Let’s Choose Freedom – John Adams
DESCRIPTION
This Sunday, let’s spend some time considering the spiritual quality of Freedom and bring it into a fresh perspective.
SUMMARY
- He visited an art exhibit on Pan-Africanism, which sparked a realization that a sense of belonging leads to a deeper sense of freedom to be one’s authentic self.
- John discusses Michael Beckwith’s teachings on releasing limiting beliefs and taking control of one’s life direction, likening it to being the “sailor of one’s own ship.”
- He shares inspiring stories of physical healing, such as Myrtle Fillmore’s recovery from tuberculosis and Mary Baker Eddy’s healings, to illustrate the power of spiritual understanding and consciousness to promote wholeness.
- The speaker affirms the unity and wholeness that is our spiritual inheritance, and leads the audience in a meditation to connect with this higher consciousness and experience freedom, belonging, and physical healing.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams, LSP (00:00):
Yeah. Thank you so much. That was beautiful. Let’s see if I feel like I’m on. Yeah, we’re wireless. I don’t have to hold the mic. I can dance. Good morning everybody. It’s so good to be here with you. It’s such an honor and a joy to get the opportunity to do these talks, and I’m just grateful for Reverend Amy for giving me this opportunity. We’ve already started the conversation. My talk title is Let’s Choose Freedom, and we’ve already started talking about freedom this morning. I was reading the online chat. Hello online family. Good to see you. And everyone’s already in the conversation and we’re in it in song and in prayer. Thank you Reverend Judy. So I want to talk about freedom a little bit today, and I’m going to talk about it in three ways and I’m going to start with a little bit of a story.
(00:59):
A few weeks ago, maybe a month or more, I was at the Art Institute of Chicago and I saw an exhibit there called Project A Black Planet. This is a fascinating, interesting exhibit. Projected black planet is the art and culture of Pan Africa. So it’s the entire continent of Africa. It’s a landmark exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It ran through the end of March and it was the first major international exhibition to explore a cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism from the twenties, 1920s to present featuring many, many artists from Africa, north and South America and Europe. And the exhibition examined Pan-Africanism as a dynamic worldview advocating for global solidarity and south determination among people of African descent. Fascinating. And this was a very paradoxical experience for me and paradoxical in that it was simultaneously not for me because it was really for people who have that connection to the African continent.
(02:09):
People who have heritage there have some history or some connection to that area of the world, which really isn’t me. So the exhibit wasn’t for me, and yet at the same time it was for me because it opened me up and helped me start to look at things through a different lens. We tend to lean a little bit more into what is the sort of loudest voice in the room, if you will, which is that white European-centric ideology that just we’re sort of born into and grow up with. And it’s the one way to looking at the world. And this was just sort of saying, yes, that’s fine, but there’s a whole nother way of looking at life. There’s a whole nother life experience that people are having. And the way I do these exhibits, it’s just the way I like to do them. I like to go through, they’ll have several rooms of artwork.
(03:07):
So I’ll go through the room and I’ll kind of experience the art and however I’m reacting to it. And then I go back and I read all the curatorial notes and artists text if they have some, and they often do, particularly at the Art Institute. And I take all that in and it’s just a very rich experience. And for me, what I was getting from this was this sense of coming together, the word that they use in their description of solidarity, this idea of coming together, of pulling together a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging really spoke to me and I had sort of this, it hit me on a spiritual level. This is this real life stuff. You kind of go and do your life. I’m living my life. And then all of a sudden there’s this spiritual insight that happens. And this was one of those experiences and the phrase that came to me as I was looking through this and reading through it and experiencing it is this idea of belonging equals freedom.
(04:17):
That belonging, the sense of belonging, whether it’s in this exhibit of Pan-Africanism or it’s in our community or in whatever way we feel welcomed and we feel like we belong. There is this sense of, oh, right, I can just be myself. We talked about this the last time I was here. We talked about this authentic self. I can just be me. I can be in my full expression. I can really honor that. And what can happen, particularly if you’ve grown up as I have and others may have in some kind of marginalized way, in some kind of disenfranchised way, in some kind of way in which you have to continually or feel like you have to continually code switch. Code switching is when you are like there’s the group dynamic is happening and you’re like, I want to fit in, so I’m going to start talking like them and acting like them, and my body language is going to be like them and I’m going to accommodate that to make them comfortable. So I feel like I can fit in. But when you belong, we can let go of all of that. We just belong and we have this sense of beautiful freedom, of just being authentic, being our authentic selves.
(05:37):
It’s this coming together and it’s the spiritual offering that we get. I think that freedom is a God quality. I think freedom is a natural state of being. It is who and what we should be always. And I think other stuff gets in the way, it kind of gets shrouded. And so our work here at Cityside and other spiritual communities is sort of getting rid of that. And when we do, we come home. It’s a sense of home, this sense of, ah, I can just be me. And the beautiful gift about this is, it’s something that we certainly receive, but it’s also, and this is really what I want to bring home around this particular point of freedom. Is it something that we give? It’s a gift that we give. We do it all the time. We do it here at Cityside. We’re like, please come in.
(06:24):
Sit, sit, be welcome, have some coffee. It’s not complicated. It’s actually really simple. And it’s simple because it is our organic self. It is who we truly are. We are always giving the gift of welcoming in and belonging. And that gift brings with it this reminder, this reawakening to our natural state of freedom. And it’s so significant. We are these spiritual beings. We are these avatars of God in this human space, in this world. We are the things that channel God into this world. God being soar, spirit love, unconditional. This expanded knowing, this inner truth, life force that we are. I don’t, when I say God, I don’t mean some old man in the sky that’s throwing down lightning bolts.
(07:22):
But this inner light that we get in touch with, that we know of ourselves, and we are the agents for that, we bring that in because we live in a world that is full of free will and in a free will world where everything and everyone has free will, it can feel a little chaotic. We can go a million different directions. We bring the channel of this love, this light, this higher consciousness. We are the way and we are the conduit for that to enter into this world. And one of the ways that we do it, and we do it probably without even thinking about it, is by welcoming and giving people a sense of belonging and allowing them and knowing that they belong. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way where I’m like, yeah, okay, you can belong. It’s more of if there is any kind of gatekeeping, it’s just in holding that high watch, holding those values, holding that sense of yes, we are always welcoming and we are not segregating.
(08:25):
It’s a beautiful gift and it’s an empowering thing to realize that even in our most casual moments, we are expressing that God self, our God self, our true nature. This idea of belonging equals freedom. It’s such a powerful spiritual idea. I think it’s why we come together in spiritual community to create this belonging together so that we can experience that freedom and express it more fully. The other way I want to talk about freedom today is the way Michael Beckwith talks about it in the book. And Michael Beckwith actually talks about freedom in a few different places in the book in a few different ways. But the way that landed for me was from the reading where he was talking about this idea of releasing the limiting beliefs. We talk about this a lot here at Cityside. So we step into that consciousness of letting go of anything that is forcing us or limiting us in our joy, in our happiness, in our freedom. We are freeing ourselves from any belief that holds us back, stepping fully into our spiritual inheritance of empowerment. I have to get used to having the mic, our spiritual inheritance of empowerment. I don’t know. I love that phrase. I think that’s a Michael Beckwith phrase.
(10:02):
There’s a YouTube channel that I watch, speaking of things in real life that inspire me. There’s a YouTube channel that I’ve been watching for. It’s not really my thing, but I actually find it fascinating. It’s this guy who’s rebuilding a boat. He’s rebuilding this 1920s boat, and there’s actually a few channels on YouTube about rebuilding these wooden boats, these wooden ships, and he’s been rebuilding it. And anyway, he was talking about his love of sailing and he was talking about his history with sailing, and he said he remembered that he had this when he was first really getting into it, he had a single mast sailboat and he was sailing it all over the place. He was up in the British Isles and he went all the way down into the Caribbean and he was all over the place by himself. And he said at one moment, at one point, I was all alone in this vast ocean with no land around me.
(10:56):
And I realized, he said, I have this realization that I have taken my life into my own hands. It was like this. There’s a spiritual truth in that, and this is in alignment with Michael Beckwith, that we are called to take our lives into our own hands, that we are not just the victim of circumstance and situations. We’re not this pinball machine where we get launched into the world and we’re bouncing off of, oh, there’s jobs over here and oh, relationships, oh, and health issues and relationship problem. And I’m just being bounced around randomly. What Michael Beckwith teaches us and what we teach here at Cityside is that we can set an intention. We can take our lives into our own hands and be the sailor of our own ship. And yes, the sailing might go a little like this, but we’re headed someplace. We’re setting an idea, an ideal for ourselves.
(12:00):
We’re headed towards this greater good, this greater experience, this greater freedom, releasing ourselves from any limiting beliefs, from any belief of the randomness of things happening. And understand that we are participating in a organized, loving universe. Reminds me, this is another life thing. So occasionally I’ll watch TikTok, not often, but I will watch it. And somebody has put Louise hay on TikTok and she pops up on my TikTok all the time, and she’s on there and her very rou voice and she’s very careful. She talks kind of slowly and she’s like, you live in a loving universe. She’s like, if you’re having challenges, just remember over and over again, this universe is a loving universe and all is well and I am safe. And she just encourages us to practice that kind of mantra over and over and over. And the reason is it shifts our awareness, shifts our consciousness, it shifts our thinking.
(13:08):
It’s so easy to slip into, oh my God, the world. And she reminds us that we can control, that. We can steer that ship, we can change our thoughts and those change thoughts change our life experience. And this is what Michael Beckwith is teaching us, that we can move out of this sense of limiting and limitation and move into full potentiality, this expanded idea of setting sail, being free and knowing that we can direct where we’re going. Connie and I were talking just briefly this morning about belief. We get locked into some beliefs that are challenging and how it can be difficult to unravel those and to set a new belief for yourself. And that’s why I like what Louise Hay teaches because she’s teaching us to remember we come back to it again and again. It may not happen the first time. So we come back to it over and over and reaffirm what we know to be true, and we get the help of our friends around the room, around the world to help us hold that consciousness.
(14:24):
So we have practitioners here in the room who will hold that with us and for us. So if you are seeking a shift or a change, I would invite you to seek a conversation with a practitioner after service today or after the service. So we know that we have this idea of belonging equals freedom. That when I offer this gift and I receive this gift, I have this buoyant sense of freedom. And I know that when I release my limiting beliefs and I set intention and I set sail, that I’m having this freedom of living in this buoyant, lovely, loving universe and I can bring that positivity into my life. And the third way that I want to talk about freedom this morning is I’m very aware, particularly recently because of certain recent events for some of us, that if you can go skipping down the road feeling free, but it’s hard to do that when you’re not feeling well, when you’re sick, when you have illness, when you have disease, it’s very difficult.
(15:32):
I mean, if you’re like me at all, when I’m not feeling well, I start to become very insular. I start to turn in and this becomes, comes the hard part to feel that expressive freedom when you’re not feeling imperfect, wholeness and perfect alignment. And what I know, and something that Reverend Amy and I have been talking about is this idea that in the foundation of new thought in these communities that started forming, whether it was unity or center for social living, religious science or what have you, those founders had physical healing experiences. That’s what got them started on this road. And I know we’ve talked about some of these stories, but I’m going to tell ’em to you anyway. I’m going to tell ’em to you again because I think we have to come back to them again to remember. Oh, right, this is possible. One of the stories that I love is Myrtle Fillmore. So Charles and Myrtle Fillmore started this movement called Unity. Not to be confused with Unitarian, but Unity is beautiful sister organization still around. I think Reverend Jackie is a unity minister, and there are other unity people in our orbit.
(16:56):
Reverend Mark Anthony Lord’s church in Michigan is Unity Church. So Unity’s been around for a long time. Anyway, it was in the late 18 hundreds. Myrtle Fillmore contracted tuberculosis. At the time, it was called consumption. Some of you may remember what was weird. I shouldn’t go on a tangent, but what’s weird about that is that for some reason, at that time, consumption was considered a very romantic thing to get. I don’t know why it’s such a weird thing. Like La Boem, Mimi’s dying of consumption and what’s her name, the Ivan to be alone. Greta Garbo. It was like, ah, dying of consumption. It’s all very melodramatic and romantic, but it was tuberculosis and it was not something that could be treated at the time. And Myrtle Fillmore had it. And the story goes that she went to hear this guy speak Dr. Eby weeks. Dr. Weeks is not somebody that you will ever find as luminary in the new thought movement. I think this is the only place that he really shows up. I think he wrote a couple of hymns. So if you’re into Hys, you might be familiar with him, but this is really his great claim to fame is Myrtle Fillmore heard him speak. And what he said was words, the effect of you are a child of God, you do not inherit illness.
(18:24):
And this was like from Myrtle. And she was like, wow. And so she took this in and it just hit her. Sometimes you hear those spiritual truths and they just hit you and it resonated with her. She internalized it and she worked with this idea over and over again in her prayer work and her meditation work, and she healed herself of tuberculosis. One of the reasons I like this story a lot, not only is from the healing, but it took her two years to do it. In this day and age when we’re so used to Amazon, same day delivery, do my prayer, I’m like, okay, where is it? Show up yet? Sometimes it takes a while to unravel those old beliefs, those old thought patterns that have brought about this consciousness, this experience that we’re having. I heard this, I don’t remember his name. He was a wonderful speaker.
(19:26):
He was speaking about cause and effect. This idea that we teach this in Cityside, this idea of cause and effect of if you, I dunno, what’s a good example? You smoke every single day for the rest of your life. There’s probably going to be some kind of physical effect of that, right? If you, I don’t know, eat chocolate cake every day, there’ll be a physical effect of it. And he said that this is the way the universe sort of balances itself out. It’s a natural law. And as far as he knew, the only way to avoid or to I guess mitigate the effect is through meditation. That through meditation and going through that process, we can work our way through that whole belief pattern, that whole fear pattern that shows up around it. And we can find ourselves, work our way through to the seed of it, unravel it, and come into our wholeness that way.
(20:25):
So we don’t have to go through the detrimental experience. We can do it through meditation and tell you another story. There’s a Mary Baker. Eddie is one of those new thought luminaries. She started science, sorry, Christian science. She has a couple of stories. There was this, this is one that just as an aside, I was away at a spiritual retreat for our ministerial school with a bunch of classmates. And I was walking on the beach. This was in the Carmel Monterey area at Smar Conference Center. We were walking on the beach and we were talking about this story and we’re trying to figure it out. It’s so wonderful to have such beautiful classmates. I’m telling you, and it inspired me for part of this talk, but Mary Beck, Mary Baker, Eddie, there was this guy who was severely injured by a heavily wadden laden wagon. Its wheels passed over his body.
(21:34):
He was really severely injured and presumed dead. And they brought this guy to Mary Baker Eddie’s home, and she came downstairs and through prayer and spiritual understanding, the man was restored to health and life. And the reason why we were talking about this, think about that. Think about what that if I had been hurt, and Connie said, well, I can heal that with prayer. I think people would be like, you’re crazy. You’re going to do that with prayer. But these are stories of things that have actually happened and we were trying to engineer it. How do we break that down? How do we unpack that? How do we hack into that kind of consciousness? I think this is just what I think. I think that she believed that she had a firm belief that that prayer would work. I also think that this guy being brought to her house also believed that her prayer would work.
(22:40):
And I think it was something about that consciousness, that shared belief system that brought this about. She did the same thing. There’s a story about her healing this kid with rickets, which was not curable at the time. There’s actually a lot of Mary Baker Eddie healing stories. There’s a story about Mary Morrissey. Mary Morrissey is a controversial figure in our movement because she’s had a lot of financial problems. But before any of that happened, she does have this story of when she was very young and she was having kidney problems and she was in the hospital and she was going to have a surgery, and I think they gave her odds of maybe 20% successful or something like that, something very low. And a practitioner pointing at Connie, a practitioner came into her room and said, would you like some prayer? And she said, yes, that would be lovely.
(23:40):
And the practitioner said, do you believe the surgery will heal you? And Mary said, no, I don’t because they’ve already told me that the percentages are so low and whatever, and I don’t think I can believe that. And she said, do you believe the prayer will heal you? And she said, to be honest with you, I don’t believe the prayer will heal me. I’m not there in my belief right now. And the practitioner said, do you believe that? I believe the prayer will heal you. And she said, yeah, I can believe that. I can see that in your eyes. I can see that you actually believe that this prayer is going to heal. And that was enough. And Mary was healed and she’s still with us to this day. So these stories I’m sharing with you are because we have the power and the ability to bring this healing into our lives, this wholeness into our lives in a variety of ways.
(24:35):
I’m not saying disregard the allopathic doctor process. I say do it all. That’s all part of getting the body into shape to heal itself. I believe all healing is self-healing and just inviting in that wholeness. And we’re going to do some more work over the next few months here at Cityside to deepen our connection to this physical healing process through spiritual practice and start to do some unpacking and some exploring and some figuring it out and bringing it back home. New thought can drift away from this from time to time, but I think it’s great that we’re really looking at bringing ourselves back into this physical wholeness, this physical healing. Ernest Holmes, I have a couple quotes for you. Ernest Holmes tells us that true liberty is spiritual is the freedom of the soul. And only as the individual frees themselves bonded to false ideas and recognize that they are a free agent in the world where they be free. And this goes for whether we’re bouncing around in my pinball machine analogy or we’re feeling that illness or we’re feeling disenfranchised and we don’t belong, that we know that we can step fully into our spiritual inheritance and know that we do belong, that we are free, that we can set our own intention to be that light, love, joy, inexperience and in sharing, and we can be that have that physical experience of wholeness.
(26:18):
The other quote that I found from earnest is we are free only when we are no longer the slaves of circumstances, but the master of them. Freedom means the power to act in the highest and greatest sense. And to me, that phrase, highest and greatest sense is this higher consciousness, this consciousness of alignment with that unconditional love. As I talked about the last time I was here, we are already unconditional love. We kind of forget it from time to time, kind of maybe don’t act like it from time to time, but that doesn’t change the fact that we are it. We are eternal beings having a human experience, and we inherit all of the great good and glory that is this thing called God, this thing called source, this thing called life. We are part of that which creates universes and everything. And so we step into that and we claim and know that power, we claim and know our spiritual inheritance. Yes, yes. All right. So we’re going to try and do some of this in prayer. I’m going to invite in some healing consciousness, this deep awareness.
(27:37):
We started this healing idea with Mina and Connie when they showed the last movie thing they did was a documentary that interviewed Anita Murjani and Eon Alexander and these people who have had near-death experiences. And through those near-death experiences, they connected with spirit and they came back and had these radical, miraculous healings. So these things demonstrate themselves all the time in the world of form. So we’re just going to embrace that now. We’re going to touch into that spiritual knowing and know that it brings in our wholeness, our freedom, our belonging, our clarity. Just knowing and affirming and touching into that space, within that space without that is love everlasting. That is always present, is always expressing here and now. It is everywhere. And everyone, it is this truth of being, this sense of authenticity, this spiritual reality that simply is. And knowing my oneness with this, even in this human form, I know my oneness with this. I know each and every single person’s oneness with this. I see and know you all as expressions of this love, this divine light in this world, and connecting to that light. I just allow that light to move through my body, through my physical being into each cell, each organ, each muscle, each gland, each aspect of my physical being, knowing that it is lit with the light of spirit, the light of love, the light of joy, the light of perfect wholeness, that this perfection of spirit is reflected and expressing in and through me.
(29:25):
I affirm and know that I belong here in this loving universe and that in that belonging, I have true freedom. Freedom to be my authentic self without edit, without any kind of diminishment. I am fully and radiantly expressing my authentic truth here and now. I set sail to my greatest good. Knowing that I hold this intention, allow it to be and to bring all those around me, with me to celebrate and to swim in the abundance of this world, to swim in the joy, the love, the light, the wholeness, the peace, the harmony that simply is.
(30:11):
I know that through this power of my intention and my consciousness, that I am affecting the world around me. That the world around me may seem like it’s expressing in more and more limiting ways, but I know that my consciousness is strong. And I know that through our collective prayer, that we are uplifting the consciousness of all around us and that we are breaking through any kind of limitation, any kind of fear, any kind of less than. And knowing that we explode into this glorious, glorious, light, love, joy, laughter that is just free to be in every corner of the planet. And I’m so grateful for it. I’m so grateful for this truth. I’m so grateful for these realizations. I’m so grateful for Ernest Holmes and Mary Baker, Eddie, and all of our teachers. So grateful for the wholeness that is expressing itself here and now for each and every single person. So grateful for the fulfillment of this prayer in ways expected and unexpected. So grateful for all of it. I release it now into the action of law. I know that it is done. I confirm that it is so I hold it in my heart as truth. And together we say, and so it is. Thank you.