What I Am Up To
On Sydney Banks's three principles, the dazzle of those already ahead, and the brand as the path one has actually walked.
I. The dazzle
Most mornings now, before I open my notebook, I scroll past another founder’s site and feel a small, familiar tug behind the breastbone. Her colors are clean. Her tagline is decided. The arrows on her page all point somewhere. She is ahead. The tug is not envy, exactly. It is closer to vertigo, the way the floor tilts when someone else’s certainty meets your own still-forming one.
I have a name for this feeling now. The dazzle. It is what happens when a polished surface meets an unfinished interior. The dazzle does not ask you to copy her — that would be too obvious to refuse. It asks something subtler. It asks you to take her shape as the shape. To borrow the silhouette and quietly forget you had your own.
When I am dazzled, I cannot sense who I am. That is the cost. The whole apparatus that knows what I love, what I want to make, who I want at the table with me — it goes quiet. The signal drops. In its place comes the smooth voice of the dazzle saying this is how it is done.
The matcha cools on the desk. I close the tab. I sit a moment longer than feels comfortable. And I begin again from a different door.
For a long time I did not understand what the door was. I knew the dazzle. I did not yet know what to do with it. The understanding came slowly, through a frame older than any business book — old enough to be in the mystic traditions of every continent, and recent enough to have been articulated again in plain English on a small island in British Columbia. It is the frame underneath everything I want to say here. So I want to name it first.
II. The three principles
In 1973, on Salt Spring Island in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, a Scottish-born welder named Sydney Banks had a sudden, lasting awakening at a couples retreat. He was forty-two. He had no formal training in psychology, philosophy, or spirituality. The trigger, by his own account, was a casual remark from a therapist: Syd, you’re not insecure, you just think you’re insecure. The word think landed in him in a way that opened, in his telling, the entire mechanism of human experience.
He spent the next thirty-six years teaching what came through that morning. He insisted he had not discovered anything new. He had seen what the mystics across traditions had seen for centuries — and he had simply tried to put it in plain language anyone could use. The framework that emerged is now called the Three Principles. Banks (2001) named them Mind, Thought, and Consciousness.
Mind is the universal intelligence that animates all life. Not the personal mind. Not the brain. The ground that lets experience happen at all. In the older traditions: God, Source, Tao, Brahman, the divine field. It is always there. You cannot have more or less of it. It is not earned. It is the energy by which a thought becomes possible, by which a body lives, by which a moment occurs.
Thought is the creative principle. The faculty through which form arises in awareness. Not the thoughts you happen to have — though those are part of it — but the fact that thinking is happening, constantly, generating the moment-to-moment shape of your experience. The Buddhists call it mental fabrication. The Hindus speak of vrtti — the movements of the mind that overlay the still ground. Most of the time we mistake thought for reality. We see through it like a window we cannot see, and the world looks coloured by it without our knowing the glass is there.
Consciousness is the awareness that makes thought into experience. The knowing capacity. The screen on which the forms of thought appear and become real to you. In other traditions: the witness, sākṣin, turīya, pure awareness, rigpa, the knower. It is what lets you know anything at all. It does not have to be cultivated; it has to be recognized.
These three are inseparable. You cannot have one without the others. Together, they produce everything you have ever experienced — every joy, every fear, every business idea, every dazzle, every settled certainty. The whole world rests on them.
I am bringing them into this essay because the question of branding cannot be answered without them. Or, said more honestly, it can be answered without them, and the answer will be a dead end. Most of what is taught about branding lives in the realm of personal thought, and personal thought, when it does not know what it is, is a hall of mirrors. The way out is not better mirrors. The way out is to remember the room.
III. Mind — the formless source under the brand
If a brand is a vision for a business — and I have come to think it is exactly that, a fundamental vision that informs every downstream piece (the offer, the language, the look of the site, the people you hire, the people who are right for it) — then the question is where the vision comes from.
It does not come from market research. Market research is a survey of personal thought already in circulation. It comes from somewhere upstream of personal thought. It comes from what Banks called Mind — the universal source — running through a specific person in a specific moment of their life.
This is why the founder’s personal connection matters. When the vision is rooted in something deeper than the founder’s preferences — when it is rooted in the source that runs through her — the whole business carries a coherence that cannot be faked. There is a big alignment, even in a big business. It is the alignment of a single channel from Mind through one person all the way down to who they hire on a Tuesday.
This source is formless. Everything that exists comes out of the infinite formless space. The brand is one of the forms. It is not the only form the source could take; it is the form it is taking here, through me, in this season of my life. That recognition does two things at once. It dissolves the dazzle, because the dazzle is the assumption that there is one correct form already manifest in someone else’s business and I have to copy it. And it dissolves the perfectionism, because I am not making a one-shot final artifact. I am letting one of many possible forms come through.
You do not have just one shot. This is one of the simplest things to say and one of the hardest to live. The well of inspiration is not finite. There are infinite ideas in the source. If this offer is wrong, another is coming. If this sentence is wrong, another is coming. If this site is wrong, another is coming. The fear that you have to nail it now is the fear of a personal thought that has forgotten the well.
Inside that recognition, a different state of being becomes possible. I call it settled uncertainty. I do not know what next year will look like. I do not know which offers will work. I do not know whether the audience I am writing for will show up in numbers or trickles. None of that is mine to know. But underneath the not-knowing there is a quality. A kind of conviction without claim. A felt rootedness in Mind that does not depend on the future being legible.
This is the working condition of a founder who has not been captured by the dazzle. She is in charge — not because she has the answers, but because she has stopped outsourcing the question. Her business does not need to look like anyone else’s. It does not need to fit the box of any success trend. She is the one who is making this, and the making is allowed to be hers.
IV. Thought — used well and used badly
Thought is the creative principle. It is also the great trap. Whether it is a creative apparatus or a hall of mirrors depends entirely on where it is sourced from.
When thought is sourced from Mind — when it arises out of the quieter place rather than out of the personal noise — it generates forms that carry the source through them. The offer is alive. The language is fresh. The site looks like the founder. Decisions about whom to hire and whom to serve become legible because they are downstream of one coherent current.
When thought is sourced from itself — from the personal mind looking at other personal minds, comparing, calculating, anxious — it generates dead ends. The offer is a Frankenstein of competitor patches. The language is borrowed. The site is a tribute to seventeen other people’s sites. The hires are made by hunches that have not been examined. The brand cracks along all of its seams because there is no single source under it. It is collage where it needed to be growth.
This is what I mean when I say cracking the signal. Personal thought from outside cracks the line from Mind through the founder out into the world. Someone gives you a consultation, a suggestion, a strategy, and the moment the words land, you feel something close in you. The body tightens slightly. Your own sense of what you are up to gets a little harder to access. Their certainty has taken up the room your settled uncertainty needed. The dazzle in miniature.
The way home is not to argue with them. The way home is to notice the closing. To gently set the input down. To return to the formless source and let Thought generate the next form from there.
The seeing alone is the freedom. Banks (1998) said this in different words many times. Once you see that thought is producing the experience of being lost, the thought naturally settles. You do not have to fix the content. You have to recognize the mechanism. The recognition is the move.
The worst version of thought-sourced-from-thought is the survey. Tell me what you want, and I will build it for you. This sounds collaborative. It is a disaster. Surveying the world for what they want disperses the signal completely. You lose your fidelity in the noise of a hundred other voices, and you drown. The right people did not yet know how to ask for what you were going to make. You had to make it first, in the language of your own delight, before they could recognize it. Then they came.
A word about that word, fidelity. I am keeping it. I have set aside authenticity, which has been worked too hard and now carries a whiff of performance — curated rawness, sold-self under cover of confessed-self. Fidelity is older and more honest. A high-fidelity recording preserves the original signal. The medium gets out of the way. The voice in your speakers is the voice in the room. A brand built on fidelity is the same thing in another scale: the founder is the original signal, the business is the medium, and when the medium gets out of the way the customer hears the founder.
V. Consciousness — the instrument of recognition
If Mind is the source and Thought is the apparatus, Consciousness is the instrument by which you know which Thought to trust.
The body is part of this. Settled uncertainty has a felt sense. So does cracking the signal. So does the dazzle. None of them are abstract. They land in the breath, the chest, the small tightening between the shoulder blades, the way attention either opens or contracts. Consciousness is what catches the difference.
This is why I trust the body-test for outside voices. There are two kinds of outside voices and they go in opposite directions. One cracks the signal. One reflects it back. The body knows which is which before the mind has named it. Opening or closing. Settled or scattered. The criterion is felt before it is thought.
The clearest version of the reflection-test is the sentence the right person can say to you, and the response that sentence elicits in you: Oh, yes. This is what I do. It is not a clever sentence. It is not insight. It is recognition. Consciousness recognizing a thought-pattern that fits the orientation. Confirmation of an existing reality, not implantation of a new one.
This same instrument changes how you read what the world wants. There are three different things, and they get collapsed all the time.
There is what people are looking for. This is what surveys capture. The search terms, the explicit asks, the surface requests. Personal thought translated into form.
There is what they actually need. Often deeper. Often unnamed. Often something they would not have thought to ask for. Mind running through them, asking for movement they do not have language for yet.
And there is what I can see from my source. Perception that comes from my orientation, my journey, my fidelity to Mind. A view from one specific angle of the larger field.
The serving version of branding is: I sense, from my point of view, what people need. I offer it in language clean enough that the right people recognize it even though they were searching for something else. The bad version is paternalism — I know better. The good version is humility plus seeing — I see from here; the ones whose need fits will recognize themselves. This dissolves the false dichotomy between caring about needs and refusing to survey. Care, yes. Survey, no. The third move is to perceive from inside the source.
VI. Different expressions
For months I asked myself which of my passions was the real brand. One is inner work — the sit on the bench, the body as instrument, the rediscovered land near Bankya, the slow return to a deeper voice under the trained one. The other is outer — building things, businesses, automations, and lately Claude. Teaching people, especially the ones who never thought of themselves as technical, how to use this new tool from concept to automation to the more involved technical parts.
I tried to choose. I tried to find a clever umbrella that would hide one of them under the other. None of the umbrellas held.
Then a thing surfaced this week that I want to put down plainly.
These are not two brands. They are not two domains. They are different expressions of the same one source. Of me. The brand goes from the innermost sensitive part to the outer technological expression, and these are not disparate. They are a continuous spectrum, with the practitioner at one end and the builder at the other, and the same person walking the whole length of it. The umbrella was never a topic. The umbrella is me, traversing the range.
Inside this spectrum, the next refinement matters. Not every expression has to carry the same job. The passion can be visible in the persona and the business — it is the audible voice, the signature, the magnet — without being the place the income comes from. The service work, where the care for what people need is appropriate and operational, is where the income lives. The passion is the projection. The service is the wallet. Both are real. Both come from the same founder. Each is doing the job it was made for. The passion stays uncompressed by the demand to pay rent. The service stays clean of self-exploitation. Both are honest. Together they let a life run.
This means I can do coaching, and AI consulting, and AI implementation, and yes — even internet marketing, learning the business parts properly. None of this is a betrayal of the inner work. All of it is the same wholeness expressing in different registers. The test is not which activity I am performing. The test is where the activity is sourced from. Inside-out is fidelity, at any point on the spectrum. Outside-in is dispersion, at any point on the spectrum.
Underneath all of this, deeper than any persona-piece, is what I am beginning to call orientation. The particular direction Mind takes when it moves through this specific person in this specific life. Everyone has one. It is not a strategy. It is not a story. It is the shape of how Mind has chosen, for now, to come through you. Persona is downstream of it. Business is downstream of it. Brand is the visible track of orientation expressed into form.
VII. The journey is the brand
Most of the people I am writing for know themselves reasonably well. They have done the inner work. They have sat with their stories. They have a real felt sense of who they are. And then they hit a wall I know intimately: a disconnect between that self-knowledge and any actual business shape. The self is in there. The shape is not yet drawn. The translation from one to the other is the work nobody told them was its own discipline.
That translation is what I am up to. Not teaching self-knowledge alone. Not teaching business alone. Teaching the slow, daily, body-checked walk from the one to the other.
The walk has a method. Mine is daily writing. Two thousand words most mornings, three thousand on the good ones, into the same folder. The folder grows. I read back what surfaced. I notice what I cannot stop returning to. I notice what makes me lean forward. Slowly, slowly, the up-to-something gets clearer to me, because I have been listening to myself in language long enough to hear it.
Other practices help. I ask myself old questions. Name the top ten events of your life — and what they point about you. I tried it on the bench at lunch this week. The first event was a job I once loved. I sat with it. The loving had not been about the work. It had been about who I was working with — brilliant people, mutually supporting each other, exchanging ideas freely. And the loving had been about how I got to be in that room: all in, giving every idea, every piece of knowledge, every offer of help. Two pointers from one event. The kind of human environment I need. The kind of energy I get to bring. Both wanted to be in the brand.
After writing comes projecting. I put onto the web the things that amaze me and delight me. Not what I think will perform. Not what is trending in the corner of internet marketing I have been studying. The things that genuinely make me lean forward. The rediscovered land near Bankya. The teacher whose voice rings true. The question I cannot stop asking. I write them. I publish them. I do not edit out my wonder.
And then I look — gently, without grabbing — for the people who like what I am up to. Not the people I have to convince. The people who already had a slot open for this. The work is to notice them, not to recruit them. When the fidelity is strong, they come. They resonate, on some level. Oh yes, this is what I do. The same recognition I am trying to give them, returning back.
Out of all of this, slowly, the answer to the question what do you do begins to form. It does not form by being decided in advance. It forms by living, expressing, listening. You start from your wholeness — not from a niche, not from a clever position, but from the whole of who you are. You let your work go out into the world in your own voice. You listen for what people say they get from you. Their words sharpen the articulation in a way you cannot do alone. Over months and years the what I do becomes clear — not because you reasoned your way to it, but because you grew into language for it. The brand-articulation is the slow harvest of expression meeting reflection. What do you do? gets a different answer this year than last. That is not a failure of branding. That is branding alive.
If someone asked me today what I do for a living, I would say I love watching people become more free — who they are — less burdened by the experiences. In practical terms, three moves: reframe what people are going through, remove the obstacles, and free them. The reframe is most of it. Once a person sees their experience differently, the obstacle is often already gone. And the answer that comes next, that I want to say out loud because I have only just begun to say it out loud: and that is also the description of my own journey. The teacher and the student are walking the same path. The brand is the lived path offered to those walking the same one. You teach what you have walked. The unburdening you offer is the unburdening you have done.
So one’s own journey can be the beginning of the brand. Not a frozen journey sold forever. A living one — the brand evolves because the founder is still walking. You change and grow, and you help other people do the same. The work is not to package the completed transformation. The work is to keep going, and to keep showing the way at the visible edge.
There is one more thing I want to say. The framework I have just laid down — visionary, thought leader, connected whole being — is not for the special few. Everybody is a visionary. Everybody is a thought leader. Everybody is a connected whole being expressing themselves into the world. The people ahead of you are not a different species. They have just allowed these three pieces of themselves to express into business form. You have them too. Everyone does. The dazzle at the top of this essay dissolves here. There was never a separate class of founders. There was only a moment in which you forgot you were one.
The matcha is cool again on the desk. The notebook is still open. The cursor is still blinking. The day is still all ahead. There are infinite ideas in the source. You do not have to nail this one. Another is coming. The point is to keep walking, and to write what you saw at the edge of the walk, and to trust that someone who is on the same edge will read it and recognize themselves, and write back.
That is what I am up to.
There is a sense of playfulness in this. We are not to take ourselves too seriously. The gravity is in the fidelity. The lightness is in the self. Both belong.
Bibliography
Banks, S. (1989). Second Chance: A Novel. Duvall-Bibb Publishing. ISBN 978-0-937713-01-3.
Banks, S. (1998). The Missing Link: Reflections on Philosophy and Spirit. International Human Relations Consultants. ISBN 978-0-9681645-0-1.
Banks, S. (2001). The Enlightened Gardener. Lone Pine Publishing. ISBN 978-1-55105-298-4.
Pransky, G. S. (1998). The Renaissance of Psychology. Sulzburger & Graham Publishing. ISBN 978-1-57613-024-7.