My father assures me that all eight of them are delightful, and I will have a good time. Eight! I can hardly imagine so many children under one roof, with just one set of parents.

I share this story with my friends in the Catechism class that I am attending in preparation for my First Holy Communion. The Nun who teaches the class overhears the conversation, and stands up, wielding her ruler, shouting for silence. Judy, she says, you are to stop talking about that immediately! Go to the back of the room! We are Catholic. We do not attend or learn about Jewish rituals. I forbid you to go to that event or ever speak of it again! I am humiliated, and, head hanging, I walk to the back of the room, and then rush out of class and run all the way home, the nun’s voice following me, calling me back to atone for my sins.

When my father gets home, I am still sulking in my room. I didn’t have the heart to tell my mother, who was devout, what had happened. I always wonder why she is so dedicated to the Church, yet never attends Mass. Now I am thinking maybe she is afraid of nuns. I am sent to church every Sunday with the old woman who lives across the street and runs a bookstore from her house. She has a lot of children’s books on a special low table, and if your hands are clean, she lets you come in and look through them. I like the bookstore, but I don’t like going to church with her. My father listens as I tell how angry and hateful the Nun was, and how I don’t want to go back to that class because she thinks I am an evil person now. I start crying about how I really want to go to that party, but I am afraid of going to hell if I do.

My father says, Do you want to belong to a Church that teaches you to disrespect other people and not be interested in anything but your own beliefs?

I don’t know, I wail. Mommy says I was born Catholic and that’s the Church I should be part of. What am I supposed to tell Mommy?

The truth, my father says. You were born human. Your Mother was raised as a Catholic and she believes in it, but you were just born our child. You can choose what you believe. We can’t make you believe in something you don’t truly believe in.

Will Mommy hate me?

Of course not. She is good friends with our friends. She is looking forward to the Bar-Mitzvah, too. She would not let a nun forbid her from going.

Are you sure I won’t go to hell?

I have no idea where any of us will go, but I am sure the nuns don’t know either. Hell is made up from fear of being bad. People who are good probably rest in peace.

But what about God? I think I like God. But I don’t even know that much about God because the priests say everything in church in Latin.

All religions like God, Judy. God is much bigger than anyone’s particular beliefs. God is something spiritual you feel; talking about God is just the words people use to try to describe that feeling."

And so it was that I did not make my First Communion, stopped attending any particular church but often went to various churches with different friends, and had a wonderful time at the Bar-Mitzvah. My mother was sad that I would not be Catholic but resigned to it. She had, after all, enjoyed the Bar-Mitzvah, too.

I have always remembered that incident because it was when I started looking to understand the difference between beliefs and faith and I felt the first stirrings of faith.

/

My father is a first-generation American. His father, who died well before I was born, came to the United States from Italy. My father tells the story often and is very proud of his father and especially proud to be an American citizen. He is the only one in his family of eleven brothers and sisters to have gone to college. His father barely spoke English, worked in a steel mill in Pittsburgh until he could make enough money to pay for his childhood sweetheart to come to