This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
Recognition: God Is All There Is – Rev. Linda Jackson
DESCRIPTION
We spend so much energy looking for God, for good, for answers — as though they were somewhere else. This week we open our exploration of “Opening the Channel” through affirmative prayer with its foundational step: Recognition. Join us as we stop searching and start recognizing the One Presence that has never been absent.
The summary and transcription were auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
SUMMARY
In this talk, Rev. Linda Jackson introduces the September theme of “opening the channel” as a gateway into affirmative prayer, the foundational practice of the Science of Mind philosophy. She explains that affirmative prayer, also known as spiritual mind treatment, consists of five distinct steps: recognition, unification, realization, gratitude, and release, which are described as a living practice rather than a doctrine. The sermon focuses primarily on the first step, recognition, which is defined as the active acknowledgment that God is all there is, omnipresent and already indwelling, not a distant force to be summoned.
Rev. Jackson draws on Ernest Holmes’ book “Prayer” and the Science of Mind teaching that God operates as both love and law, with the law acting upon thoughts and beliefs to bring them into manifestation. She emphasizes that this practice supports conscious creation, contrasting intentional, affirmative thought with unconscious rumination, worry, and complaint, which are likened to praying for undesired outcomes. Scientific support is referenced through the concept of neuroplasticity, whereby repeated affirmative thought can strengthen new neural pathways toward desired outcomes .
Personal testimonies illustrate the transformative power of affirmative prayer, including a practitioner’s prayer that lifted emotional heaviness surrounding a troubled mother-son relationship and an experience of unexpected practical help arriving in alignment with a prayed-for outcome. These accounts underscore the teaching that solutions can arise from sources beyond what the human mind can arrange.
The sermon stresses that recognition is not toxic positivity or spiritual bypass, but an acknowledgment of a deeper truth beneath present conditions. Crucially, the practice requires not merely intellectual understanding but an embodied, felt conviction described as “the fire” that animates the technique. The sermon closes with a live five-step affirmative prayer and an invitation for congregants to receive personal prayer from practitioners.
TRANSCRIPTION
Rev. Linda Jackson:
All right. Are we not so blessed with this music team? Woot, woot. One more time, right? Thank you so much for that. And thank you for being here. Thank you to the online friends as well. Sometimes you have to encourage yourself. We speak victory during the test. I love that. And I want to be clear that this message is not about toxic positivity. It’s a decision to speak truth before it’s visible, to have faith in the unseen. And that is our sort of doorway into affirmative prayer, which is the main point of our September theme, opening the channel. And what does that mean, opening the channel? And I’m sorry, I was trying to look appropriate, but I’m taking the jacket off.
So what does that mean, opening the channel? For me, that is exactly what it feels like as a sort of prelude into prayer. I guess we could have had it be a sixth step because for me, before I begin, I bring myself present, I center, I open myself. And it is from that place where I remember God is all there is. Shifting my awareness toward the infinite, taking my mind off of whatever the undesired condition is or conditions are and placing my mind on infinite potential, the generative, creative nature of God. And communing, communing with that nature, with the divine, with the God of my being, whatever word works for you. There is no word that can contain the idea of the infinite, that can contain the idea of God. So whatever works for you, we’re stepping out of striving alone thinking we are making it happen out of the world of form conditions, lifting myself in consciousness, opening into co-creating with the intelligence of life itself.
So we’re using Ernest Holmes’ book Prayer, talking about what the science of mind calls spiritual mind treatment, which is kind of scary sounding. I remember thinking, who are these people? What is this thing they do to our mind? Well, it’s just a treatment over the thoughts, treating the thoughts. We now call it affirmative prayer because I think a lot of people have that, “what’s that?” feeling. So there are five very distinct steps. And if you are already well versed in this, we have a lot of practitioners in the room. And if you are already well versed in this, please stay open to what else might be here for you, what else might come forward for you.
So the five steps of spiritual mind treatment, also known as affirmative prayer, are recognition, unification, realization, gratitude and release and you’re going to be hearing a lot about these this month. But please understand these steps are a living practice, not a doctrine. There’s a conviction and an energy that fuels the power of the prayer. Each person’s experience of God is unique and each person’s experience of prayer is unique. So spiritual mind treatment, affirmative prayer, it’s a hallmark of the science of mind. For anyone new or newer or someone listening who’s never heard of us before, that is the foundational teaching that we use, that we draw upon. And we bring in a lot of other compatible teachings, but this month we are anchoring in this foundational practice of affirmative prayer and it’s a hallmark of this teaching. And it draws upon another foundational idea of science of mind, the creative process, which could take another month to share about that.
But the short version is that God, the allness of life is both love and law. Love as the presence, intelligence, consciousness, pure potential, and law as the creative power, the principle that is always operating and it acts upon our thoughts and our beliefs and it brings them into our experience, into manifestation, whether we are conscious of it or not. So this practice supports us to become conscious creators of our experience.
Are you creating intentionally or is the law operating on your unconscious thoughts and bringing into manifestation whatever you’re putting your attention on? Remember, I say this a lot, worrying is like praying for what you don’t want. And I will add to that complaining is like praying for what you don’t want. Ruminating on what’s wrong creates more of what’s wrong. So I have these three quotes, I’m sorry. “What you think about comes about Earl Nightingale. Man is what he thinks about all day long,” which is Ralph Waldo Emerson and what you think you become Guatemala Buddha. So many great philosophers and teachers are saying the same things, right? What we put our attention on, we get more of. And there’s a scientific explanation, actually several, and it’s beyond my skillset, but I was reading about this reticular activating system. It’s part of the brain. The brain filters billions of bits or millions of bits of data and it filters out the noise for us based on what we feel is important.
So we have told the brain that this thing we’re worrying about is important. We’re going to filter out all the other evidence to the contrary and only see things that validate that fear, right? But the good news is the neuroplasticity of the brain. When we give attention to the same thoughts or habits repeatedly, it allows us to strengthen new neural pathways so we can convince ourselves of something good and develop neural pathways that focus on that, that help us to have a different experience. And affirmative prayer supports strengthening new neural pathways toward the desired outcome. And while we are specifically looking at the five-step affirmative prayer, spiritual mind treatment, as a cornerstone of the science of mind, there is no wrong way to pray. But old types of prayers may be strengthening the old neural pathways. We just want to pay attention to what is it we’re experiencing and feeling and where are we putting our energy as we’re speaking it.
Another quote from the Foundations of Science of Mind student workbook, which is where that reading that Paul shared came from, “Prayer in its broadest sense is an act of communion with God.” Not yet. Are prayer and treatment the same? Here we go. Are prayer and treatment the same? Yes and no. Treatment is prayer, but prayer of a very special kind. It’s affirmative and scientific. So affirmative prayer is not supplication or petition, but recognition and acceptance that God is all there is, that there is no spot where God is not, and that we are all spiritual beings here and now, and that all the abundance of the universe is already ours if we accept and embody it.
And scientific prayer is based on our knowledge that the universe is a wholeness in which God as presence or love works continuously as principle or law to manifest as form or effect, that this creative process takes place in a provable, reproducible manner and that we can consciously allow it to bring about changes in our lives. The five stages of treatment provide a structure and technique that empower this process. All right, so this first step of affirmative prayer is recognition and this whole idea of this prayer being scientific and affirmative, this is what we are up to this month, opening the channel, expanding our consciousness, intentionally co-creating rather than creating by default or error.
And I will be focusing on this recognition, God, is all there is, but I first want to share a story of my first experience of prayer, of affirmative prayer. When I first walked into what was then Chicago Centers for Spiritual Living, a sort of sister community to city side, I was pushed by pain. Michael Beckwith says we’re either pushed by pain or pulled by inspiration. And so many of us are pushed by pain to find a community or something similar to this. And some of us are pulled by inspiration. Maybe we’ve already had some sort of waking up experience and we’re inspired and we’re out looking for more of that. It just depends where you are on your path, right? But when I first attended, I was in some pain. I was looking for relief. I had just ended a seven year relationship that came after a 16 year marriage and all of that was like, “What’s the common denominator?” So I was looking at myself and my son, who I now know was dealing with some trauma, some traumatic events, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he was really acting out and I was scared.
I was scared for his safety, for his wellbeing. I didn’t know how he needed to be supported. And I felt a heaviness, a heaviness in my being, an angst in life in general. And one of my first visits, I stayed for prayer after service and I didn’t really understand what the practitioner was doing. It’s like, “What is she saying?” But the words flowed through her. It was almost poetic and recognizing God as these qualities of love and wholeness and saying we were one with it. Then she affirmed that our mother-son relationship was perfect for each of us on our spiritual paths and that no matter how it looked in the world of form, that it was divinely orchestrated. And she declared that when it mattered, I would have the perfect words that he would be able to hear and understand in just the right way.
And I could feel the burden lift. I could feel the angst soften. And how does that work? And she’s not doing something to me. She’s praying into the infinite, but we’re one with it. So as she speaks that truth into the infinite mind, it impacts everyone in it.
And I felt the shift. I felt the angst soften. And I began to refocus to the desired outcome instead of just focusing on how effed up everything was. So I became a regular in the prayer room after service. And little by little, my mind shifted. My circumstances changed. And around that same time, I was preparing for my daughter’s college graduation party. So this was a long time ago, preparing for my daughter’s graduation party and we were having it at home. And I don’t know if any of you ever use a party at your home to motivate you to get some work done around the house. We’re talking refinishing floors, painting. I don’t know what I was thinking. So I was in this like, get to get it done. And the date was getting close and the time to finish was feeling short. And I took that nervousness into my prayer request.
And I will never forget the practitioner used words something like, “Help will come from places you’d never expect and everything is completed with ease.” Now I had a tread or step on the back porch that needed to be replaced. I had no plan. There was no handy person to saw the wood. I didn’t even have the right piece of wood for it. I came home after service, parked in the garage, and a couple doors down, there was this guy with a bunch of lumber, power tools, and he was working on something. And I walked over there and I said, “Is any of this scrap?” And he said, “Yeah.” And he pointed it to this pile and he said, “What do you need?” And I said, “Well, I think that looks like the right size thickness of wood that I need for this tread on my back porch.” And he said, “Well, let me see.” And he walked in my backyard and he said, “Yeah.” And he took out his saw and he cut it perfectly and he screwed it in and all of a sudden my back porch step was fixed.
I was like, “Okay.” No, it was just a piece of treated lumber and the rest of the porch was painted. But a little later that day, I heard a knock on the door. I’m not kidding you, this really happened. Someone knocked on the door and it was a friend of my son’s who I hadn’t seen in a couple years. And I told him my son wasn’t there and he saw I was working around doing things and I told him I was preparing for Katie’s graduation. And he said, “Well, do you want some help? I don’t have anything going on. I can help you.” I was like, “You want paint the porch?” And he did. So help came from places I did never expect. That was not something I could conjure up. I could not conjure up a guy down the street with the perfect wood and the perfect tools to repair that porch.
I could not conjure up a friend of my son’s coming from two years later showing up and willing to paint. And it was done. I didn’t have to do any of it. I got to focus on the other things. Well, I was hooked on prayer from that point on, and I still am. It’s life changing. And that line of solutions come from unexpected places beyond what the human mind can figure out is a powerful phrase.
I have six prayer partners and I pray five or six days a week. That’s how important that practice is to me. It supports keeping my mind right, attuned to high consciousness where solutions become possible. So this month, every Sunday, we’re focusing on one step, but as you heard in the reading, many religious scientists, people who study this philosophy, consider the first two steps, recognition and unification, the most significant parts. Why? Because it opens us to the consciousness that everything else is built on. So we’re beginning with the recognition that God is all there is, and Ernest Holmes opens the very first chapter of the prayer book talking about thought, but underneath the psychology, there’s a simpler claim being made. He says, “The first principle fundamental to the understanding of the operation of thought is that we are surrounded by an infinite intelligence. Surrounded, not somewhere far away, not something we have to summon or find.
We are surrounded by it.” And later in that same chapter, he puts it even more plainly, “God’s creative power of mind is right here.” Not out there, right here, everywhere present, omnipresent. And this is the whole of recognition, really. It’s not a way to get God’s attention. It’s remembering we already have it. We already are it, that God expresses through us to the degree that we are available and we open ourselves to it in this step.
A more intimate concept of an already indwelling God who is personal to us by virtue of being personified through us. God’s not observing us from outside. God is expressing as us. We are individual expressions of it. And Ernest Holmes says, “In living the science of mind, we must first recognize the broad general principle underlying everything. God is all there is. Not most of what is, not part of what is, all of it.” So the next natural question is if God is all of it, how do we explain all these horrible things we see going on in the world? We wouldn’t be good scientists if we didn’t ask that question. It’s because we have free will and people forget that they are one with God. They believe they’re separate and they create from ego and fear instead of from love.
And this idea of recognition isn’t passive. It’s not just a nice idea. It’s active. Homestead in science of mind, the spirit of God is a law of elimination and obliteration to everything unlike itself. When we focus on it, it eliminates everything unlike it. We no longer experience what we put our attention on is what we experience. When we come from high consciousness, when we recognize God as unlimited potential, we remember the greater good is already here. It’s not something to wait for or look for. It’s something to claim, something to accept. When we recognize God is all there is, we use specific qualities of God like love, freedom, wholeness, ease, abundance.
And we’re going to be talking a lot about prosperity and abundance in these next couple of months as we move into our prosperity season. And sometimes prosperity looks like time and like peace, like room to breathe. And sometimes it looks like financial health. But whatever it is that you’re seeking, whatever condition you’re wanting to shift, recognition starts the same way every time, naming the qualities of God you’re seeking, remembering God is all there is and remembering that it’s already here. We’re not waiting for it. And this is where Amy will pick up next week with unification.
And I love that step. It’s hard for me not to go into a lot of detail about it, but unification is knowing we are one with it. So if God is love and freedom and peace and abundance, I am love and freedom and peace and abundance as all of us are. And this combined with that recognition shifts us into a different mindset, remembering that. And I want to be clear because this can get misconstrued. Recognizing God is all there is, is not a bypass. It isn’t asking you to pretend that a hard thing isn’t hard or that a real fear isn’t real. We’re not skipping over what’s true in your life today. And sometimes we need to meet you there first and hold you in compassion for what you’re experiencing, but we’re recognizing that there’s a deeper truth underneath it without asking you to deny what you’re experiencing right now.
There is a denial stage in prayer, but that’s a whole nother thing. We don’t want to bypass. We want to feel what we’re feeling and then look for the truth underneath it. In this first chapter of the book Prayer, he calls it spiritual mind healing as opposed to spiritual mind treatment. This exists because real conditions, sickness, limitation are what this practice is for. It’s why people want prayer. Recognition doesn’t erase the fact that we have a condition. It just changes what we bring to it. It changes how we come to it and that changes our experience.
Ernest Holmes says prayer does something to the mind of the one praying. It does not do anything to God. It aligns us with truth. It shifts our attention onto good. Wayne Dyer says, if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Now you can know all of this intellectually and still not feel it and feeling it is crucial. And from that Foundation Science Mind workbook, we have a reading on the technique and fire. There is a technique for spiritual mind treatment that can be taught and there is something vital to a treatment that cannot be taught. This is a felt sense that you must discover and foster within yourself through continuous awareness of the presence that surrounds and indwells you. It is the fire that you feel within yourself that fuels knowing the truth of spirit as your source and substance in life.
The fire, not the technique. Those five steps, yes, they help. It’s a great technology for shifting consciousness, but it’s not so important if you get that exactly right. It’s the consciousness. It’s the feeling underneath it.
And in that same workbook, he talks about recognition and unification. The first two steps of treatment, recognition and unification, form a portal through which you allow your perception of wholeness to shine, illuminating every word you think, speak, or write. And this is sort of what I imagine, what I picture when I go into prayer. It’s like I step out of the condition and align with this channel to the infinite, to the good. So the first two steps aren’t just the beginning of a formula, they are opening the channel. Pure faith is a spiritual conviction. It is the acquiescence of the mind, the embodiment of an idea. This was in the reading. If I jump up and down and scream, I am rich, all that God has is mine, that’s dynamic, but unless it means something to me, unless I am one with the substance of the belief, nothing will happen.
Embodying it is so important for that fire. We have to believe it. We have to come from a place of knowing God as the infinite source and supply, the source of all our good. My job’s not my source. My friend’s not my source. City side’s not my source. I know I am sourced. And when I connect with that, align with that, I believe that I can shift my experience in the world. And Science of Mind Home says, we do not wish, we know. We do not dream. We state. We do not hope. We accept. We do not pray. We announce. We do not expect something is going to happen. We believe it has already happened. So the invitation today is not to just say the words God is all there is, but to cultivate conviction of that, to feel for that fire, to embody that belief.
It might not happen all at once. It might take practice, but that felt sense, that’s the true idea of recognition, opening the channel to the divine, to the God of your being, recognizing it as love, freedom, abundance, all that God is, feeling that. Remember a nod to the song, you have to encourage yourself. You have to speak a word over yourself. Sometimes my prayer is to get my mind right. Sometimes my prayer is, and I have to ask somebody else to pray for me because I can’t get there myself to have right thinking, to remember my oneness so that I can speak and affirm for others. I have to put the oxygen mask on myself first, right?
And again, it’s not toxic positivity. It’s a decision to hold a belief in the unseen potential and to speak it into existence. Home says we have to daily control the thought that denies the real and affirm the divine presence within us. So I’m going to go into a five step prayer and as I complete my prayer, you’ll have the opportunity to come up to one of the practitioners in the room. We’re going to do something a little different, a little throwback. We’re going to have practitioners come forward and if you have a personal prayer request, please come forward and have a practitioner pray for you, a one minute miracle prayer. And anyone online, you will be able to fill out a prayer request form. A link will be dropped in the chat. And this form is on our website for everyone to use anytime. You can ask a practitioner to call you or to pray remotely for you.
So let’s begin with that pause and that breath anchoring in our bodies, opening ourselves, remembering ourselves as channels of the infinite.
I recognize there is one power, there is one presence, one life. I call this power and presence love. I call it God. I call it the divine spirit. You can call it by any name you choose. There is no word that can contain it, but I recognize it as love. I recognize it as abundance. I recognize it as this generative creative potential and I open myself, avail myself to it. I bring myself fully present to it and remember that this is the truth Of my being. I am one with it. I am one with all that it is. I am one with the love. I am one with the freedom, the abundance. This is the truth of my being. This is the truth of everyone in this room online, everyone hearing this prayer. We are each individual expressions of the divine. We are all that it is.
We are the intelligence, the generative creative nature, the freedom and the abundance. And from that place of knowing the truth of who we are, I just affirm that these qualities of God that we recognize are making themselves manifest in our experience, that we are saying yes to a greater experience of freedom, a greater experience of abundance, a greater experience of the ease and the grace that comes from allowing God to be the co-creator of our lives. We step off of the treadmill of thinking we have to do it alone. We anchor ourselves in this oneness, in this knowing of the truth of who we are, and we say yes to greater containers for good, for abundance, for freedom, for joy. And we step fully into our lives, into full expression of the divine expressing as only each one of us can express it. And we say yes to this.
And I release this prayer into the action of the law that always says yes, yes, yes. I let it go. I call it good. And if you believe what I am saying, if it resonates for you, please join me in saying, and so it is.