OVERVIEW
Instead of setting New Year’s Resolutions, we encourage opening through spiritual practice to receive the Vision of what Spirit is wanting to express through you. Then your “work” is to reconcile how you are being right now with how you must be in order to embody the Vision. Join me this Sunday to explore how this relates to Ernest Holmes’s fundamental ideas on Spirit and Designing Your Life.
TRANSCRIPTION
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being my community, you in person and online. Um, last week’s Burning Bowl provided the opportunity to have an intentional completion of 2022, and this invites us into what is possible opening this space for creating something new. And there’s an American Indian saying, and I’m just paraphrasing, but it’s something around good endings make for good beginnings. So I’m grateful to be here with you for this good beginning, the beginning and intentionally creating 2023 and the start of the new year. As you all know, historically resolutions, what can I do differently? We make promises to ourselves. And I read a New York Times article this week that said, most resolutions are broken by February <laugh>. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t set goals. These, um, actions reflect our beliefs. There’s a saying, uh, it it’s from the reading in the sciences of mine that our actions reflect our beliefs and prove our faith. So in that regard, our actions are very important. It proves what we are believing and it’s a way for us to check in like, wow, this is what I’m doing, so that’s what I’m actually believing. And as always, we have to start with what is going on inside. We do the work to elevate our beliefs. Then we reconcile our actions to align with those beliefs.
And in our spiritual tradition, as most of you are already aware, instead of resolutions, we open our re our ourselves to receive the vision of what Spirit is wanting to express through us. And our work is then to reconcile how are we being right now with how we will be when we embody the vision, the great reconciliation. That’s what I titled my talk.
One of the things that I appreciate about you, about us is that we are seeking greater understanding, greater understanding of ourselves, of the world, of our existence. And in that seeking, we <affirmative>, we continuously have to keep looking at ourselves, at our beliefs, at our assumptions, at our behaviors in our inner world and our outer world. Some of us have been seeking and questioning since we were children. Many of us went along with the status quo for a good long run and didn’t start questioning until we had an experience that brought us to our knees. Some of us required a dark night of the soul to begin to wake up. And in a new design for living, which is one of the books this month, Ernest Home tells us that we must release ourselves from the undesirable things of the past, those old limiting beliefs and behaviors. And he says, you can make the change and step out of what may have been an undesirable past into a bright future. This, I’m, I’m having an emotional reaction to this because this is the thing about this teaching that is so amazing. People get to a point in their lives where they don’t know what to do anymore. And this teaching can shift that perspective.
It is such an appealing aspect of this, this teaching that to know that the conditions of our lives are not static, they’re not unchangeable. We are never stuck. So I don’t know what this is that’s coming up in me. I don’t know if it’s for one of you in the room or for one of you online, but whatever you’re going through, it can be different. This teaching gives us hope.
Ernest goes on to say, when we begin to take a look at ourselves, we first know ourselves as we appear in the physical world, but we need to get to understand ourselves as the real self, the unseen cause that brought us to where we are. And in the signs of mind text, the first section titled the thing itself, which is always kind of weird, it’s like some sort of science fiction thing. <laugh> the thing itself. Ernest says, we must make the discovery for ourselves. So if we were to suggest that this creative power that we call God or universe would do it for us, it would be a sort of, you know, God of bondage, of control, making things happen for us. We have to discover it for ourselves. We are free to make the discovery and we are free to experience something else. John touched on this last week. I found it very moving. You should listen to the recording if you weren’t here, we are always free to choose. Ernest says, freedom is the birthright of every living soul.
But it’s in that choice that we sometimes get caught in our personality, in ego, in thinking that we have to make something happen or thinking that it has to be a certain way and that exhausting sort of hamster wheel of being in manifesting consciousness. But my challenge to you for 2023 is to be in the question of how much freedom can you stand? Do you unconsciously limit yourself and stifle your freedom? Are you creating life as being hard, feeling stuck in the past, as was in the reading, choose to release the undesirable past for a bright future.
The thing itself, as Ernest calls it, is first cause spirit, mind, invisible essence. The intelligence from which everything comes, the power in back of creation is available to all of us equally. We are free how we choose to use it. There aren’t people out there who’ve been given more access to power and that’s why they’re having a life that you think looks more desirable. They just believe it’s possible. And so many of our contemporaries are, are sort of sleepwalking through life. We see this. I mean, if you can even stand to be on social media anymore, <laugh> pointing fingers, blaming others for their experience at the effect of, but when we begin to wake up, we take responsibility for our experience and we can let others have their experience.
And another foundational piece of the science of mind teaching is that ideas begin in conscious mind. Move through the subconscious subjective medium, which is the law that’s always saying yes. And then we experience the outcome in form. So we need to get interested in what’s going on in the subconscious cuz it filters through the subconscious and then out pictures in form. We bring our limiting beliefs into conscious awareness and be more intentional creators. But I wanna be clear, this is not just about manifesting. I think that new thought sort of went down that path. And, and it it’s way more than this. It’s about transformation. We become the vision. We become a new, we reconcile how we are being right now with how we must be to embody the vision. We transform ourselves into the new.
So I’m talking about vision. We have visioning and visualization and I like to clarify. Michael Beckwith says, the visualization is that visualization is a doing process and visioning is a being process in visualization. We are directing spirit to have our way and envisioning, we allow spirit to have its way with us when we’re at the effect or when we’re in manifesting mode, directing spirit or whether we’re surrendering. These are part of the four states of consciousness, which could be a whole talk in itself. And just a little plug, we are gonna dive deeper into that in that visioning class that starts tomorrow night, <laugh>. Um, but in visualization we are directing spirit to have our way and envisioning we allow spirit to have its way. It doesn’t mean that visualization is is not useful to us or bad, but like we will do in our in the workshop today, we’re open to receive through the meditative practice of visioning.
Then we will use the vision boards to visualize and support the vision. So we allow visualization to support the vision that is received by us receiving in intuitively from spirit, from God, we open ourselves to receive that. And then we use the, the visualization to empower it, right? So we receive the vision and then we use visualization to empower it not the other way around. Too often people are directing through manifestation and then asking God to make it happen for them. The idea is to open to what God is wanting to create through you. And then you use the visualization process, affirmative prayer and other spiritual tools to support bringing it into manifestation. But whether we are opening and receiving guidance and creating from there, or directing and imagining to create, or if we are unaware and creating through the filters of our limiting beliefs with all the messy outcomes, the principle still works the same our consciousness creates. So our theme this month is Designing Your Life, the book by Ernest Holmes, A Design for Living. And we are also revisiting the basics of our spiritual principle using the introduction to the science of mind book. And I’m re I’m working with the first part of new Design for living. And the first section of the introduction, the thing itself, the thing itself is God spirit source. The thing itself is endless expansion always becoming more of itself.
The study of the science of mind is a study of first cause, spirit, mind or that invisible essence, that ultimate stuff and intelligence from which everything comes the power back of creation, the thing itself. And this inherent nature, this power is always seeking to express itself through us. As us as we open to this, as we listen sense and come to know this, we become receptive and become a full expression of it. This is where we move into, uh, that, that ease and grace instead of being on the treadmill of thinking that we have to make something happen in our lives. So we’re reconciling. Visualization is a doing process and visioning as a being process. There’s so, so many great opportunities for this idea of reconciliation and action and surrender. Black, right, right, wrong. And as I was working on this, I say God includes all of it. Everything is already done in God. The whole spectrum. It’s in the new design for living. Earnest says literally all good things that life offers are yours to have and enjoy. Everything is already available, but you need to recognize them, accept them, and incorporate them into the new design that you’re creating.
So when I was thinking about this talk over the past couple of weeks, I was asking what wants to be expressed? See, this practice of visioning really does become a way of life. I sit and I listen and it gets to be a, an experience of where I’m, I’m listening and hearing even throughout the course of my day, I don’t have to just sit and do it in the quiet I’m hearing if I make myself available for it. And this word reconciliation kept coming up. I didn’t like it at first <laugh>, but uh, I’m going with it here. So, uh, Google definition of reconciliation, the restoration of friendly relations as in his reconciliation with his uncle or two, the action of making one viewer belief compatible with another, like our reconciliation between art and science. So I appreciate these ideas of, you know, keeping it friendly, making things compatible. It’s not either or thinking it includes all of it. And when we talk about reconciling who we are right now with the vision of who we are to be, there’s an invitation to keep it friendly and compatible, creating alignment. We don’t need to make it hard. We don’t need to feel like we’re in a struggle
Without reconciling that We have that sort of push pull experience where we’re putting out an idea and then there’s a part of us that’s contradicting it and not thinking it’s possible when we say we want something, but believe another or Act inc. Congruently, that’s what makes us think we’re stuck. And stuck is not a thing. We’re only stuck in our mind. So you’re always being called to reconcile who you are being and how you are being with what is showing up in your current experience. You could say we’re finding the gap between who we are, how we are, and how we want to be who we want to be.
So back, I’m gonna say a hundred years ago, <laugh> makes it sound like, uh, I’m being derogatory about my age and that’s not what it is. I actually like my age. But it just surprises me when I think about things that happened when I was in college. Like it’s almost like a different time period. <laugh>, like the world was so different, it just feels surreal and spirit keeps us young, so it sort of feels unreal. But way back when in college, um, I took a computer science class and I may have shared this before, sorry, sorry if I’m being redundant, but, um, this computer science class, it was called fortran. There was a, it was computer language at the time that was, uh, supposed to make computing more accessible. So instead of the computer taking up this entire room, it only took up a quarter of this room.
Obviously we’ve come a long way, but you had to use, um, codes that created punches in cards and then you fed these stacks of cards to the machine and it spit out a certain behavior and that’s how you made the computer do what you wanted it to do, right? Well anyway, this class was not my cup of tea. I was not interested, I wasn’t getting the instructor, I was in a big lecture hall. I couldn’t even really figure out what was happening. So I dropped the class. But the way it worked back then was if you didn’t want that w to show up on your transcript, you had a certain period of time where you could take the class over and then that w would go away. So I took the class with a different instructor and he had a much different energy and approach to this. And the big assignment was to program the computer to make a, an ethereal turtle walk in a particular direction. You know, the turtle goes end steps kind of thing. So we’re using the commands and the codes of the language, punching the cards, feeding them to the machine to move this turtle around the screen so it ends up in a certain spot.
And I made it happen, but I learned something really profound from that class, from that instructor. It’s one of the most important things that I learned in college. And it might seem obvious to you, it says a bit to me now because it’s in alignment with our teaching. But at the time it was a profound change in how I approached life. When you’re trying to figure out how to get from here to there, you start with the answer. You start with where you wanna be, it’s visioning. You start with the vision and you work your way back to where you are now. It’s a sort of reconciling of the difference. You find the solution. Your next step is sort of reverse engineering, reconciling where you are now with where you wanna be. And one of the visioning questions, there’s a series, it’s a guided contemplative practice. One of the questions is, what must I become? Which is really just that how do I reconcile who I am right now with what is wanting to occur? As science of mine says, there’s a power for good infinite possibilities that express through each of us. When we let go of controlling and surrender, we open to receive its intelligence, its guidance, and we catch the vision for what is wanting to express.
And our work is just to reconcile the difference, who and how we are being now with who and how we are being called to be. And from the reading that Connie shared, Ernest says, all the good things that life offer are yours to have and enjoy. But you need to recognize them, accept them, and incorporate them in your new design. Recognizing and accepting them. Both of these occur in visioning. Visioning opens us to the infinite. We receive the guidance to recognize and align with infinite possibility and we accept or become it as part of that practice. And then to incorporate them into the new design. This is where a visualization or goals and action steps can come in. And also from the reading that Connie shared, he suggests two things that can be done about establishing a new design. First, you have to be, be willing to let go of undesirable things of the past. And second, you have to enlarge your viewpoint. So I’m gonna take us into a little bit of practice before I close out.
Keeping in mind that Ernest says nothing lies beyond the scope of your ability. The new design you create for your life has no limitations. Step out of what may have been an undesirable past into a bright future. So I just invite you to take a moment to turn your attention within. And just in this inquiry of how we have a tendency to accept certain conditions, situations as if they are inevitable, almost like habits. I invite you to ask the question, what are you erroneously or habitually accepting as a condition in your life?
How does that serve you? What’s the payoff? What do you get from this? And then more obviously, how does it hold you back? And are you willing to let it go? And secondly, his second point, enlarging your viewpoint. I invite you into the question of are you closed to the very things you most desire? Do you feel that you already know all the answers like nothing else is possible? Has the status quo become tolerable? Do you feel like you don’t know what to do about it? This is where we open to spirit. We do not have to figure it out. We open ourselves and the answers come, the guidance comes. Infinite possibilities are already available. We are in an infinite creative field, a field of unlimited potential. We simply open ourselves, catch the idea of what God is wanting for us. And as we open to it, the way becomes known. The way is made clear. We receive what we need in support the right people, places, opportunities show up for us. Nothing lies beyond the scope of your ability. Everything is possible. No limitations. We are free to choose. We are free to begin again in every moment. And we begin again.
And if needed we begin again. Allowing the love of spirit to be our guide. The possibility to experience infinite freedom, infinite joy, infinite abundance in every area of our lives. And I’m grateful knowing that each of us is opening to this idea now, expanding in our capacity to receive, expanding in our yes to greater good. Yes to being the fullest expression of spirit that we are here to be. And I’m so grateful. I call it good. And so it is.