Spiritual Principle: How To Use It – John Adams, LSP
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DESCRIPTION
Today we complete our review of the first four chapters of Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes with the fourth chapter: How To Use It.
SUMMARY
John Adams discusses how to use the principles of Science of Mind to shift one’s perspective and create positive change in life. Key points include:
- Use Science of Mind to disrupt negative thought and feeling patterns, and express more love, joy, and abundance.
- Observe your thoughts and beliefs without judgment, to understand the root causes behind your experiences.
- Practice forgiveness, both of others and yourself, to release limiting beliefs and open up to the divine life within.
- Use affirmative prayer and trust in the creative process to consciously manifest desired outcomes.
- Maintain a perspective of compassion and understanding for yourself and others, recognizing the underlying divinity in all.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams, LSP (00:01):
Thank you. Thanks so much Paige and Greg and Nora. What a beautiful, beautiful song. Thank you. So I always try to find something and ask them to sing it for us so that we get a lot of different things and they always accommodate me. It’s so wonderful. They’re the best band ever and the best human beings ever. So there was this guy named Jasper, and Jasper was having a bad time of it. Everything seemed to be going wrong. Everything that he tried to do seemed to be going wrong, and he got very, very down on himself about it. It’s like, Ugh, what else can go wrong? But he had a friend and his friend was like, okay, tell me what’s going wrong. And he said, well, I was on my way to the grocery store. My car broke down. And his friend said, well, I mean you can see that as a problem, but it’s also like you were close to home.
(00:58):
You got the car fixed. Now when you go on a long trip or you go far from home, you’re in safe transportation, everything’s going to be okay. He goes, yeah, but I think I’m going to get laid off from my job. They’re cutting back. And he said, well, you’ve always hated that job, so maybe this is an opportunity to find a job and do work that you love. And he said, okay, okay, okay, I’ll think about that. So we’re going to come back to them in a minute. I wanted to share with you out of the chapter, there was so many good nuggets in this chapter. It was hard to pick a reading, but I wanted to read something to you from out of Science of Mind in the chapter. So just to review, we’re doing the first four chapters of The Science of Mind in January.
(01:43):
And the idea of this was to review those fundamentals and those first four chapters really outline the philosophy of science of mind, and today’s chapter is how to use it. So we’re going to get into that today. And I like this idea that he shares on page 51 from this chapter, it says, it’s easy enough to rush about shouting that there are no sick people, but this will never heal those who appear to be sick. It’s easy to proclaim that there are no needy. Anyone can say this whether he be wise or otherwise. If we are to prove such statements to be facts in our experience, we shall be compelled to do more than announce a principle no matter how true it may be.
(02:33):
Sit with that for a second. It’s interesting. I’ve been on TikTok and of course, because of the things that I look at and search for, I have a lot of spiritual tiktoks, a lot of mindfulness, a lot of that kind of content that’s being created and a lot of even into religion and all of that kind of stuff. One of the conversations that seems to be happening on TikTok a lot these days is people announcing that there is no God. God does not exist. It was created to control us and to invoke fear. I can understand where that comes from, but what we’re going to talk about today is that there really is this thing called God. We’re just going to understand it a little bit differently. That’s been our conversation here for a while now, and we know that it expresses itself a little differently than what others may be used to seeing.
(03:37):
I’m so grateful for Reverend Judy’s prompt on our share today about what have you been programmed from childhood to believe about things. I had come up when I shared with Rob that one of the things that I was always heard is that if you’re bad, you’ll be punished by God. And we know that these things are false statements, and how do we know this? We know this because we are proving it with our experience. So I’m just going to share with you that when I do this, this talk thing that they ask me to do, when Reverend Amy asks me to do this, I am speaking to you about my journey and my experience. I don’t pretend to have it all right, but all I can do is share with you what’s working for me and how I’ve been experiencing this, and to the extent that I do channeling it.
(04:34):
So one of the things that when I was sitting with this title, how to use it, the thing that I kept thinking about, the first question that came to me is, why do we use it in the first place? Why use it? Why? And some of the answers that came up for me is because we want things to work better than they are. We want to change our circumstances. We get very excited about what’s possible in sending ourselves in the spiritual work, and that’s great. I’m going to put this down here so it’s out of the way, and we get very excited about what else we may be able to do. And I want to pull this over so I can do my slides, but we can get caught up in this spiritual idea that we must be, I dunno, I don’t know. We must be purely spiritually altruistic. And what I want to suggest is that that is an old idea that altruism is absolutely beautiful and holding kind, loving, supportive thoughts is absolutely beautiful. And yet we know that we can make manifest things that don’t always work as well for us.
(06:10):
We want to get very real about why we’re using it. One of the ways that we can try to use it is to change others. I want to change this person not behaving the way I want them to behave. They’re not showing up the way I want them to show up. And of course, we can never change another person no matter how many affirmations we do. And it can really feel like in this life experience, at least for me, it can really feel like we’re getting onto a roller coaster, right? It’s this experience of I’m getting kind of locked into this is going to bother me. I’m going to have to push this down. We get locked into this experience of I’m trying to unlock my computer and talk at the same time. It’s such a gifted thing to do. There we go. Hopefully that’ll show up on the screen over here. Ben’s way ahead of me. So as he usually is, oh, I got it.
(07:24):
It just wasn’t in very tight. Oh, you know what? I think we might, there it goes. Okay. Oh, rollercoaster. So we can feel like we’re getting locked into our circumstances and situations. It’s like when they put you in that rollercoaster and they pull the bar down and you’re like, I’m in it. And even if you change your mind, it feels like you can’t get out. These circumstances can feel absolute. They can feel very solid, very immovable, and we can feel very vulnerable to the situation. We can feel very vulnerable to our own fears about what this means and what it will mean.
(08:08):
But it’s just our perspective. It’s the way we are looking at it. The story that I started with this, Jasper was focused on what wasn’t working and his friend was trying to help him see that there was some good in what was going on. I’m going to do my first quote, Richard Nerman. I talked about Richard the last time. Physicist, brilliant guy. I kind of a big fan. He says, the fact that we are living at the bottom of a deep gravity, well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this is normal, is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective is. I love that from, and I love pulling in someone like Richard because he’s a scientist. So we want to kind of always marry and we’re studying science of mind. So there is this marriage between science and spirituality and this idea that if you really think about what’s really happening as he describes tribe, wow. And here we are alive and experiencing it, and in this experience, we have this perspective that is malleable. We can choose to see the good in things. We can choose to see the negativity. So the invitation is to keep our focus on what is positive. This is one of the ways in which we use it. How do we use it?
(09:45):
We adjust our perspective to what is positive. I like this quote too. This is from Marie Curie. Again, another scientist. Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less, and we do this through our scientific study, but we also do this through our spiritual study. We do this through our life experience, and one of the things that I always try to do is to use these principles and see what happens. Just be curious, be in that curiosity because understanding, to me, understanding equals consciousness and consciousness equals the philosophy of science of mind. Science of mind is that process of getting us off the rollercoaster. It is to disrupt that rollercoaster experience. Part of our spiritual work is disruption.
(10:47):
So why do we use it? We use it to disrupt these thoughts and feeling patterns that we are ready to shift. We use it to express more love, light, joy, abundance, wholeness, peace and our experience. This is expressing our truth, our true nature, who we truly are are these infinite, eternal, loving beings that are having this human experience and the human experience is mesmerizing. It pulls us into these situations that may feel fearful. That’s the lizard brain, the reptile brain of survival, right? I’ve got to survive, so I’m on guard all the time, and I’m not telling you not to do that. I’m not telling you what to do at all. I’m just suggesting that as we’re holding thoughts in mind, being aware of when we’re working and living in fear, when we’re living and working in love, and how we balance that with making our lives work for ourselves when we make our lives work best for ourselves.
(12:04):
And how do we do that? We do that by directing our thoughts and feelings. Sometimes easier said than done. I get it. I have another quote, Joe dispenser, Joe dispenser thoughts of the language of the brain and feelings of the language of the body. How you think and how you feel create your state of being, how you think and how you feel create your state of being. Yeah, our experiences are very much about how we interpret them, how we see them, how we feel them. And one of the keys to how to use it is to not just as Ernest Holmes said, announce the spiritual principle, but also to feel the spiritual principle to invoke our feeling nature. We have to feel it. That is where I think we need to really get in touch with that thing that’s at the center of our being, the core of our being, which is that truth, capital that God, if you will, says that God is not this am anthropomorphic old man in the sky, acting like Santa Claus, capriciously giving good and bad out to people who are good and bad, but it is that creative life that is within us, and we are the channels for that.
(13:41):
We are the way that God expresses in this world. The miracles that happen in this world happen through us, not to us. If you think about it, I don’t want to go down the path of biblical literature, at least not today. We’ll do that another day. But the Jesus miracles, if you know the story of Jesus of Nazareth and the miracles that are articulated in the New Testament, all the Jesus miracles came through him. It wasn’t something that he was like, oh, look, and then God made this thing happen. He channeled this energy, he channeled this love, this presence. He knew so clearly that there was absolute love and nothing else that it transformed the world around him and the circumstances around him, and that’s what caused the healings and all the miracles that happened around him. He was the conduit through which God expressed. And so, so I, that is the only way that God expresses in this human experience. It comes through us. And so we hold that consciousness and we hold that perspective.
(15:16):
One of the ways to do this, and one of the ideas that I had about it was I do work with a lot of, I’ve been working in the arts most of my adult life in nonprofit work with artists performing arts and now multidisciplinary arts. And one of the things that can happen when you have, let’s say we have an art appreciation class at the Art Institute of Chicago with a curator, one of the things a curator will do when they show you the painting is that they will ask you to just simply tell them, what do you see? Literally? What do you see? You look at the painting and kind of go or look at any beautiful paintings we have here and go, well, I see a frame, I see a red blotch here and a yellow blotch here, and maybe a figure over here.
(16:03):
You literally look at what is there on the painting. And one of the things that we can do is through our process of what is going on with me, what is happening here? What are the fears? What are the thoughts? What are the realities that I’m holding onto? What are the beliefs that I’m holding onto? If we journal those out, rather than getting into, well, this is a good thought and that’s a bad thought, or this is, and getting into the judgment of it, if we step back and we just look at it and go, okay, what am I seeing? What am I seeing? Am I seeing patterns? Am I seeing a lot of word choices? That’s sort of interesting. And again, the hard part about it, if there is a hard part, is just letting go of any judgment about it. So one practice can be just to do this journaling and kind of examine what am I really holding onto and what am I really believing? And explore these things for ourselves.
(17:03):
One of the things that you can find when I do that because done this, and so what are the things that I found that I was really interested in is where am I letting people off the hook and where am I keeping people on the hook? So let people off the hook. Well, you didn’t show up or you didn’t do the thing you’re supposed to do, but that’s okay. It’s fine. We’ll figure it out. It’s no problem. And when do I people on the hook, oh, you didn’t do what you were supposed to do and Oh, I need to get into it with you. I need to hold you accountable. I need to teach you responsibility. I need to make sure that you understand that there’s a power dynamic that’s happening here. It can show up a lot of different ways. And this idea of letting people on the hook and off the hook I think is really, really interesting. And again, no judgment if I am doing it, it’s just kind of observing when and why do I do that?
(18:19):
Why do I feel like I have to do that? And so as our curator friend might tell us, we just want to look and see what we see. And by the way, in my metaphor, you are the artist. So you are the one that not only are you observing the artwork, but you created the artwork and it’s your journey. So what does it represent to you? And what that does is it starts you to understand yourself more and it starts to understand, oh yeah, I feel like I have to do this for this reason. Okay? What I find is that you were not making ourselves wrong, but it’s really interesting at the core of it, when I did this and I was looking at when do I keep people on the hook, one of the things that came up for me was I’m trying to be helpful.
(19:24):
I don’t know if they think of that, that I’m being helpful, but that’s my intention, right? My intention is to be helpful. And once I get into that realization, I can start to unpack that. Why is that my responsibility? Why am I doing that? Where is that coming from and is there ultimately a fear at the heart of that? And for me, there really was, there was a fear. And the fear comes from so many different. This is why you have to spend time with it and unpack it. The fear comes from, as Rob and I were talking about those childhood programming beliefs about what God is and does and the lightning bolts, you’re bad, you’re bad. Or just the belief that if I don’t, something bad will happen. So I have to try and control the situation. And the way I control the situation is by trying to teach you how to show up in the situation.
(20:31):
So how to use it. We come back to how to use it, we come back to that peace, harmony, love, joy, serenity, surrender, allowing everyone to be on their journey. Seeing everybody as being on a journey brings us to this idea of forgiveness and forgiveness. When I use that word. I know we’ve used this word before and everybody has their interpretation of it, but I really mean it in a very expanded, poetic way. I think this is the next slide. So Catherine Ponder is a writer, a new thought writer who writes a lot of stories about people who’ve been through a lot of different journeys in their life, and she writes a lot about abundance and prosperity and prayer. She’s a beautiful, beautiful writer, and I just included this quote so you get a little sense of her. She says, when you realize that all things spring from within, that this entire universe has come out of the invisible, then you are aware of the powerful spiritual substance from which all things are made.
(21:51):
And she tells the story of a woman who was suffering from a debilitating illness. And this went on for a while until this woman started to practice forgiveness, not of the illness and not of nature that seemed to bring this illness forward, but of everyone in her life. Her affirmation was, I fully and freely forgive everyone, and I am forgiven. I fully and freely forgive everyone for everything, and I am forgiven. I now allow divine life, that life within us, that God, that divine life to heal and bless me in every way, I now allow divine life to heal and bless me in every way.
(22:49):
So in her affirmation work, she’s recognizing what is happening. She’s not pretending that there’s a different reality. She doesn’t have that intellectual dissonance of like, Nope, there’s nothing wrong here. She’s recognizing there is something not what a set of circumstances she doesn’t like. She’s recognizing that the connection that she’s making is that there’s something to be forgiven here. She steps into that space of forgiveness, and then she calls force forth her truth, which is this divine life has always been perfect, always will be, and is expressing in and through me right here, right now, in every way.
(23:33):
And as the story goes, she experienced a tremendous shift. It was a miraculous shift. So it was almost like a miraculous healing. And I think this is such a great insight into how spontaneous miraculous healings happen. And I know that sometimes the reverse engineering of this is the thing that’s happening. So what was the thought that generated? It can be really tricky. It can be almost impossible. I almost think it can be a very complicated journey because so often it’s like I’m holding a grudge against somebody and I don’t like the way they’re showing up in the world can equal me having money problems. And it seems like the two have nothing to do with each other, but that limiting belief can show up in a lot of different ways in our lives, and they’re unique. It’s like a fingerprint for each of us. The connections that are made are made because of you, whoever you are in your journey.
(24:47):
For me, a lot of times if I’m holding somebody outside of love in my experience because they’re just making me mad or whatever, so you get no love today, for me, it often shows up as problems in other forms of relationships. I don’t have health problems, not wood, but one of the challenges that I have can be with relationships. So my limiting beliefs can show up in my relationship issues. And I think we all have sort of that channel that is always the channel that the challenge comes through. So some people, it’s illness and sickness. They have that challenge. And so the limiting and unconscious biases can show up through health and wellness. Sometimes it’s harmony in relationships, sometimes it’s money. It can show up in different ways for different people for whatever reason.
(25:59):
And so when we get into that and we start to look at that and we start to understand, oh, I see I’m making all of this happen with the power of my consciousness. One thing that can come up is then did all this suffering have any meaning? Did I go through all that? I went through, particularly when you get to be my age and you reflect back on the life that I’ve had, and I think, oh wow, did I go through all of that? Did it have any reason? Did it have any purpose? Here’s what I think. I’m just going to tell you. This is my opinion. Other people may have different opinions. I think it does because I think we are creatures who are evolving. I think that’s part of why we’re having the human experience in the first place. We are not static, we are not done.
(26:49):
We are not sitting in the same place. I am not the same person today that I was 10 years ago. I’m not the same person I was 10 days ago. But that part of our work here is to evolve ourselves. And that’s why I think part of the forgiveness process that can be that is so incredibly important, and it can also be one of the more challenging aspects of it, is to forgive ourselves to let ourselves off the hook. When you really think about if you do your journaling exercise and you think about where do I keep people on the hook and I keep people off the hook, think about where you keep yourself on the hook. What do you not forgive yourself for?
(27:39):
And because a lot of times when you don’t forgive yourself for that, you’re projecting it out so you’re not forgiving others. So that reflection can really help you get that insight. But to be a clear conduit for this life, love God expression in and through us, we need to clear those things. So how do we use it? We use it by clearing up those places where we’re holding ourselves in bondage, we’re holding ourselves. And the word I wrote down in my notes is we holding ourselves in purgatory and part of our work and how to use it is to free ourselves. So there are some very practical things that Ernest Holmes talks about in this chapter of how to use it, belief in mental clarity. So using unwavering belief and clarity about what and who you are and what and who you want.
(28:46):
And I guess the guidance that I would share for me anyway, is that the more I lean into seeing and knowing everybody as on their journey rather than judging them, but just understand this is where they’re at right now and just blessing them and knowing that and allowing them to evolve just engenders compassion and empathy for me and allows them to be who they are and give them space to be who they are. And that gives me mental clarity because I’m not caught up in a lot of judging and unforgiveness, and it really just helps clear my mind to be able to hold a higher consciousness alignment with universal laws. The creative process works through universal law of cause and effect your thoughts and intentions act as the cause while your experiences and results are the effects, right? This is something that we know we hold in our intention, we pull it into our feeling nature, and then we have the experience.
(29:58):
And the thing from my story at the very beginning about the experience is that perspective, when we look for it, we see it. We look for the good, we find the good conscious choice. You have the power to choose your thoughts. Holmes encourages focusing on positive, constructive ideas and rejecting limiting and negative ideas. So we always want to keep ourselves pointed towards the light. We’re going to get caught up in the world of form from time to time. It’s fine again, we forgive ourselves and we move forward and we keep ourselves focused on moving towards the light, the love, the joy, the happiness, the positivity.
(30:41):
And I would also add that whatever that is for us, as we move out of our spiritual time and we move into our human time, it activates us. We take action in the world. We become activists in our own lives of bringing that consciousness into all the spaces in which we move, and it activates the choices and actions that we take so that we are able to address the things in our lives and the world of form that we see, which is really just a reflection of the inner anyway, so we can address those in the outer as we continue to work on our inner and hold that inner light and that inner high consciousness. We do affirmative prayer, which is a structured method of affirming and declaring outcomes, right? Affirmative prayer, five step prayer. We recognize that this source, this God, this truth, this love is all that is.
(31:40):
It is in and through. All that is we unify with it. I am one with this. I have to be because it is in and through everything, I’m part of everything. So it’s in and through me. And then we affirm that whatever it is, wherever we may be seeing circumstances or conditions that we want to shift, we affirm that it’s already done. That perfection, that perfect wholeness, that perfect harmony, that perfect abundance and prosperity, that perfect peace, that perfect joy is already mine. It’s already here. So we just allow it to express even more fully in our human experience, and we know that it will. And then we give thanksgiving for it. And the Thanksgiving is that confirmation of faith. It’s to say, yes, I know that I am one. I know that this is done. I know that this must be so. It must be so because this is really all there is.
(32:40):
And then we release it. We let it go to be expressed in the world of form in whatever way, shape or form that it wants to be expressed in ways expected and ways unexpected, which is always kind of fun when that happens. And then we trust the process. We let go of worrying or overthinking about how the result will come. Trust the universal law is working behind the scenes. This trust is an important component of our practice to know that it is. So we keep coming back to that, this clarity of thinking, this trust in the process I think is such an important aspect of our teaching.
(33:28):
We can get so caught up in fear mongering in the fear consciousness that we forget and that’s why we have to keep coming back to center. And that’s why we have a center. We are a center for spiritual living, but each of us individually are a center for spiritual living. We are the center for this experience of love and light and joy in our lives. And so just becoming conscious of that and making conscious choices and conscious intentions of saying yes to good and greater good, to hold people gently and know that they’re on their journey and whatever’s going on with them right in this moment. If it’s not to your liking, just give them some space. They’re working their way, they’re working their way towards their good. Whether it’s somebody that you know in this community or it’s somebody in, dare I say, politics, they are.
(34:37):
It doesn’t always seem like it. And sometimes it’s so crazy slow, come on, wake up already. But they’re on their way because love this. Love is really the only thing that’s real. And so as someone keeps going down that road, it’s particularly hard when it’s someone who has influence in our society and really can have impact in our society. It can be really hard. But what they’ll find is that those paths that are grounded in fear don’t lead anywhere. They don’t last and they don’t really lead anywhere. They seem like they will, but they don’t work. And the more you trust me, I’ve gone through down not, I wouldn’t say every wrong road in life, but I’ve gone down a lot of wrong roads in life. And that’s what happens is it just doesn’t work. So I keep trying and keep trying until we find something that does work.
(35:40):
And I have to say that from my experience, this works, this principle works that this prayer work that I do, and we are a prayerful philosophy, this prayer work. Again, not praying to some capricious God outside of ourselves, but praying from that truth. That has always been us. We’re here, we’re animated, we’re alive. We’re having this experience and praying from that and that knowing that love is path forward really does change things. It really does have an impact. So let’s pray this in together. We’ll do some of this prayer work right now. I feel like I’ve been a little scattered this morning, but I really wanted to just share my experience of this and how to use it. It’s so fascinating. And the other thing that I think is really interesting about this is it’s so expansive that there is no one way to use it.
(36:41):
That we each find our own way with this material, that we each find our own way with this philosophy, that when we are really connected to that love, it has its way with us and it expresses through us in its own unique way. That’s why there’s each one of us, because we are here to express that in our own uniqueness. So I celebrate that and just connecting in and taking a breath and knowing that as I center myself in, I become aware of this life love force that is within me, that has always been there, has never not been there. I always think of it as God being something other, but it isn’t. It’s just me. It’s just you.
(37:27):
It’s this most familiar part, this love, light, joy, attunement with this eternal nature of ourselves. I know that it is in and through me as I know it is in and through each and every single person. When I do that, I see that. I see each and every single person as an expression of this love, this light, this God, whatever way it shows up in their personality, whatever way it shows up in their behavior, I still know that underneath whatever is happening, there is this light, this love, this joy. It allows me to hold them with compassion and hold myself with compassion. Whenever I may be falling into a fearful or negative belief, I’m so kind to myself and being kind to myself makes it easy to be kind to others, and it helps me interrupt this roller coaster experience of being locked into situation and circumstances. I know that that is not the truth of life. I know that life is ever expanding, ever changing. And so I know that I can direct that with my intention, with my thoughts and my feelings to be a brighter, more beautiful, more harmonious, more joyful experience. And I call this in for myself, and I call this in for each and every single person and whatever area of life that each person is holding in mind right now where they would love more love expressing.
(39:27):
I just know that it is so I know that it is happening. I know that it is expressing in and through those situation circumstances, that perspective to bring about a new perspective, to bring about a new experience, to bring about a new way of being. There is, dare I say it, a healing that is happening right here, right now, A wholeness, that there is a freedom, there is an abundance, there is a peace. And I’m so grateful for it, so grateful for the way this works, the grateful for this philosophy and this wisdom of Ernest Holmes. So grateful for these first four chapters, knowing we can revisit them anytime. So grateful for this community to say yes, to holding the high watch, to holding the love, to seeing the world as a loving place, knowing that in this perspective, we truly change and impact the world and all that is.
(40:25):
And knowing that this, we carry this out into our days, into our activities, into our actions in life, into our behaviors in life, and knowing what we are affecting all around us, that we are changing, disrupting what doesn’t work and bringing in this light. I’m so grateful for this community and the courage and the tenacity and the love absolutely present and so grateful for all the manifestations that are happening for each and every single person today. Knowing that this is so, that this great gift, the great gifts of love, the great gifts of the good that we hold in heart is showing up. So grateful for this. I release it now into the action of law, knowing as I release it, this is an act of faith to know that it is already done. It was already done before I even started praying. It is done. It is here it is. So, and together we say, and so it is. Thank you, John.