Introduction to Sanshindo: Integrating the Three Minds

 Human beings are marvelously complex creatures.  We have Earth-shaking and Earth-shaping capacities.  We have been mightily successful in terms of our numbers and our spread around the planet.  Yet we fall short in mastery of our own personal organic operating system.  We cannot seem to avoid acting unskillfully and sabotaging our own interests, both personal and as a species.  We obstruct our own intentions.  We suffer bitterly in the face of discomforts, disappointments, and confusion.  And we cannot reliably find the deep satisfaction and fulfillment that the many pleasures of life portend.  Something is wrong with the way we are managing our own experience.  As competent as we are in so many realms, we are, in general, very bad at being happy.  We should be able to do MUCH better.  And, in fact, sometimes we do.    
 You can almost certainly recall times when you were blissfully contented, when everything you tried to do seemed to come without effort, when all the “parts” worked together like a clock.  But for most of us, those memorable times are few, far between, of short duration, and don't seem to be available except by chance.  Since we apparently have the capacity for such ease and fulfillment, we should be able to access it at will.  But, alas, we arrived without an Owner's Manual to tell us how. There is no shortage of attempts to write such a manual.  Bookstores and libraries are full of treatises on the right way to eat, to exercise, to organize our homes, to learn skills, to cure illnesses, etc.  But what seems to be missing is an explanation of our basic control system itself and a program for optimizing that system.    
 That lack of an explanation of how the human psyche is arranged and how it can be optimized was a troubling puzzle for me, and one that only grew deeper with the passage of time.  Then twenty five years ago I met a man named Shinzen Young who taught me the Three Skills of Integration.  And that changed everything.  With diligent practice in developing those three skills, everything became clear to me.  The sense of fulfillment, ease, and happiness that I had lacked became available to me at will.  Now I want to pass the means of this transformation on to you as it was passed on to me.  Hence this book, which will propose a model for better understanding ourselves and a program for optimizing our functioning for maximum effectiveness and, most importantly, happiness.        We are creatures with three minds.  The explanation of the tripartite structure of the human psyche that I will present to you in this book is very likely going to run contrary to your established notions.  Especially the notion that your “mind” consists entirely of your verbal thinking processes and that your body is some kind of menial flunky – St. Francis' “Brother Ass”.  To understand this book, you will need to suspend your resistance to reconsidering this and other notions about the structure and operation of the human psyche.    Please be patient and bear with me as I make the case for your three minds.   
 Let's begin by defining the word “mind” as I will be using it in this book.  By “mind” I mean a living system that generates, receives, and processes sensory information.  And I will use the word “thinking” to refer to this processing of information by a mind.  This hopefully will not seem too radical a change in the meaning of “mind”, but as we begin to work with it you may find it to be a broader definition than we find in common usage.  I think you will quickly see that the common, limited usage of the words “mind” and “thinking” is biased and inaccurate and that expanding the definition will be necessary to understanding, working with, and optimizing our Three Minds.       
 So, what do I mean by the statement that we are creatures with three minds?  I mean that the human psyche is a system composed of three minds that operate in ways very distinct from each other.  We have a linguistic mind, a visual mind, and a somatic mind.  At the conscious level, the linguistic mind thinks with words, the visual mind thinks with images, and the somatic mind thinks with body sensations.  These three minds operate in parallel, sometimes independently, but often interacting with each other.  Understanding the way the Three Minds act independently and in combinations is key to understanding the system as a whole.  Understanding the system in this way is prerequisite to optimizing it.    
 Our three minds evolved in a sequence spread over billions of years rather than all at once as a unified system.  Early living creatures had no eyes with which to capture images and no linguistic powers with which to process words.  Their sensory experience consisted entirely of body sensations in the realm of the mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, and so on.  Those body sensations were the thoughts of the somatic mind.  As animals became more complex over time, the thinking of the somatic mind became more complex.  After billions of years as purely somatic beings, animals developed eyes capable of capturing images.  Those images were the thoughts of the visual mind.  Images became a new “language” of the psyche, added onto, rather than replacing, the feelings of the somatic mind.  Our ancestors became creatures of two minds, one somatic and one visual, and remained that way for more hundreds of millions of years.  Very recently, on the scale of evolutionary time, let's give Homo Erectus the benefit of the doubt and say two million years, we developed the power of thinking and communicating in words.  And so was born the third of our Three Minds – the linguistic mind – thinking with words.  Again, the new mind was added onto the existing two minds rather than replacing them.    
 So, our three minds developed sequentially over a long span of time, each speaking its own language, each layered “on top of” the prior minds, each connected to the others on an ad hoc basis.  Because the Three Minds speak different languages and consequently do not understand each other very well (at the conscious level at least), and because we have developed some unskillful habits in the use of the three minds individually and in combination, we experience conflict, disharmony, non-optimal performance, and unhappiness.   
 In this book I hope to guide you to an understanding of the reality of the Three Minds and how they operate in your own experience.  You may already have a realization about the system of the Three Minds operating in your own experience just from having it pointed out by reading this introduction.  But we will journey much further together.   I will explain, with examples, how the disharmony and dis-integration of the three minds leads to unhappiness and non-optimal performance.  I will describe the three skills of integration we need to develop in order to re-integrate the three minds.  Finally, and most importantly, I will give you detailed instructions for training the three skills and re-integrating and harmonizing the three minds.
 I have given the name “San Shin Do” to the system I will introduce in this book because it reflects the fundamental point I have just explained about the broader meaning of the word “mind”.  The central character心is pronounced “shin” in Japanese.  It means mind, heart, spirit, vitality, and inner strength.  So the word Shin nicely represents the Three Minds that make up the human psyche.  The importance of this will become clear to you as we proceed.  The first character 三is pronounced “san” and means three.  The third character 道 is pronounced “do” and means road or path of personal growth.  And so San Shin Do means “The Way of the Three Minds”.            
 It is my fondest wish that each of you should be successful in bringing new levels of harmony, effectiveness, and happiness to your life through The Way of the Three Minds.  At the end of this book you will find a link to the Three Minds website.  On that website you will find support for your journey into the optimization of the three minds.  There are audio recordings of guidance correlated with the exercises in this book.  There is also a forum where you can communicate with other Three Mind students, and, as time permits, I will answer questions in that forum.  And there is a schedule of live workshops you can attend.  Almost everything needed for your success is available to you.  All that remains to be added is your commitment to diligent practice of the exercises.   
 Have fun with all of this, allow your curiosity to motivate you, and best of luck!