The Circumference of Consciousness with John Adams, Minister in Training
OVERVIEW
We are on the move, growing and changing to express our authentic selves more fully. Love is our true nature, and our “job” is to express it abundantly. Our teaching guides us on how to do this and remedy thoughts and beliefs interfering with the clear, bountiful demonstration of this love in us and all around us. Join us as we illustrate these ideas and deepen our understanding of what this teaching does.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
John Adams (00:05):
Good morning. We are a small, intimate group here in the room, and I’m connected with some of my online family. So good to have you here. So good to have you with us. So today we’re going to continue our conversation about the first four chapters of Science of mind and how this thing works. And what I really wanted to accomplish today was to give you a picture, something illustrative that you could hold in terms of helping you understand how this works in picturing it. So Reverend Darrell talked to us in the first week of the month about cause and effect, and he helped us understand that we are not at the whim of some cause that is outside of ourselves, but we are the cause, right? And we understand from Reverend Amy that she took us through the ideas of science of mind using the five steps of affirmative prayer, treatment, prayer, treatment being that way in which we treat our awareness, our understanding to call in a broader, more expansive consciousness around whatever’s happening in our lives.
(01:16):
We’re going to talk about that a little bit today. And so what I wanted to do was to give a picture that you could hold in your mind about how does this work and what does it do. And one of the things that we use in our centers for spiritual living is something called the teaching symbol. Some of you may be familiar with it and have had an introduction to it at least and maybe even more. And some of you it may be very new. And usually in centers of spiritual living, when you walk into a center in any place where they have their own center, when they have their own space, you’ll see the symbol somewhere in their space. Connie and I were talking about it. We have to take everything down and set everything up and take everything down and set everything up.
(02:04):
So there’s not a lot of opportunity for changing the decor here, but in any other Sunday you would see this symbol. And so I want to bring up that first slide whenever you get to it. Oh, there it is. So this is a rendering of the teaching symbol, the way you might see it in various centers. What I like about this is that it holds for us a stuff all over the place, holds for us tremendous meaning once we understand what it means and what it symbolizes. So we’re going to get into that a little bit today. And I think it’s going to help create like, oh, when I see that symbol, I know this understanding. I have a deeper understanding of the science of mind, and I want to just remind myself what, oops, let me go over here. Come here. Yeah. So let’s move to the second slide, Ben, if you don’t mind.
(03:03):
And each of these sections have meaning. So there’s this top section, this middle section, this bottom section, and I want to talk about what those things mean. So if you haven’t seen this before, if you have, just to remind you, this top part of our circle is about spirit, it’s source. And what are some words that we might put in there? If I can get some shares from the room, what are some words that we might use for source spirit? God, whatever your word is or understanding is of that deep, powerful, expansive, ever loving presence. What are some words?
(03:43):
Cosmic intelligence. Cosmic intelligence. That’s a good one. Anybody else? Love? Absolutely beautiful. I like to think of it as unconditional love because it’s love of every flavor. It’s all love, right? Anybody else? Like one more divine source. And so whatever your word or phrase is or phrases are that you put up here, that is that all that is that thing that we know is part of us and is that which is in and through and expressing of us that perfection that is always there. And then this middle part here, I really want to focus on mind. This is where we hold our beliefs. This is our biases, this is our personality, this is our perspective. This is what we believe about the way life is. So one example is if in source up in spirit I’m holding the thought of abundance, it’s going to move through my mind and my life experiences, my bias, my perspective on abundance can show up a couple of different ways.
(04:50):
It can be expansive. I see the universe as ever giving, ever plentiful, ever burgeoning and abundances everywhere when all the time I can also hold the thought of abundance is hard to come by. I have to work so hard for it. It’s just one of those things that money doesn’t grow on trees and all these things that we can pick up along the way. And that becomes our perspective. That becomes the idea of abundance that we hold. And that’s what happening in this middle section. And then the bottom section is that out picturing that life experience, what we’re experiencing in real time in our real life. And so in centers for spiritual living, we often use the analogy, seed, soil, plant. This would be seed, this would be soil. The bottom part would be the plant. So we have the seed of the idea like abundance.
(05:46):
We plant it in that soil, which is our consciousness, our awareness. So that can be expansive or it can be very constrictive and limiting and whatever that is, is the plant that comes out of it, which grows out of it. So if I’m holding tight and I’m like, oh, abundance is so hard, I might get abundance, but it might come in the form of a credit card. So it’s debt, it’s still expressing, but it’s trying to express through that belief system that I’m holding onto. And usually that in a summary is what the teaching symbol represents. And if this is, like I said, this is just a real quick snapshot of it, if we were doing this as a workshop, we would get much deeper into what each of these sections are and what they represent and how they work. I don’t have that much time, so we’re doing it really fast.
(06:39):
So usually when we’re teaching the teaching symbol, this is where it ends. But I want to take it even further because there is a lot more meaning packed into this than even at this point that we’ve understand it. And what I’d like to do now is have Connie share a handout with everybody. And I’m sorry, I messed up when I had it printed. And instead of doing double-sided, they did two pages. So there’s two pages to it. So whatever we’ll live, and I know that Ben can share it online as well. And if we get the link in the chat, there’s a Google doc that you can access. And if you want to, you can pull it out and print it for my online family. Or you can just grab a piece of paper and start doodling. There’s nothing magical about my lovely graphic art project here. Mina’s laughing at me.
(07:36):
And what I want to talk about before we we’re going to leave the teaching symbol for a minute, I want to talk about archetypes. And archetypes really to me speak to this side of this middle section which I call soul. So for me, I like to take that middle section and sort of divide it. Maybe there’s a little dotted line and there’s this mind, which is a lot of our personality, our beliefs, the things that we hold our perspective, but there’s also soul. And to me, soul is what is most forward in our expression in our lives. And I’ll give you an example. I’ll just use myself as the example. What is very forward for me, I think about it this way. When I first came into the world and before I had all these life experiences and I think about me in my most natural organic place when I first walked onto this planet.
(08:34):
For me, the archetypes that I have is kind of a mix of at least two of these. I’m kind of poet, I have this romantic idea. And language to me is always very expansive. Some people are very literal. I had a teacher in ministerial school is very literal. It is like this word means this and it can’t mean anything else. And I’m like, yeah, words can mean many things. They’re very poetic. They have very expansive meanings. So we had very different personalities. And I think that mixed with that when I was first coming into this is probably a little bit of mystic, it was very heart-centered, very emotional, very connecting with people through my feelings. So if I were coloring, and so you see, I put a turtle on the paper because what I would have you do if I had all the time in the world is have you get colored pens and pencils and start coloring in your turtle of the different kinds of archetypes that are really forward for you in your life.
(09:38):
And for me, like I said, it started off as poet and mystic and I would color that in. And then thinking and reflecting on my life experiences, what I came up with, what I understand is that I’ve acquired and really incorporated in my life warrior. I’ve been through my life experiences, had to hold my ground. I had to in these experiences, really had to own myself to claim myself to stand up and defend myself in many instances. And so although I don’t think I was a natural warrior when I came into the world, it is an attribute that I have cultivated and I think is now part of my soul picture. So if I were painting this, I would add in some warrior into the picture. So I wanted you to just take a minute and maybe reflect as I did. Where were you when you first started?
(10:37):
What were some of the, and what I want to say is it can be a mix. We are really all of the archetypes, and these are just a handful. I kept the list very limited because we only have a limited amount of time. But if you Google archetypes, you can find many, many, many more. And you could do this with archetypes, you could do it with Enneagram if you know the Enneagram. And we have all the different aspects of Enneagram, but some are more forward than others. You could do it with astrology when we have zodiac signs, some are more forward in us than others, but we have all of it in us. And the same is true for archetypes. I just find archetypes is a little easy to work with. So just kind of reflecting on where were you when you came into this world, what would be your mix? And then what of the life experiences you’ve had, do you think you’ve acquired and added to the mix of your soul complexion? And if anybody has any like, oh yeah, I’m a, let me know, share it out. Oh, I should look at my online family and see what’s going on here as well. So anybody have any like, oh yeah, I am definitely this or that.
(12:01):
I have to come over here to where Don is. What are you saying?
(12:11):
Scientist and warrior and they’re still inviting in more. Yeah, I know that you’re really cultivating that spirit side of yourself. Absolutely bringing, pulling in. The philosopher is coming in. I know I would probably have a little bit of philosopher in me too, which is something else that I’ve been acquiring. So if we were painting this, you can see that your palette is going to continue to change and shade and color. And the part of us when we take it to the reason why I think this is so I impactful and so helpful is the soul part of us is the part of us that we take with us. It is part of our eternalness as we move through this life experience, we’ll let go of this life, we’ll move on to whatever we move on to. We’re taking this with us. And so can we go back to the teaching symbol, Ben, back one slide maybe? Yeah. Well actually let’s go to the very last slide. Let’s just go ahead and jump to this one. So we have our mind and our beliefs. We have our soul and our archetypes. And the way I interpret the teaching symbol is much the way we just discussed. So we have this idea, I was working with abundance, so I’ll keep working with abundance. So abundance in this purest form coming through the mind, coming through my beliefs, coming through my perspective out picturing.
(13:41):
And that out picturing, it’s not like I’m working on a Word document and I print it in the printer and it comes out and I go, ah, I don’t like that. I want to reformat it. That is part of it. But that life experience has more meaning than that. It’s impactful. But big takeaway for me is that our life has meaning and this meaning is influencing this soul picture that we’re creating. So everything that happens, every instance, every situation, every moment has meaning and is impactful. And I think that we can lose perspective of that, right? Sometimes we can lose perspective. Our life has meaning and what happens with this teaching symbol? So on the left side, I see that as the involution we are bringing from spirit down into our human experience and expressing it. It is most of the time, involuntary, involution, involuntary.
(14:50):
We can’t ourselves from thinking and we can’t stop ourselves from making manifest. But what we can do is set intention. There’s a lot of ins there, right? Involution, involuntary intention. And we set intention. We can start to co-create that experience with spirit. And then we have that experience and that experience has meaning and it then starts to go back up. And this is the evolution part of us. It starts to evolve us, it starts to change us. It starts to shift us, the evolutionary part of us, and it impacts us. Let me give you a real life example just because it’s a little esoteric right now. So a real life example would be a long time ago now was a while ago, I have to park my car behind my building and I had a parking spot at the time that was very convenient. You go zip right into the building, zip right out, really great.
(15:51):
And I thought, oh, this is great. But what would happen is I would like, okay, I’ve got a little bit of time between meetings or whatever, I’m going to run to the grocery store and run back and I’d come back and someone was parked in my spot. Now they are reserve spots and they’re not supposed to park there, but invariably someone would just say, I’m just going to jump in for a minute. And then they’d be there for several hours and there was this one car that was doing it all the time. So one day I pull in, I’m like, oh, here’s this car again. And there was a young woman, it was her car and she was coming out and we were there at the same time. So I was able to meet her and I talked to her and I said, look, I get that in the way our building is set up. It’s really hard with cars and parking and all of that, but you can’t park here. I pay for this. We all pay for this because we need and want that convenience of being able to come and go and you simply cannot park here. She’s like, and she got up and she got in her car and left. The next day I came out of my car was keyed.
(16:59):
So I can look at that experience and that situation and I can hold that as like, oh, people are so awful. And it can be a very constricting restricting kind of consciousness that I bring to it. And that is what I would evolve up and hold here. And that is what whatever seeds I’m pulling through are going to filter through or I can be in my spiritual consciousness, I can be my conscious co-creator with spirit. And I can say, think about what this woman was thinking. She was looking at that situation and she thought, the only choice I have, this whole thing happened, and the only outlet that I have for this is to do this act of vandalism. But what I want for her is for her to know that there is a universe of choices. There’s all kinds of ways to process through something like a situation like that where you’re frustrated or you’re angry, you’re feeling guilty.
(18:08):
And that’s what I would want her to know. And I would want her to have that experience of this expansive volume of choices. And that’s what I want for me too, so I can hold that consciousness. And that’s the thing that evolves up and comes up into and informs my soul, inform my beliefs and forms my mind. And now that is a much more expansive way of holding that consciousness. So we always get to choose. We are always in choice about those things. Viktor Frankl, I wrote down this quote, I wanted to share it with you, Viktor Frankl said, between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space is our power to choose our response in our response lives, our growth and our freedom.
(19:06):
So I think this is really cool. That is really exciting. Now I understand that life has a lot of different things happening. There are a lot of things happening in our own lives. There’s a lot of things happening around the world and holding that high consciousness, holding that expanded idea can be really challenging. I get it. What I also know is that the invitation is always there. I call it, the way I phrase it is we’re always invited to have a bigger idea about our lives and about what is unfolding in our lives. There’s always this invitation for a bigger idea. And in that bigger idea, anything is possible. And also I use this phrase a lot when I pray, particularly in the very first step, which is I understand there is one, there is God, there’s this expansive truth, this unconditional love, this divine source that is all that is everywhere and every when.
(20:15):
And I do that on purpose because I remind myself that even things that have happened where I may not have held the highest, most expansive consciousness I can redress that I can come back to it again. I always have the opportunity to lift that up and hold it in a new and expand expanded idea, new and expanded consciousness. I can always get a bigger idea of what is going on to me. This is what forgiveness is really all about. If you’ve ever done any forgiveness work. And so this is all jam packed in this one little symbol. And what I want to do also just because I’m not done yet, so we come up to, we have the involution, the involuntary, and the in intentional. We have this out-picturing our out picturing has a powerful meaning. Our lives have meaning. It impacts in how we decide we are the meaning makers.
(21:16):
We are not at some outside agency isn’t making the meaning. We are the co-creators with spirit. We are giving meaning to, we are holding the meaning and the meaning makers of what is happening. And we hold that in our consciousness and it colors and changes our soul and we carry that with us and we pull that forward and we hold those beliefs in mind and those perspectives in our mind and they influence and impact all the new seeds that are coming through. And it evolves even up into spirit. So that idea of love, that expanded idea of abundance, that expanded idea of wholeness, that expanded idea of peace and harmony is reflected and an aspect of it that is now showing up in spirit in the all. That is all it is. Your version of that is your perspective of that. It is your take on that.
(22:17):
And so you are always adding to the whole that is the oneness, that is their circumference of consciousness and not done yet, if you can imagine a little dotted line going across. So we have this seeds thought coming through doing its thing being made manifest. We get a perspective on it, we hold a belief about it, it evolves up, it influences us. It even evolves up into spirit where it becomes a new aspect to how love is showing up. And we come across and we go through it again and we go through it again. And if you imagine this system happening over and over again, what we’re creating is a vortex. Where have we heard vortex before? Well, we hear it in the teaching of Abraham Hicks. This is a vortex that’s happening. We hear it in like Mary Morrissey and others that talk about a spiral universe that is always moving, is always in motion.
(23:23):
That there’s always something more that is inviting us to expand, to hold a bigger idea, to hold a bigger consciousness around love. It also represents because of the three points to me, the triune nature of spirit. So triune nature is one of the foundational principles of science of mind. If you want to know more about that, I think we’ll have to get into class. I won’t have time to get into it now, but the triune nature is that seed soil plant. It’s that thing that if it didn’t exist, we couldn’t have this process. It is that which is animating all of it. If it’s just me, I am, I have no perspective. If it’s me and Reverend Judy, we just bounce back and forth between the two of us and we can just kind of reflect back and forth. And there really can be a stagnation that happens.
(24:16):
But if there’s a third now there’s movement. Now there’s motion, now something is happening and it starts to grow and expand and change and shift. And that’s the exciting part of our teaching. So that’s represented here too. And you can see that kind of teaching in karma. You can see that kind of teaching in Buddhism. You can see that kind of teaching in course in miracles instead of, I call it intention instead of intention. Of course, miracles would call it holy Spirit. If you came up in a more traditional Christian path, you might have heard of it as the trinity. It’s all packed here in the symbol. It’s all right here. So when you look at that symbol, all of it is present there for you. I just wanted to share that with you. I’m have another quote I want to share with you. And that is from Emerson because sometimes we can get a little self-conscious about the thoughts and beliefs and ideas that we’re holding and the things that we’re making manifest.
(25:22):
And what Emerson says is don’t be timid and squeamish about your actions. All of life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better. And I love that because it’s true whatever is happening in our life experience, it has meaning and is impactful and it is always leading, evolving us upward. We are always in that evolutionary part. And the truth is that, and we’ve said this before, that in terms of karma, what we put out, the good we get back is always greater than whatever it is we put out. So we’re always cultivating and fostering more and more good. That is the reality of it. And so that’s science of mine, right? Plant seed, soil, plant, the out picturing that out, picturing has meaning. We hold that. It changes us, it evolves us. We can be conscious of it or unconscious of it. The invitation is to be conscious of it.
(26:26):
The invitation is to get a bigger idea around it. And if you can’t do it in the moment, which is understandable in some situations, know that you can come back and revisit it when you’re ready and know, oh, that’s why I had that experience. Oh, that’s why that’s showing up. Or even, I don’t know why it was showing up, but I know that I can hold a bigger idea about it. I’ve had that happen with health circumstances, with jobs coming and going with people coming and going. There’s always an invitation to come back to it and hold a bigger idea. So those are the two big takeaways. Your life has tremendous meaning and you’re always invited to get a bigger idea around what is happening. So with that, I want to take us into prayer.
(27:24):
I know this was really, really fast and just sort of a superficial touch on this. Usually this is part of a big workshop that I actually wrote for a class that I was in, how to write a workshop. So maybe one of these days I’ll talk Reverend Amy, and we can do the real workshop because we get really into this very deep and it’s very, very rich. It’s really, really fascinating. And what I love about this is as you go into the world and you visit other spiritual centers and you see that symbol, God, you see so much, you see so much. You remember so much about who you are and what you are and what is happening. So I just invite you to close your eyes now and just take this into prayer with me. As we just recognize right here, right now, all that is all this source, this love, this unconditional peace that is in and through all that is, it is everywhere and everyone, it is this creative spark, this creative truth, this creative energy that is in and through me as me, with me.
(28:29):
For me I am one with it. There is only one me and spirit, you and spirit. And so from this place, I just say a blessing upon each and every single person that’s joined us today or hearing this sharing and just know that we are getting a bigger idea about life. That we are reaching out and lifting up and knowing and understanding that there is an expanded way to look at what is happening. That we are agents of change in the world of form. That as we hold in a more expansive consciousness, this is impacting all that is around us, all who are around us, that we are powerful beings and co-creating with this divine spark, this divine spirit. And I’m so grateful for this. I’m so grateful for the way Spirit shows up in all its many forms. I’m so grateful for the conscious, the awareness, the teaching of understanding how this process works and being able to be a more conscious present co-creator with the power and presence of spirit.
(29:33):
I’m so grateful for how it shows up as abundance, how it shows up as wholeness, how it shows up as harmony, how it shows up in all its many forms of unconditional love in presence, in action, in life. And so I claim for each and every single person that they are making may manifest all that which they are holding in mind, what they are calling forward. A more forward, more expansive experience of abundance and financial prosperity of prosperity of all types of wholeness. This wholeness of physical health, this wholeness of physical and human expression, this wholeness of heart and mind. Just knowing that that is present for each and every single person. I know that each and every relationship that is wanting to come together and teach and share and inform, there is at the heart of it, a love that is wanting to come through and expressing here and now for each and every single person.
(30:28):
And that idea of harmony is coming forward and presencing itself as we say yes to it. And we co-create with it. That is the higher, the bigger thought that we can have, the bigger idea we can have for that. And all the forms in which God and truth and divine peace, whatever your word is, whatever your phrase is, however it expresses in and through our lives and through ourselves and as we channel that and co-create with that, I just know that there is great possibility. There’s infinite possibilities that we look beyond the circumstances and conditions and we know and hold an expanded idea, a bigger idea for our lives. I just know this truth to be so. I call it all love. I release it now knowing that it is done. And so it it’s,
Paige Kizer (31:20):
Thank you, John.