This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Creation Is Already Finished: Which Possibility will you live? – Rev. Aimee Daniels
DESCRIPTION
What if your life is not something you are creating—but something you are choosing? Our use of imagination can move along well-worn patterns, but we can consciously shift those. If all possibilities already exist, then the question becomes: which one are you living from? This conversation is an invitation to stop striving and start choosing—right here, right now.
SUMMARY
The summary is as follows:
This talk explores how individuals can consciously choose the “room” or inner state they inhabit—such as striving, disappointment, trust, joy, or peace—within the metaphorical house of many rooms representing states of consciousness. Drawing on Neville Goddard and New Thought teachings, Rev. Aimee Daniels emphasizes that creation is already finished, all possibilities exist now, and our experience is shaped by the states and moods we consent to, rather than by external causes. She explains how imagination and the brain follow habitual grooves of thought, often looping through worry, lack, or “not enough,” and how spiritual practice—especially morning practice—interrupts these loops, calms the brain, and reorients us to our spiritual nature.
Using concepts from prayer, the “divine blueprint,” and quantum possibility, Daniels frames spiritual work not as striving to create something new, but as becoming still enough to recognize and reveal the good and wholeness already present. She integrates examples from history (the Allied effort in World War II) and personal observation (conversations about exhaustion, grief, and differing responses to loss) to illustrate how belief in greater good and chosen interpretation shape experience. Drawing on Chalmers Brothers’ work on moods, she contrasts disempowering moods like resignation, resentment, and anxiety with more generative moods such as acceptance, ambition, curiosity, and peace, showing how each mood opens or closes perceived possibilities.
The talk highlights the inner “psychological drama” in which attitudes of mind create our world, and invites listeners to release old self-concepts, defended identities, and familiar emotional patterns in order to inhabit new states, even when this feels disorienting. Referencing neurotheology and the contrast between an “achievement brain” and a “presence brain,” Daniels urges choosing presence over achievement culture by consciously deciding “whom you will serve” through attention and consent. She concludes with a guided “movement prayer” in which participants identify their current state and mood, choose a new anchoring quality (such as peace, trust, or courage), and somatically and verbally consent to living from this new state now, affirming transformation through prayer and the recognition of oneness with the divine presence.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Thank you for that song. We were talking about how that song is like an earworm when you listen to it. Don’t let your mind get weary. Your will be still. Don’t try. Don’t let your heart be heavy. Inside you is a strength that lies. Love is in you. Be here now. It’s beautiful. So let’s begin with a story. And this was teed up for us in the reading. Imagine that there’s a house with many, many rooms. And one room is called striving. One room is called disappointment. Another room is I’m not enough. Another room is nothing ever works out for me. But there’s other rooms too. There’s a room called trust. There’s a room called enoughness. There’s a room called joy. There’s a room called peace. So all these rooms exist all at the same time. And many others, of course. But which room are you living in, in your life?
Not which room have you visited because we’ve probably all visited all of them, maybe more than one in a day. Right? But where have you been kind of inhabiting, like living in? And this is really what we’re going to explore this morning because Neville tells us that creation is already finished. And so the deeper question underneath it is not what issue is going on with your life, but it’s really what state are you living from? And I don’t know about anybody else, just speaking to myself right now, but many of us have spent years striving, right? Striving to succeed, striving to be perfect enough, striving to have enough money, striving to be spiritual enough. Anything we might be trying to be enough of, right? And yet there comes a point when striving doesn’t work anymore, right? Where we start to feel exhausted. And I’m hearing more people talk about being exhausted than I ever have before, by the way, in my work outside of Cityside.
I’ve been having so many conversations about that. I can’t even tell you. People are just triggered all the time. And so that’s why we have our spiritual life, right? Because the spiritual life is not about trying harder. It’s really about choosing consciously. Neville Goddard says, “Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness or our own.” He uses he and God a lot. Okay. It’s old fashioned language, but just know it includes everyone. And in new thought, we would say there’s only one cause, right? There’s only one power. There’s only one presence. Neville also talks about this and he said, “There’s no second cause. There’s only one cause and that cause is God or spirit or the universe, whatever you want to call it. ” And I think that that’s important too, because even though we know these principles, we can act like there’s another cause.
There’s some bit of evil or something that’s going to get us and we forget that we actually do live in this field of oneness that’s all connected, even if not everyone’s expressing in it, just to be real. So the infinite field of possibility is not someplace out ahead of you. It’s right where you are right now, right? And you’re the chooser. So what are you choosing to inhabit? Neville tells us that imagination travels according to habit.
And so if you think about your brain, we all have neurotransmitters. We have these little brain connections that form based on what we use the most. Our perpetual thinking, we can kind of get in a loop and our imagination is also the same. It’s not always free. It follows the grooves in our head. It follows our conditioning. It follows our repetition, whatever we’re putting into it. So if my imagination has been trained to rehearse what’s wrong, what could go wrong, what’s missing, what still needs to be fixed, then that’s the loop my imagination is in. And so if I wake up in the morning, I don’t know if this ever happens to anyone else, or even if I wake up in the middle of the night and I allow my mind to engage in what I haven’t finished or what I could be worried about as a human, right?
I’m caught in the loop, right? I’m caught in the loop. And that’s why our morning practice is so important. I mean, all our practice is important. Whenever you practice, it’s important because it’s reminding yourself that you are really your spirit and that spirit is always at the center of your being. And it’s really calming your brain down, right? That’s what it’s doing. And so his insight is that when we’re running these habit loops, that is not conscious creation, that is imagination moving according to habit.
And this is not about shaming ourselves. I want to say that with any of this, we just want to hold it lightly within ourselves, be gentle with ourselves. It’s about awareness. It’s about noticing where you’re at and asking yourself the question, “What has my imagination been rehearsing? What is my mind spend the day rehearsing?” Right? Because habit can be interrupted. We can create new habits. We know this. Like people who take on an exercise program and they commit that they’re going to do it every day, it becomes a habit, right? The same is true with our practice. The same is true with our thinking. So how do we work with this? So Neville says, “Creation’s finished.” What does he mean by that? He means that all possibilities actually already exist. And if you think about quantum physics, what causes something to come into form? It’s a chooser, right?
If anyone saw it, anyone see what the belief do we know? It’s been a really long time ago now, but remember the scene in there, if you saw it that Marley Matlin, I think is the main actress in it. And you see her and you see her walking and like in one life, she’s like with a partner and maybe they’re going to a movie or something like that. And there’s another life where she’s walking alone and just this idea that it was about what she chose, right? But all the possibilities already existed. So what possibilities are you consenting to? Neville talks a lot about consent, just this idea that we’re choosing it, right? And so this is very aligned with what our new thought teachers teach. Emma Curtis Hopkins, who was Ernest Holmes teacher, taught that God is not the God of the future. God is the God of the present.
So this is about what you’re choosing in the present moment. It’s not about a future choice. It’s about recognition. That’s what Emma says. It’s about recognition of what’s already present, recognition of the possibility that already exists. And this makes sense. If you think about how we pray, our third step in prayer is recognition. That’s declaring the truth as if it’s already true. That’s our third step of prayer, recognition. So Ernest tells us the truth is that which is, and our recognition of it does not create it, it simply reveals it. So anyone who’s been through classes probably has heard the word divine blueprint. Anyone ever heard that before? We use it a lot when we’re talking about healing and health, like your body’s restored to the divine blueprint, but everything has a divine blueprint, right? Every spiritual quality and every energy that we might talk about is really the divine blueprint.
And when we choose a higher spiritual quality as what we’re recognizing the presence of, then we’re reconnecting to that divine blueprint. That’s what we do when we pray. And that’s really our spiritual work, not to strive to create something new, which we’re very accustomed to in our culture, right? Let’s go strive. But becoming still enough to recognize what’s already true. What’s the truth right now? The truth is that good’s not absent. Sometimes it’s hard to see that, especially right now, right? But it’s just not revealed yet, right? The good is just not revealed yet. It’s waiting for our recognition to bring it into view. We just came back from vacation, this is rich in the front row here, my husband, and we went to Normandy, which is where D-Day was. And we went to the American Cemetery at Normandy and it was really, I don’t know, it was really impactful.
It was really sad to walk along the wall and see all the people who had given their life. Many of them never made it, even made it into shore.
And I have to admit, my triggered human self in the world right now was like, “What’s wrong with us right now? We’re not working for a just cause.” That’s my human self. But like my spiritual self also can look at the energy of what happened with the allies. Basically, Hitler controlled all of Europe, I mean, except England, because it’s an island, right? And people came together because they saw greater good was possible and a lot of people sacrificed, but it happened, right? They believed in the possibility. And even though it feels hard right now, like looking at all the evidence of things that’s happening in the world, it’s like good is possible, right? We can all call that in together and I really believe this is going to pass, but I just mentioned that because I don’t want to deny the reality that is like barraging us every day, but as spiritual people, we want to raise ourselves above it in our practice.
So Neville tells us that the world contains an infinite number of states and consciousness like rooms and we, the imaginative self move among those. So that means we’re not trapped. I might be accustomed to striving or disappointment or other things, but I could choose something else. They’re not the only rooms in the house. And so the spiritual question comes back again to what room am I inhabiting? What possibility am I inhabiting right now in this moment? Neville writes in chapter six, “To enter a state, one must consent to the ideas and feelings which it represents.” So the word consent is important because a state isn’t just a thought, it’s like our lens on how we see the world. That’s what a state is. It’s a way of feeling, it’s a way of expecting, it’s a way of responding. So our state is kind of how we’re living right now, right?
And we can live in a lot of different states. We might have a perpetual state, right? Our state might be, “I’m busy. I’m behind.
I need to earn the love I have in my life. Things don’t work out for me. I’ll rest when I get there.” We have all these states. I mean, we have good ones too, right? But it seems like our mind likes to grab the negative ones more, but we interpret our life through the states. I was on a trip last summer. I might have shared this already. I’ve talked about it a lot. I was on a trip and about half of the group were widows. Did I talk about this before? Yeah, I’m repeating myself, but I just want to say this way, because the difference between where people were in that journey of what had happened to them made a fundamental difference, right? Because we interpret our life through things. I could have an experience that’s the same as you, but I might interpret it negatively and you might interpret it positively, right?
And that’s what I observed on that trip. Some people were like, “Okay, this is a terrible thing happened to me, but I’m moving through it. ” Whereas my friend who I was traveling with just wasn’t there yet. So my point at sharing it is, we each choose what we’re going to see. And if we’re in a place where it’s hard to see possibility, and there’s times that are like that, right? You’re exhausted, you just lost someone, life feels overwhelming, whatever it is, but if we can just begin to move ourselves up a little bit, then we’re going to feel better. It’s kind of like what Esther Hicks talks about in choosing a better feeling state. So I want to offer something from some coaching training that I did that I think is helpful. And beyond talking about states, this gentleman, Chalmers Brothers is his name.
That’s a mouthful to say that Chalmers brothers came out properly, but he teaches about moods. So moods aren’t passing emotions. They’re like persistent atmospheres that we live in. It’s like the background music of our life. Did you ever know someone who was perpetually grumpy? No, I’m serious. I worked with someone. Everyone called him grumpy. That was his name. They’re like, grumpy. Oh, you met with grumpy. I mean, anyway.
So Ben, if you could pull up the next slide. So what Chalmers talks about that I really like as it relates to our conversation is like, my mood impacts what I believe is possible, right? So if I’m in a mood of resignation, then I feel that nothing that I can do makes a difference. So it doesn’t feel like it’s even makes a difference for me to make action. It’s just pointless, right? If I’m in a mood of resentment … Now I’ve been there. I was previously divorced. I’ve been in resentment. I’m going to be honest about that. It’s the killer of relationship, just FYI. But when you’re in resentment, where’s your focus? It’s like someone wronged me, right? And then what happens? Well, then my energy’s assumed by my grievance, isn’t it? Right? And if I’m in anxiety, which I think a lot of people are experiencing in the world right now, then I feel like always like there’s a threat, it’s present, but it’s not defined, right?
And I might have paralysis or I might feel very scattered. And these are all sort of moods that we could be in that feel less positive, right? So if you’re experiencing one of those right now, I think the invitation is to work, just to try to move yourself up a little bit. I mean, getting prayer, working with a practitioner, doing your practice, there’s a lot of things you can do with that, but I think it begins by acknowledging like, oh, like for me, if I’m resentful, it means I haven’t set a good boundary, I’m giving too much, right? I haven’t clearly stated my needs. So now when I notice I’m resentful, I’m kind of like, “Ooh, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.” But I wasn’t always like that because I didn’t know, right? Okay, let’s go to the … Oh, okay. He already went to the next slide.
See, he’s so on top of this. Okay. So these are moving into more positive moods, right? If I’m in acceptance, what happens? What do I believe is possible then? Things are as they are. We all have things in our life that we just have to accept. Maybe we don’t love them, but we accept them and then we can move forward from there, right? I’ve accepted what’s happened. I can move forward. So like the ones that are under that we talked about that feel more negative for lack of a better word, if you can simply start to move yourself toward acceptance that this is what is, I think that’s a great step. And then the next of them are just sort of energy. If I’m in a mood of ambition or enthusiasm, I see tons of possibilities, right? And I’m energized and I want to move and I want to take action.
If I’m in wonder and curiosity, that’s a fun place. Then I’m really open to learning and new experiences. And I love the last one. I love this last one, especially now in the world. If I’m in a mood of peace and serenity, then I’m grounded, everything feels sufficient and I’m just focused in the now.
But we choose these. We choose these moods. So when you think about yourself right now, what mood is shaping your perception right now? Just notice it. Just notice it. We’re going to go into a practice at the end for you to like shift it, but just notice it. Because Neville tells us that in chapter six, that it is within. What we’re looking for is not out there. It’s within. We talk about this all the time, right? We just have to remind ourselves, okay, I got to come back to this. It’s not later. It’s not after you’ve done all of your work because we like to do work in our new thought movement. It’s not after you’ve earned something. It’s not when you’re worthy enough. It’s within, it’s now. It’s already happening. It’s already there. You just have to allow it to be revealed. And Neville talks about the parable of the prodigal son.
Do you remember that one? The prodigal son gets his fortune and he goes out in the world and he squanders it and he end up living with the pigs in a trough or whatever a pig lives in. And he has this moment of realization where he realizes he comes back to himself, right? He comes back to himself. He realizes in the language of the Bible, he can go back to his father’s house, but what does that mean metaphysically? It means coming back to his spirit. And he found his peace by turning within, which is how we find our peace.
Neville also said, I love this quote, “The drama of life is a psychological one in which we, by our attitudes of mind, continually create our world within us and the without is but a reflection of the within.” I mean, isn’t that brilliant? Like we live in a psychological drama. We’re like a reality TV show. I don’t want to be that. But this is also, when you think about this, this is why striving alone never really works for what we’re looking for, right? Because we never find it, right? We don’t give ourselves credit for what we’ve done. We always think there’s a something more, right? That’s the energy of striving, and that’s really the achievement culture that America lives in, right? So our invitation is not to go practice a new technique. It’s like to come home to your spirit. That’s really what the invitation is, turn within.
You don’t have to try to get into the father’s house using old language. It’s where you are, right? You’re already in this house of spirit. Whatever your word is for that, you’re divine, whatever word you want for that. But when we want to step into a new state, it also sometimes requires a small death. What do I mean by that? And this is where we really need to hold ourselves in gentleness if we notice this is where we are. When we move from one state to another, we choose a different room in the house. Sometimes we have to let go of an old self concept. Maybe sometimes it’s someone else’s concept of us, right? It might be a familiar, emotional pattern. I think I had that for a long time in my life.
What felt familiar to me was unavailability, and so I kept experiencing it until I became aware of it, right? But it could also be a story we have about ourselves, or it might be a story your family or someone in your life put on you about like, you’re this way, right? But we all get to choose our own story, right? So for us to move and to let that die, sometimes we have to step into something different and it might feel disorienting. Have you ever made like a significant change in your life and it feels really disorienting? I mean, Rich is sitting right here. He just retired, right? I mean, he’s already creating his new thing, but like other people’s ideas of you too, like, wow, you got to keep doing this. It can be hard. It can be a change, right? But part of our growth is to get comfortable being uncomfortable, right?
Because it’s new. You haven’t done it before. Meister Eckhart talked about something, I don’t even know if I can say this word, glass and height, which means releasing and letting go. That’s what that word means. So it’s not like passive resignation, it’s active willingness to release our grip on what we’ve been holding onto. Even when we have a cherished wound we want to keep living in, or we have a defended identity. I think a defended identity is a big thing in our culture, right? We all think all that outer stuff is who we are, or just we’re used to suffering a certain way. But Meister Eckhart tells us the soul must let go of its possessive hold on all things, even on himself, even on itself, not himself, even on itself. And so Eckhart was pointing to something that Neville also knew, and that’s you can’t really inhabit a new state, and I’m like stepping into my new state here, if you’re clinging to the old one, right?
You can’t step into a new state if you’re clinging to the old one, you have to let go. Rumi talked about this also in his beautiful poem, The Guest House. Everyone remember that poem, it’s classic, but he described the human experience as being a guest house and our emotions, our states, we might say our moods, our visitors, their guests to us that arrive uninvited. You ever have that experience? “What is this? Why am I sad right now?” We have uninvited guests, but Rumi tells us, “Welcome and entertain them all. Each has been sent as a guide from beyond.” And sometimes that discomfort or whatever that feeling is that you get, sometimes that’s just the messenger, right? It’s time for it to shift.
In the Bible, Paul said, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” It’s the same kind of concept, right? We do a reset. So transformation is beautiful, but it isn’t always comfortable because part of me might still want, part of me might not want something to change because we like things to be predictable, don’t we? We feel safer when they’re predictable. So again, be gentle with yourself. I was talking with my practitioner this week and we were talking about how in our culture we’re wired for achievement. They actually now are doing studies on the brain and they call the brain that most of us have in America, the achievement brain, which is the jacked up brain. But there’s another brain. And in neurotheology, who knew there was such a thing, there’s another brain and they’ve studied the brains of Buddhist monks and people who do a lot of spiritual practice and what they have defined as a different brain, which is the presence brain.
And I’m like, “I want that one. How about you? ” Right? Because we get to choose. There’s an ancient line in the Bible that says, “Choose this day whom you will serve.” And I remember when I was growing up, I thought, “Oh God, devil.” I think it was like true God, false God. Remember how they got in trouble for worshiping the gold gods or whatever it was in the Old Testament. But I don’t think it means that. If you interpret scripture from consciousness, it’s really like, what are you giving your attention to? What are you serving in your life? And that’s what I want to invite you to. Like what do you really want to serve in your life? Do you want to serve the things, the unwanted things that you experience, the less pleasant ones? Or do you want to serve trust, present, wholeness, peace?
Because you can’t serve two states at the same time, right? You can’t. And I can’t keep rehearsing the old state and experience the new one. So it really becomes simple. Neville use the word consent. You can also ask yourself a question, what am I consenting to today? Not forever, not perfectly, but just what am I consenting to right now? Because we’re reminded by pretty much any spiritual teacher we’ve ever come across right, that we have an inner sanctuary in our spirit, and that’s really where we want to move from, and that’s what we do when we turn within. So where does this leave us? What am I doing for time? See, because I don’t use my computer anymore. I have to actually look at my watch.
So here’s my invitation to you. We’re going to close with a practice, but I really encourage you this week to practice this. As you go through the week, notice the state that you feel you’re experiencing and notice the mood. Name the mood. Give it a name. I’m in resentment. I’m in disappointment. I’m in whatever. Name the mood and then choose again. Choose again. And that’s how we work with our imagination consciously. That’s what Neville was pointing to in every chapter in this brilliant book, right? You’re not a fixed thing. Your life is not fixed. You’re the imaginative self and there’s infinite possibility and you are always free to choose again.
And so you don’t have to wait for your life to change. You can start living differently now. So we’re going to move into a little practice now and I’m calling this movement prayer so you get to decide how to do it and they’re going to give us a little beautiful accompaniment and the background, but you can either stay seated and put your feet on the ground, or if you would rather stand up, you can also stand up, but I just invite you to close your eyes either way. And so with your eyes closed, I just invite you to feel your feet on the floor.
If you’re sitting, feel the chair holding you. And if you’re standing, just feel your body holding you in space and just take a slow breath in and then just let it go and do it again, breathing in and breathing out. One more time, breathing in and breathing out. And without any judgment, just ask yourself, what state have I been living in? What’s state have I been living in? What mood has been shaping my days? What mood has been shaping my days? Just breathe in again, breathe out. And what has my imagination been rehearsing? What has my imagination been rehearsing?
And I just want you to notice. And as you notice, I invite you to just lift your shoulders up towards your ears and then just release them. Let’s do it a couple times. Just move your shoulders up to your ears and release and you can roll your shoulder blades down your back if that feels good. Just roll up your ears and back. And now allow your hands to open softly in your lap or at your sides. And let that just be a gesture of willingness. It’s a gesture of willingness as a gesture of consent. Just consenting to what spirit wants to move for you.
Is there something you’re willing and ready to let go of? Maybe a moment you’re ready to let be different in your imagination. Just allow that intention to be present. Now ask your inner self. What’s the state? I’m willing to live from now. Peace, trust, wholeness, courage, enough. Maybe there’s another word that resonates for you. But I invite you to just pick one word to anchor. And as you breathe in with your word, I just invite you to lift your heart up. Maybe you roll your shoulders back more, maybe you look up, but lift your heart up. And as you breathe out, just allow your jaw to soften, allow your body to soften. Let your spine lengthen.
And as you breathe out, just consciously release the old state. Breathing in, I welcome the new state. Breathing out. I release the old state. I release what I no longer need. Breathing in. I breathe in the new state. Breathing out. I release what I no longer need. One more time, breathing in. I invite the new state. Breathing out. I release what I no longer need. And I just invite you to repeat after me. I’m going to make three statements. I’m going to say it first, and then I’m going to say it with you so we’re all going to say it together.
So the first phrase is, “I consent to this state.” Say it with me. I consent to this state. I welcome this possibility. I welcome this possibility. Let’s say that again with more enthusiasm. I welcome this possibility. I live from this now. I live from this now. And so now we take this all into prayer, just in the awareness of God as the power, the presence, the possibility, the presence that is never an absence. The presence that I am one with, the presence that each person hearing my words is one with, the presence that all are one with. And from this place of oneness, I just speak my word. I speak a word of transformation for each and every one of us. I know that we have set aside what no longer serves us and that we are embracing what our spirit is calling us to do, to be, to inhabit this new state, this new spiritual quality, love, joy, peace, wholeness, happiness, wellbeing.
Whatever that state is, I know that spirit says yes to it. And so I say yes to that on all our behalfs. I know that God’s got this. I know this prayer is always ready fulfilled by the power of this word and with so much gratitude we say together and so it is.