OVERVIEW
Ernest Holmes teaches us that our life is created through our awareness of Spirit. We write “the play” of our life through our conscious awareness of Spirit as a Presence. Join me this Sunday as we continue to explore “Living Without Fear” and how to step more fully into being conscious co-creators of our lives.
TRANSCRIPTION
The transcription is automated. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.
“In high school, I think I had this existential fear about what happens after we die and it sort of obsessed me and I went on this search. I was trying to figure out like what actually happens after we die. And what’s the truth about, you know, this spiritual world, you know, I was raised a Methodist and even though I don’t think we were very fire and brimstone, I still had this idea in my head that like we had to prove we were good enough. Right. And I, I tried a lot of things, but I don’t really think I found peace until I found first Buddhism because, Hey, we might reincarnate. Right? And then there’s new thought, which we are a part of, which is like, Hey, our spirit continues. We believe that. And then marry that with a little quantum physics, like energy cannot be created and destroyed.
So somehow that all made me feel better, but it still rears its ugly head sometimes. But I share it for a few reasons. One is this idea of the spiritual nature of life is something that I think creates a lot of fear in people because we’re surrounded by people who believe right. That there’s a right way and there’s not a right way. Right? They’re all speaking to the same thing, but the messages have gotten changed to control people. So that’s the first reason I wanna talk about it. But the second reason is that, you know, if we actually understand spirit, this creative nature that we’re part of, then understanding that can bring us comfort and that who we really are is not this cloak of personality that we put on in our life. But it’s really this essence or this spirit, whatever word you use, that’s the truth of who you are.
Ernest Holmes says a man sits down to write a play, his thought conceives of characters and their actions. The play is in his mind else. There is no play. He creates characters with his thoughts and he gives them the only life that they will ever have. So your life is the play that you’re living. It’s infused with your thoughts, those that you choose consciously, and those that are unconsciously there, that’s where the play of your life is created. And one of the things we all deal with is our fears. We all have them. They’re unconscious thoughts. A lot of times it can feel as if it’s just happening to us. And it’s not very helpful to say just don’t feed ’em right. It’s not helpful because sometimes you feel like you can’t help it, right. It’s just happening. And it feels like it’s happening to us.
And so, as I sat with the book this week, I was inspired to spend some time with some speaking or some teachings that inspired me from the Buddhist and the yogic traditions, because I think there’s a lot of common sense there. And Ernest Holmes is talking about the same thing, just FYI. He uses different words because he studied all the paths. So he brought it back to the language that he knew, but it all points to the same thing. And I think we wanna stay open, right? Whatever we believe we can make it solid. Right? We can make it solid and think this is the way, but we wanna stay open because there might be something else for us that helps us move forward in our life. So Connie read to us from Pema children who is one of my personal favorites. I think she’s not gonna teach anymore, which makes me sad.
But this idea about staying with whatever experience we are having in our life was really powerful for me. So whether it’s a welcome experience or an unwelcome experience, just staying with it and being open to whatever arises, whether we would call it good or bad, whether we would call it happy or sad, just staying with it, but in a gentle way, you know, that’s why I like how she talks about a dog. I mean, I have a dog at home. We’re a little obsessed with Ollie. And if I yell at him, like stay Ollie outta my frustration. It’s not very helpful. Right. But if I’m like, stay Ollie, just stay, just stay there. Then it’s a different energy, right? And that’s how we wanna hold ourselves. We wanna hold ourselves with loving kindness, right? We really wanna have unconditional friendliness for ourselves. That’s what Pema calls it because fear triggers a lot of emotions, right? And oftentimes we have anger underneath our fear. We might not name it that, but if we go a little deeper, we realize, oh, it’s anger. That’s happening. But if we work with whatever’s happening in our life and we bring it into our spiritual practice, it becomes more workable for us. We can work with it because we don’t let it throw us off center as much.
And one of the things I like about the Buddhist also is they’re very realistic about life. You know, we can all be in our like Western Lala land. Like it should all be peace, happiness, harmony all the time, but that’s not the reality of life because our journey, the journey of our body is not a permanent journey, right. It’s gonna wear out. And that’s true for the people we love. And so we all have setbacks and some of the setbacks are of different types. PMA talks about her divorce. And she’s very funny. She’s very low key, but she’s very funny. And she said, you know, my husband got involved with someone else and he told me I was bad at sex. And she’s like, I was really mad. I was really mad. And I was trying to practice, you know, look toward the good and all of this. And she’s like, I just wasn’t there. And then she heard tri P ring Rimpoche and she became aware that it was okay for her to have anger. And it was okay for her to be where she was that she just had to sit with what was happening because the gift of any emotion is it wakes us up. That’s the gift of the emotion. So when we’re having it and we’re trying to stay with it, we just wanna be aware. It’s trying to wake us up to something.
So go towards the feeling, go towards whatever’s happening in the current reality, the current moment, as Connie said, it’s gonna give begin to give way to a sense that there is something bigger happening. If you bring this into your spiritual practice, you know, Buddhist talk a lot about, groundlessness like this idea that life is always changing and we’re afraid of this. Groundlessness right. We wanna fix everything. We want everything. We wanna know what’s gonna happen with everything. But then the, if, if we’re gonna know what’s gonna happen with everything, we never get to be surprised. Like, what if it’s good? What if, what you call bad right now turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to you. And so we wanna stay, we wanna move through the energy and see what is on the other side of it. But a lot of times we wanna run away.
Don’t we, we wanna run away. I’m guilty, but how do we run away? We run away through our anger. We run away through our rage, jealousy, cravings, addictions being arrogant. We run away through anxiety, through stress, through denial, through dissociating, through distancing. You know, there’s a lot of ways we run away. We might not even know we’re running away. I was thinking about that movie, the runaway bride with Julia Roberts, anyone remember that? Like, she’d get to the altar and she’d like, have her roller skates on and leave. Right. She’d be out of there. But like, I have to own, like, I have that part of myself. That’s like, I’m just done with this bye. Right? But now I know when it’s happening, I know when it’s happening so I can stay with it. And that’s really the invitation for us. There’s wisdom in whatever it is.
If you sit with it and don’t blame yourself, have unconditional friendliness for yourself. But just notice Ernest Holmes says consciousness is not only the starting point of perception. It runs through all perception. And without it, there can be no real perceiver. The movement of thought is a movement of consciousness. So prayer, meditation, hope, fear, doubt. These are all states of consciousness, right? And nothing moves unless consciousness is aware of the movement. So consciousness works through us. So we wanna cultivate our unity with this consciousness. That’s what we do when we do our spiritual practice, sad guru talks about how amazing this intelligent universes that we live in. If I eat a banana within a day, that banana becomes me. And then it gives me the energy to move forward with whatever I’m doing in my life. It has intelligence in it. And the same is true about anything we could say.
You know, we were talking about this in mental equivalence yesterday. And I said, you know, even our brain think about how our brain works. If we pour in negative thoughts, our brain has the biochemistry to keep feeding those. Right. And that is how it is set up. That is the intelligence of the brain, because it’s trying to keep you safe. But if we’re feeding our conscious thought, then we can become open to what’s around us. And our brain has the intelligence to know like, oh, they moved into conscious thinking now. And so our work is to shift ourselves.
And also I wanna talk one, say one other thing about, you know, one of the things sad guru teaches that I think is super, super helpful is that religion, the cl can, you know, the traditional religions that maybe many of us grew up in really kind of make this earthly experience wrong, right? Like it’s not okay to have this life energy moving through you and to express it. And you know, however, we choose to express it, sexual energy or whatever. And so that makes us think that there’s some future state that’s better than where we are now. But the truth is, you know, we have this moment, that’s the truth. I love this story. If you ever saw the movie, what dreams may come, did anyone ever see that movie? Brilliant movie with Robin Williams and someone else? I can’t remember right now. I think Cuba Gooding Jr.
But I don’t remember who the woman was. It doesn’t matter. But he had this picture. He was in love with and he and his wife lose their kids. I think there was an accident or something. She falls into depression. She takes her life. So he’s so devastated. He can’t live without her. So he decides to, I guess, take his life and you see him step into heaven and he’s in the middle of his painting and he’s walking through it. And it’s like, the paint is moving with him as he walks, but he gets there and his wife’s not there. And she’s gone down to like this terrible pits of hell. And he goes down and he gets her and he pulls her back up. He helps her see possibility. And I love that as an analogy for our lives, because sometimes we’re down there and we need to pull ourselves up or we need someone to help pull us up.
And that’s okay, cuz we’re not in this journey alone. But it’s a great analogy too, for our thought like, am I stepping into my picture that I want? Or am I stepping back down into where I don’t wanna be? And as we interact with life, we can interact with life as through self preservation, right? Through fear. We’re trying to keep ourselves safe. And when we do that, we put up walls along around us. Right. We protect ourselves. But if we step in and activate what sod guru calls, grace, which I would say synchronicity flow possibility would be another way to talk about it. Then we’re gonna have a different experience of life. So it’s fear or possibility.
And you know, both of these things are active in our life. It’s really a matter of what do we do with it? When it happens, we have to make ourselves available to experience grace or flow or synchronicity. And we do that through our practice and think about your life when you feel good, what do you do? You’re open, you’re excited, you’re moving and you’re flowing. But when you feel bad or fearful, fearful you contract. So we really wanna move through life with the energy of expansion, like your song, because that’s actually natural to us. And we can express expansion positively, right through creative choice that is driven by the informed by the spirit within us. Or we can also do it in, I was, I don’t wanna use the word negatively, but that’s the word that’s coming to mind right now we can, you know, try to win. We can be in our ego. We can do all these human things that we do that try to protect our identity, our human identity. But we wanna stay in the energy of expansion. Eckard told, teaches that fear comes from the egoic mind and he points us back to thought patterns again. So we create imaginary situations in our mind. Our body doesn’t know the difference between whether it’s real or imagined. It’s the same thing to your body. And so you need to, to ask yourself, is your mind feeding the story of fear?
Or maybe where is my mind feeding the story of fear? Because I think we probably all do that and to work, to not feed the destructive thoughts. And how do we do that? We do that through prayer. We do that through working with practitioners. We do that through being in practice and study and meditation or other things that lift us up. It could be music. It could be being in nature. It’s different for everyone. But if you notice, if you’re feeling a lot of stress or fear, do you ever notice, like if you just take a step back and you go do something and forget about it, you feel better. If you ever notice that I know that helps me. Ernest Holmes teaches us that our life’s source is the infinite, the flow through us equals our receptivity to this source. We didn’t put the power within us and in the long run, we cannot misplace it.
So we all have this inner power. The source of that inner power is the infinite, which we are all part of. I like to think of that as the energy that we’re all part of, you know, you can use whatever word works for you, but I’m really in love with this word energy right now, because it’s easy when we pray to think, oh, I’m praying to something outside of me, but it’s like, no, I’m part of this energy. It’s literally creating my life experience and I can use that energy positively, or I can use that energy negatively.
And so how do we begin to tap into this energy, this divine awareness. It, it, it begins with really understanding where we are. And I like to think about this. Like, what do I want more of in my life? What do I want less of in my life that feels like I’m holding it lightly when I do that, you know? So I might wanna be more in work that I feel is more impactful to the consciousness of the planet. And I wanna be less in things that drain my energy. That’s just an example from my own life. So what do you want more of? What do you want less of? Just give it some thought. It’s a great way to check in with where you are in a really non-critical way. Cuz we can also embrace new thought and like I need to fix myself, right?
No nothing’s broken. Whatever’s happening. It’s for you. It’s helping you to move forward. And what do I do once I know what I want more of, then I take it into my practice, right? I mean I’m preaching to the choir. You all know this. I affirm, I pray. I practice. I study, but I also wanna look at how big is the container for my good, like, am I really ready to receive what I say I want? And is there any place that I’m limiting it that I don’t even realize it. Like I came from a very hard working family. My dad had a small business and he would leave the house at six 30 in the morning. He would come home at six 30 at night. He was in tool and diet. It was hard physical labor and he’d be exhausted. But that’s the example I grew up with.
You grow, get up early. You do not sleep in. Sleep in is like laziness and you better be productive. Well, somewhere that still lives in my mind. Right? Like, and, and it can cause me to not like give myself more leisure and play and things like that. So that’s what I’m talking about. Really looking underneath the surface to say like, okay, do I have something that’s limiting my good, that I’m not aware of? And how do I, how do I open up more to that? Good Ernest Holmes says, we put great faith in fear, faith in fear that one may lose his position. Faith in fear that one may lose material, possessions, health, and on and on. We put a lot of faith in our fear, but we wanna have faith in the substance underneath it. So I’m gonna use the word energy for that.
He uses the word substance. I’m gonna use energy that we are part of this energy that we are co-creating with. And Ernest says, faith is not hope it is substance. It is not. It does not look away from itself being substance. It looks within itself. And within this, it realizes that the life of spirit is also the life of, he says, man, but we can also say woman or person or it right. You are it. And that we wanna turn away and deny anything that contradicts this fact of existence. So with faith, we pour our thought into a new mold. We call that a mental equivalent. It’s what we’re studying right now. But begin, begin to create a new play for our life. Right? We consciously begin to identify what we want our life to look like. So we can play fear or we can play possibility.
And most of us have already played fear. Haven’t we we’ve all played fear. I still play fear. Sometimes I had this crazy dream this week in my dream. I don’t know what I was doing right before I went to bed, which is apparently a very important time to implant things in your subconscious. I had this dream that I was in this room of people who didn’t believe what I believed. And they were trying to force me to believe what they believed <laugh>. And I’m like, what was that dream about? But it shows an unconscious fear. Like we’re living in the middle of a, a culture of fear right now, right? Where different viewpoints of the world are fighting with each other. So clearly there’s some fear in me about the viewpoints, which I do not hold. So I own that right now. I know that. What am I gonna do with that?
I could put in my mind before I went to bed, just this idea that there are peaceful solutions out there seeing harmony, seeing people working together, becoming more curious about what might be possible or how we find the middle ground. You know, that’s, that’s what I wanna feed. And so whatever it is for you, I just invite you to look at that. And one thing that is super powerful to do is this active imagination. Neville, Goddard talks a lot about this. And it’s really the point of the mental equivalent, which we’re stunning. We were talking about this the other night at dinner, I was with rich and a few of his friends. They had been golfing and they were talking about, when things go wrong in your game and you get in your head and then it gets worse and whatever. And I said, it reminds me when I got scuba certified, I got in the pool and I freaked out.
The first time I took my mask out, I forgot that I wasn’t supposed to breathe. And when I was in the pool, so I took in all this water, I come bursting out and I said to the really nice young man, I’m like, I cannot do this. And he is like, come on, you gotta, you know, whatever. And he goes, I said, okay, I’ll come back tomorrow. But I really had to work with myself. I had to visualize it, take the mask off. Remember not to breathe. Simple thing, put the mask back on clear the mask. But I had to work with myself and I learned something from that was that I could work with seeing things differently. And so that’s what we wanna do through our practice. We wanna practice active imagination. We wanna practice prayer work and we wanna create a greater container for our good.
So I invite you to play. What is the play you want to play in your life? What do you wanna choose? Are you gonna choose fear? Are you gonna choose possibility? And we’re gonna take this into prayer now. So I invite the practitioners. I’m actually inviting the practitioners to stand up. If anyone just wants to go get a prayer while I’m praying the big prayer. If there’s something you’d like some prayer for, we got a couple people standing up, you can just go grab some prayer and I’m gonna speak a prayer while my, I got three people singing for me here. Yes. Awesome. So in this moment, let us turn within how good it is to know that we are part of an energy, a substance, a spirit, a love, whatever word is your word, just this deeper consciousness of life that goes beyond this human experience. And I know that I’m one with this field of all being this infinite energy substance spirit source, just as each of the people hearing my words are one with this loving presence and power of good and possibility this ever emerging flow and grace and ease
How good.
And so from this place of oneness, I speak my word, just knowing and declaring that whatever we are holding in fear
Good
That we release that into spirit into the higher consciousness and we allow it to be transformed and transmuted into something different, a different experience of life, an experience of possibility. And I know that spirit says yes to this spirit says yes to the greater expression of life in as in through all of us
Say yes, yes.
And as we embrace this, yes. I just know that life opens before us, our experience shifts. And I know that more is possible
High shift.
And so we just simply allow this goodness to come into our awareness.
So
Peace harmony flow
Ease. Yes.
Synchronicity.
Yes. Yes.
Grace.
I say yes to all. That is good. Yes.
And with so much gratitude, knowing that spirit says yes to all that has been spoken and all that hasn’t been spoken, anything that we are holding in our hearts, anything in the hearts of the people in this room. I just am grateful to know that spirit says yes and all is well
Say yes.
And so it is
Says to all that is good. That is good.”