The Thing Itself – John W. Adams
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
Exploring the Science of Mind Chapter One; a freedom and love that is beyond our fondest dreams.
SUMMARY
Not available.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams (00:00):
So beautiful. Thank you so much. So grateful to have you with us, TIFF. I know that Paige will be back next week, right? Yeah. But thanks for being here these last couple of weeks. Come back again for sure. Hello everybody. Oh, I have to get my laptop. One second. So glad to be here with you. Today we’re going to be talking about the first four chapters in The Science of Mind by Earnest Holmes. So this is sort of the foundational start of our philosophy. And I was thinking about this as I was putting this together and I was thinking, when was the first time I really got into this text? When was the first time I really encountered it? I think the first time was here. This is a very younger me, believe it or not. I had hair at the time and this was about 15 years ago.
(01:06):
And that’s me and Beth Gordon and Melissa Bingham and Lola Wright. And we are in a prac class. This is a prac class where we were actually a study session. We were I think getting ready for our exam because you have a written exam as part of prac training. And this was around the time that I really started getting into these first four chapters. And today we’re going to focus in on the chapter, on the chapter, on the first chapter, which is the thing itself. So I wrote this talk and I have a script and I was saying to Don, we’ll see how much I stick to the script because I’m known for wandering, but I’ll try to keep focused so that we can explore these ideas together. I came across this definition of atheism and I wanted to share with you, it says, an atheist believes that a hospital should build, a hospital should be built instead of a church.
(02:14):
An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer. And an atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death and wants disease conquered poverty banished and war eliminated. And I love this because I think this is what we believe. We are in alignment with this. And remember last time I spoke here, I talked about how we are the radicals. We are really the heretics in our teaching. And this is why, because this I think came out of a reaction to that sort of spirit, spiritual teaching, that spiritual path probably certainly one from my childhood, perhaps one from yours, where we are told to, we have to create these great symbols of worship for God. We must supplicate and reach out to God to make God love us because this capricious God will otherwise punish us or harm us in some way.
(03:12):
And so today what I want us to do is really move away from that. I want us to, the invitation here is if we just take a minute and completely discard the old idea of God, we let it go. Let go of the am anthropomorphized old man in the sky. We let go of those childhood stories about God. We let go of this idea. There is some kind of magical force out there. We’ll let go of all of it, all of these ideas that we’ve ever, ever had about God. If we discard and let it go and say goodbye to all of it, what are we left with? We’re left with just us. And this is a radical idea. So welcome to being a heretic. And when we center ourselves in this, we get centered in on ourselves, not in an egotistical way, but in an open and lovingly curious way when we step in deeply into our curiosity, into our investigation.
(04:20):
I think what we find when we do that is consciousness, right? We find consciousness, we have awareness, we have consciousness. So the world is expressing itself. And if you talk to a scientist or a naturalist and you talk to a lot of different people who have very pragmatic ideas about these things, they will tell you that it’s all evolving based on natural selection, which means that everything is expressing in a very random and scattershot way all over the place. And that what survives the most viable things, it’s all random. And that is probably true in a universe where there is no consciousness. But what do we know? What do we already know? We have to think about what do we know and what do we really, really know in our hearts? And if we take a breath and get quiet and we get centered, and we are going to do this together in a minute, so just hang in there, we can sense into this spiritual truth about ourselves.
(05:27):
This is our eternal consciousness. Our consciousness is not limited to the number of years we’re on the planet or our consciousness as we are is eternal. And so our concept of whatever God is really starts to morph. It starts to shift radically from the old model that we’ve been spooned since childhood into something quite different. And that is the thing itself. So what the invitation here is with this particular teaching in this chapter, I think it’s actually in all four chapters. I think there’s a commonality, a common thread that runs through all four. For example, just as an aside, these four chapters kind of map very nicely to the first four steps of affirmative prayer. If you think about it, it’s very interesting. Anyway, commonality, one of the common threads that runs through these four chapters is exploration. We’re being called invited into a space of, as I said, curiosity, a space of investigation.
(06:29):
And the more we lean into that and the less we lean into the I know scenario, the I know scenario, the more we lean into that, the more we are moving away from people who are sharing dogma and the ways that things have to be. And in case you’re wondering or concerned about it, that’s what a cult is. A cult is usually a very charismatic person who comes up and knows what they know and they tell you what to think and they tell you what to believe and they tell you how to be. And that is not our philosophy at all. In fact, we are invited into, and I would even say perhaps required to find our own way with these ideas. Because the way I hold this, the way I hold my idea of God’s spirituality source, that which is creating all that is this unconditional love is going to be different than yours. It has to be. I have different experiences. I have different teachings and readings and influences, and I hold this idea and these perspectives a little bit differently than anybody else. And so we’re all uniquely finding our way with this, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
(07:54):
And that’s why we come together in our Sunday celebrations and in other ways we come together to share and to influence, inspire each other and explore all of this and investigate it together. And this is the thing itself. It’s going to show up and express itself in different ways for different people. And there, one of the things that comes through in this chapter that I really, really like is that Ernest Holmes talks about the idea of science and spirituality and how the two must meet. And I think that that’s why it’s called science of mind.
(08:47):
It isn’t that science lives over here and spirituality lives over here. There is only one. It is connected. There’s a let go to the next slide. I love this quote by Richard Mann. Richard Mann, if you don’t know, was a Nobel Prize winning American theoretical physicist. So this is a scientist. And he said, I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned, right? We’re in that investigation. We are questioning things. We are always in that loving question. This spirituality thing is mysterious. It has a mystery to it. If you’ve encountered any kind of experience in life, a lot of times you may find yourself stepping back and going, well, why did that happen? And you’re immediately into that curiosity, into that investigation of how does this fit this path, this science of mind, this scientific philosophy. And one of the things about all of this, I think is about transitioning past limitations.
(09:54):
I think it is about freedom from limiting beliefs and limiting experiences. Our role is to be unlimited, actually, sorry, I take that back. We are unlimited. Our job is to remember that and express it. And as long as we’re having this human experience, we’re having human limitations, but that’s okay. We’re having those limitations for a reason where I’m only going to live for so many years. I’m only going to be able to run so fast or jump so high or whatever the limitations are in this human body. But we’re having those for a reason. We have those limitations because we must start from a limited place to get through to the unlimited place. Like when you’re teaching someone, when you’re teaching someone, you don’t give them the whole thing at once because you’ll be completely overwhelmed. We teach by giving bits and pieces, very limited information to work with and master. And then we build on that and we keep adding more and keep expanding more. And that’s what our process is. We are evolutionary creatures. We are evolving. We’re in a spiral universe that is spiraling us up and we are evolving into our unlimited expression.
(11:10):
And in this chapter, Ernest Holmes describes all of this and he gets into it in a beautiful way. What I find about Ernest Holmes, and if I have the book here, this is the version that I use, this is the definitive version of science of mind. What I like about this particular version, there’s several versions out there. What I like about this version is that the page numbers line up with any kind of curriculum that we use that references particular specific page numbers in science of mind. So if you want to be able to take class and follow those references, this is the definitive editions, the one to look.
(11:55):
There was something else I wanted to read to you. Now, this is speaking of letting go of the old ideas. This is from of all things the Bible. I know we don’t really talk about the Bible that much. I know, right? Exactly, exactly. But as much as people want to use the Bible to beat us up, I wanted to share this idea with you that is actually in the Bible. This is Galatians chapter three verse, which verses it. It’s verse 28. And it says, there is neither Jew nor Armenian. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female, for you are all one. So when we hear people talking about and preaching from some place of holier than thou attitude, you can rest assured that even in something, the text that they reference, there is this idea of oneness. There’s this idea of, yeah, we transcend. We transcend as we are, are not atheists.
(13:10):
Pantheists are pan, meaning God everywhere, in and through and as everything or theists and pan. Yeah, pan is everywhere. Theist is God or source or truth or whatever your word is. And that middle syllable means that we transcend. So we’re in and through all that is this experience and we transcend it. And that’s our journey. Now I got to find where I left off, but I love that. And we’re going to do a work, a Bible workshop in February, and I hope you can join me because we’re going to explore this text a little bit more to find out and discover that what people tend to say it says is not at all what it says, which is really fascinating. So in the chapter, if you go through the chapter, Ernest Holmes has several subheadings, and one of them is the universe doesn’t play favorites. Remember my atheism quote I shared, we cannot earn God’s favor because we cannot earn God’s favor because we’ve never not had it.
(14:23):
So it’s not something you have to earn. We are it. We’ve just become unconscious to it sometimes, so we’re always waking up and reawakening to it. It’s part of that mysterious process that’s happening. He also says, nothing supernatural about the study of life. There is nothing supernatural here. That’s why there’s this marriage between science and spirituality. There is a oneness there. It isn’t two separate things. There’s no separation there. If we see a difference, it’s only because science hasn’t yet fully explained. All the miracles we see happening around us. Nevertheless, miracles shifts in situations, circumstances, healing, prosperity, harmony in relationships is all natural. This is our natural state of being. And the revelation of it, the shift of it, the movement towards it is our spiritual practice. He says, limitless power is available to us. That’s paraphrasing, but limitless power is available to us. This is oneness.
(15:25):
This is the oneness in reality that we are connected to this creative force that has brought all of us into creation. And then he says, all thought is creative. I love this because what it tells us is it gives us an idea of how to get into this experience of this spiritual practice, right? This is part of our investigation. Part of the reason for having a seemingly limited human experience is so that we can gain control and agility with our thoughts so that we can create intentionally. So we’re not just randomly thinking thoughts and making them manifest, but we know that our thoughts are creating our experience. And so we come back to that place again and again to recreate the experience that we’re having. He says, learning to trust will make us happy. I think that’s like learning your faith in this spirituality, learning that science will catch up.
(16:32):
But for now, we may have to lean a little bit more into faith. It will make us happy. He says that nature is waiting expectantly for us to recognize it. God is waiting patiently God or whatever your word is. I like the word God. And part of what I’m talking about today, I hope helps you see that I’ve redefined what that word means. God is waiting patiently and expectantly for us to recognize that it is in us as us, and for us, this is a power for good. And as Ernest Holmes says, and we can use it, Ernest Holmes ends this chapter by saying that if we go looking for something complicated and incomprehensible, we will never allow ourselves to grasp these ideas. He encourages us to recognize its simplicity. The thing itself is you. It is within you. It always has been, and it always will be.
(17:34):
The thing itself is this unconditional love, this creative truth that has brought you here into this human experience and will carry you forward for eternity. For we are eternal beings. We are multidimensional, eternal. Just having this human experience right now to get curious, to get investigative, to get into this idea of how do I navigate this and how do I personalize it? Because it is your journey. And so I am not here to tell you what to think or what to believe or how to do it, and neither is Ernest Holmes. We’re here to encourage you to keep asking, keep questioning, keep investigating, keep finding that, getting still and finding that love, that life that that is within you. And what is it telling you? What is it expressing? There is a wisdom within you that is coming forward. So let’s go into a practice now and just try to find this within ourselves, but just kind of practice what we preach, so to speak, and just get centered.
(18:47):
I’m kind of stepping over here. Poor Ben doesn’t know where to put, how to focus the camera. I mean, I like the podium, but I don’t like the podium. I feel like it separates us and it’s really we’re just having a conversation. So right now, I just invite you to take a breath and close your eyes. We did a little bit of this on Christmas Eve. We’re going to revisit it a little bit. If you were here for Christmas Eve, it may be familiar to you taking a breath and centering in and imagining that there is a little ball of golden light, just a few inches above your head. This little ball of golden light is this perfect love, this perfect piece, this perfect creative spark that is creating all that we see, experience, know, and understand, and just knowing and seeing, and allowing this light, this love to pour through you, through the top of your head, down into your body all the way, throughout the bottom of your feet. Just clearing away anything that is not like itself.
(19:54):
And even through our thoughts and mind our imagination, clearing away anything that no longer serves you, any ideas that were foisted upon you or that seem to linger, that are ready to go. Just let them be washed away with this light breathing in. And we just know that we center this light in our heart space. Just feeling and knowing it’s presence. It’s a presence that’s always been there. It’s very familiar. It doesn’t feel like something other. It just feels like you. It feels like me. It feels like us so familiar that you almost disregard it as like, well, spirit or God or whatever is supposed to be something else, but it isn’t is just us.
(20:52):
And so feeling into that, I just invite you to expand that into all areas of your life. And just knowing that it is wanting to and expecting to express in every single area of life, it is wanting to express as your greatest prosperity. And just allowing yourself to accept that you are that loved, that you are so loved, that you have this unlimited prosperity, that it expresses in your wholeness, in your physical experience, in your health and your wellbeing, that you are so loved, that you are radiating this beautiful, perfect health, this perfect life, this perfect love, this perfect health. It is expressing in and through all your relationships that this harmony is possible and is here. And you are so loved, so beloved by this beautiful eness that it just expresses as this beautiful connection, this harmony, this peace, and in through all your affairs, through your work, through your family, through all the processes of life, releasing and letting go of anything that is unlike itself. It is unconditional. It is ever present, and it is always an ever available. And so we just step into that, and this is what I call God.
(22:33):
And so knowing that I am one with it, I know that each and every single person experiencing this with me is one with this one, one with this source, one with this peace, one with this joy, one with this abundance, this prosperity, one with this wholeness, one with this harmony, one with this thing called God or thing called whatever word you want to use. And so knowing this, I just say a blessing upon our time together and our openness and our availability to be curious, to be investigating, to be just open and available to allowing the merger of science and spirituality to allow for you to be inspired by and to channel into your beingness, the awareness and the insight and inspiration that just brings you ever closer to this limitless experience. Your true experience, your true nature, which is limitless. You are unlimited. And so I claim and know this for each person.
(23:41):
I know that each person is experiencing their unlimited truth, unlimited nature, their unlimited selfhood in this world. And in this year of 2025, I just know that it is presencing itself in ways expected and unexpected in ways, dynamic in ways that we’ve never experienced before. It is the most beautiful and incredible unfolding, and I’m so grateful for it, so grateful for this teaching. The thing itself, whatever word you choose or phrase, you choose God, source, higher power, creative, spark, light, love. It is, it simply is. And we allow it to be, and we get curious about it, and we sit with it. I’m so grateful for that. So grateful for this community to be willing to step into that investigation, to be willing to step into this deep, deep connection and expression of spirit in their lives. So grateful for each and every single person here to say yes, to being a part of this philosophy, knowing and affirming that it is their personal philosophy.
(24:53):
So grateful for the fact that we just get together and we love each other up, and we laugh with each other, and we challenge each other, and it’s all leading us to our greatest yet to be so grateful for that. So grateful for all the manifestations of spirit as love, light, joy, laughter, as music, as community, as spiritual centers, as all that it is. So grateful for all of this. I release it now into the action of the law. The law that always says yes to whatever thoughts as all thoughts are creative. So we hold these thoughts, know that they are being made manifest here and now unconditionally perfect in love. And so it is.
(25:43):
Yes, yes. Thank you.