OVERVIEW
Relationships can break, work may stop, our body systems may even shut down but our mind and awareness are always working in partnership with the creative law of life. What is created on some level is less important initially than realizing the law works with the mind period…and never breaks down. Since this is always working, it falls on you, and you only, to own the responsibility that is only yours, knowing what is in your mind. How do we stay on top of this? Kindly, compassionately and committed to the work as frequently as you eat in a day or wash your hands.
TRANSCRIPTION
Good day. Good morning, good week. Good hour, good minute. Good. Now everybody, my name is Darrell and we’re gonna spend the next 20 minutes or so, cause I’m actually gonna time myself and stay on it. Um, I’m gonna time myself today to bring about this idea of what is this thing that we talk about all the time. I love the beginning of the year for so many reasons. One, there’s just like a reset button that we collectively kind of say yes to, right? We just, uh, ended a year whether we liked it or not. There’s kind of like this new beginning, this freshness, this willingness to go, okay, there’s a, there’s another possibility. Then what was that? Lasts depending upon your personality and the circumstances of your life, maybe an hour after midnight if you stay up or maybe a couple of weeks. Um, I work in the wellness industry and so we’re now moving into that phase where things start to fall off.
If you’ve joined a gym or you’ve been in a gym or you’ve ever done anything gym, like right, you’ve committed to doing something for your body, you’ve committed to working out, and then all of a sudden you’re like, but I, I kind of like hitting the snooze button. That’s easier to do that. I kind of like eating a donut. They’re delicious. All the things that aren’t necessarily inherently bad. I’m not here to be in a space of judgment, but just to recognize that there is a fervor and an inspiration that we all kind of step into. And then the natural tendency of our humanity is to fall a little bit away from it.
In new thought teachings, we are talking about harnessing the power of our mind. And the, the, the song that Tiffany in the band sang today, the Good Fight. I have a hard Time with Violence. I have a hard time with words that are about fighting because the fundamental thing that I was trained in in school, in that we, that we embrace in this teaching is that there’s nothing to fight, right? We’re only one. John and I sit on the diversity, equity and inclusion committee for the Centers for Spiritual Living. And one of the challenges that a lot of people, uh, bring up is that why are we talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion? When we are of oneness, this goes against everything that we say, but this is the thing that we’re talking about. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. We cannot deny our humanity and the struggle and the challenge and the fight that we often have there that’s part of this dense body. So what is the good fight that juxtaposition right, of kind of like a negative and a positive, an oxymoron? One of my colleagues, one of my mentors, one of my first ministers in this teaching, Reverend Mark, Anthony Lord said, wherever there’s an oxymoron, there is God.
So as we step into this conversation of what is the good fight today, think about what those two words mean to you. I don’t want to tell you what they should mean, but I’m gonna invite you into a conversation. This month we are focusing on this idea of a new design for living, right? As we step into the new year, what is it that we can do? What can we practice? What can we embrace to design not necessarily changing our life? John and I connected during the opening moments of what we were gonna do this year to bring about some different shift. But what can we do to design a new way of being in relationship to our life? At the beginning of the year, when we come back to some of these fundamental teachings of science of mind, the principle that is there is not, um, a principle that is found only in science of mind. So oftentimes, I know some people like Ernest Holmes, they like science of mind, but then they dabble in something of this over here and they dabble a little bit of this over there. And depending upon your cultural or religious upbringing, maybe you have some Judaism, you have some Islam, you’ve got some Christianity, you’ve got some Buddhism, you’ve got some Daoism, you’ve got something in you. And so the principle that we are looking at here lives in all of those teachings, all of those wisdom paths. They’re just unique ways of speaking this truth.
So whether it’s science of mine, whether it’s positive psychology, whether it is positive thinking, the teachings of Abraham, the law of attraction, a course in miracles, any of those mystical traditions of the world, religions the principle, the truth. It’s not new. But what I want you to challenge yourself with today is making it new for yourself. This year, returning, coming back to some of these core fundamental principles for living a powerful, soulful, spiritual conscious life. What we fight with or what we come up against is not so much something outside of us, it’s something in our default way of thinking. Default. Think about that. When something default, it just falls back in little to no effort. The biggest fight that you have with the way that you live is the default unconscious tendencies of your mind.
Let that sink in. Forget about the government, forget about left and right. Forget about finances, forget about banks. Forget about world struggles. Your thing here is the thing that creates a relationship with everything outside of you. What we fight is our unconscious thinking. When we are unconscious, we are unplugged from our power. The power is still there, but we are unplugged from it. The power of our thinking is always influencing. And I and, and I was thinking about that word, everyone wants to be an influencer online. Well, forget about everybody else. Influence yourself first. That’s where we’re gonna start today. If you truly influence yourself in the way that we’re talking about today, you will inevitably influence the world. And that’s what we need. People influencing the world, not because they’re moving the chess pieces out there, but because they’re standing here at the seat of the chess player in recognizing the power of their thoughts as they look out. The talk title today is the one thing in your life that always works. There is one thing that always works. Sometimes you walk into a room, you hit the light switch and it doesn’t work. The light switch is working. The ball isn’t. Sometimes you get into a great relationship with somebody and you break up or you’re in a relationship with someone that is committed and it’s still going. But there’s moments where it feels like something’s not working.
Maybe you get let go of a job and your job broke. It’s not working, you’re not working with the job. But regardless of those conditions outside of you, there’s one thing that always is working. It is always working. It does not sleep. And that is your mind. The thoughts that you hold in your mind are the most powerful things that you own worth more than any home worth, more than the number of zeros on an account. But we don’t take much responsibility for the most powerful thing on the planet. We give it away. So often the law is what we’re talking about. That’s the one thing that always works. The law. Whether you use it consciously and you go, I am a Mindy manifestor, I create my life. I desire love in my life. And we repeat that over and over and over again and we saturate our consciousness until it comes to pass. Or we don’t affirm things. We don’t consciously think thoughts, we just walk around. We turn on the TV and we scratch our butt in the morning. We have a cup of coffee and we look and they’re like, the world is complete shit. The world is complete crap. Everything is falling apart. That’s what’s in your mind. The law says, oh, let’s get to work.
Ernest Holmes says, A law, any law, any law does not care about the results of its action. A law doesn’t think, it doesn’t choose, it doesn’t say, I’m gonna work over here, but not over there. It has no conscience. It knows only to act. It isn’t personal. We are free to choose the direction of its action. We are ch we are free to choose the direction of its action. Now, for me personally on my spiritual journey, this was one of the most liberating things that came into my awareness. It was also one of the scariest things that came into my awareness at the same time, because if we really embrace the law as the way that God works, it invites us to let go of God being a personality.
It’s not mom or dad or uncle or cousin or big brother or big sister in the sky that we go, oh, well I hope I get the things that I want cause I was a good boy or a good girl today. No, the law just works and it does not care what you think. It has no conscience. It needs your consciousness to work with it powerfully to co-create something magnificent. It’s the one thing in your life that’s always working, you can actually believe it or not, and it’s still working. If you believe that this law is a bunch of bull crap and that God’s just some weird thing that you know, simplistic minds make up and it’s only at the true science, it’s only at the thing that we can prove on a piece of paper, an algorithm that we can put into a computer and shoot out some results. That is the only thing. It’s still working.
You are creating from here out there, there’s three things that I want you to really, uh, hear and see as the underpinning of today’s talk. One, the one thing in life that is always working with you is the law. And the word here I want you to, to, to focus on is the one thing in your life that is always working with you. A lot of times we may drop in the word for it’s not working for you, it doesn’t owe you anything. It’s just here working with you, with whatever you bring to the table. The one thing in life that is always working with you is the law. Number two, whether you use it consciously or not, it is still working.
So if you may think, oh, it’s Friday, I’m gonna take a day off and I’m not gonna really be responsible for much, it’s still working with you. And then that brings me to number three. If it’s always working, then our purpose, regardless of whether or not you work in the corporate world or the nonprofit world, whether you are a teacher or a lawyer, whatever your profession may be, let that go for a minute. Your purpose as a person, as a spiritual being on this planet and this lifetime is to move back into conscious relationship with that power of the law. At any time and any place and any space, the one thing that’s always working is the law. Whether you consciously do use it or not, it’s still working. So therefore it is our work to bring our conscious attention to the thing that’s always a foot.
Can you feel me on that? All right, now I’ve got like seven or eight other pages that I’m gonna try to do in seven minutes. So take a deep breath in and here we go. Faith is the thing that comes into this conversation. Ernest Holmes says, and what is faith? Regardless of how exalted it may be, it is only a definite way of thinking. Faith is a definite way of thinking. That’s it. Let go of this other like lofty idea of faith is something that you may or may not have. Mm-hmm. Faith is a definite way of thinking. You can think so you always have faith. You don’t lose it. You just let go of the power of your faith. When you get complacent, when you give up, when we’re in that first level of consciousness, Reverend Linda was talking about the four levels of consciousness, right?
Of the spiritual journey. You don’t do this linearly. We’re constantly dabbling back and forth between the first and the second level of consciousness. And if you’re not aware what those are, the first level of consciousness is we feel victimized by life. We are victim to it. It’s happening to us. We don’t have any power. And then we may move into the space of going, oh, but wait a minute, I do have some power. This is when we first come into deep spiritual truth and we go, wait a minute, I’m a mighty manifester. And we pray, we affirm, we do vision boards, we do something to affirm the things that we desire in life. And all of a sudden we have these weird things called mighty manifestations happen. Things that we like come to pass and then something outside of us smacks us in the face.
Some people call it the spiritual two by four. And we’re like, oh my God, I’m such a victim to life. I can’t do anything right? Until we remember that we can do something. So most of the time we’re like toggling back and forth. We talk about multitasking. We are multitasking all the time as victims and manifesters, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That is pretty much the totality of our humanist existence. But we are not just humans, we’re spiritual beings. When we step into the third and fourth level of consciousness, where we are here as instruments where we get used, not used up, but we become conduits for the law to work. We work with it consciously. And then there’s that really transcendent space of where we are one with it. It’s not even something separate from us.
That’s why in the steps of prayer, the first two are the most important. Recognizing the power of God, recognizing the power of law, recognizing the power of life, and saying that I am one with it. If we could just do that every day, we’d be good. Sure, we can have wants and desires, but if we just step into and through everything that we interact with, whether it be a loving relationship, what we order on a menu, or what we say yes or no to at work from the space, that God is all that there is, and I am one with it. And actually I am it. And truly believe that as we walk into anything that would be amazing,
Man. I’ve got like six more pages and four minutes. All right, here we go. How many of you know the phrase seeing is believing? How many of us believe that that seeing is believing? I believe it. It is a specific way of using the law. That’s what we’re here to talk about today. The law, the way this thing works, the way that it works is it works with us. No matter what we say, it works. So if we say seeing is believing, we are setting up our life to have any sort of validation about anything only happen in one place. And where is that outside of ourselves. So we wait until we see something to believe.
This is kind of a mind with this teaching, right? This is being in the, in the manifest or in the victim space, right? This is where we spend most of the time. I’m no superhuman. I’m the exact same person as you. I spend my time as a victim and a manifestor all the time. If we are in the space of seeing is believing, that’s in those two first levels of consciousness. Most of us don’t really believe anything until we see it. How often have you pushed away love when someone was standing in front of your face and says, I love you. And you’re like, okay, well I’ll believe it when I see it. <laugh>, what the heck does that mean? Love was standing you in front of the face affirming the very thing that you want and desire, and you say no.
What we’re going to, what we’re talking about is flipping the script. Believing is seeing. This is another way of using the law. This is the way that science of mine in any of these new thought traditions, invite us to use the thing that is always working. Believe first and then see. Notice what I do with my hands. Seeing is believing. Seeing is believing. I’m pointing away from myself to look out is then how I understand me. Believing is seeing. That’s why the phrase I am in any affirmation, in any tradition is one of the most powerful phrases that you can use. Because what you say I am and you put at the end of that sentence is what you will see.
Believing is seeing my friends. This is the practice. If you are a fan of, um, Ernest Holmes, the idea of mental equivalence where we hold in our mind an equi, an equivocable thing that we desire to experience outside, we don’t wait to see it. To know that it’s a possibility. We hold it inside our own mind and in our own hearts first and go, it is a possibility in my world. The challenge is, is that our human selves wants to know how to make it happen, right? I know I do. I want world peace up in this mug. I’m tired of people acting stupid and crazy and dividing to honor Martin Luther King at this time. He was a visionary. He did not, he did not base his world on what he saw. He saw nothing but hatred and violence and othering. But there was something that he believed deep within him. That’s where, uh, call upon your internal Martin Luther King Jr. Today, this week, this life, this year that is consciously using the law. He wasn’t a superhuman. He was just a human. That was to use this word that’s overused today. Woke, what was he woke to the power of his consciousness. If everyone woke up to that truth. We be living on a very, very different experience of this planet.
And there’s 20 minutes. All right, a couple more quotes to kind of congeal some of this together. All the simmers down to this is Ernest Holmes speaking again, all the simmers down to the fact that the law of mental equivalence automatically responds to our thinking. Why? Because the law is always working. Whatever we have an equivalent of in our total thought, whatever we believe the content will become in our experience, believing is seen. This is only another way of saying it. It is done unto you as we believe. If you are a fan of the Bible and some of the teachings of Jesus, it is done unto you as you believe. I kind of don’t like the word it’s done unto you, cuz it puts me back into the victim space. I’m waiting for something to happen to me, a reality and thought in essence, it becomes a spiritual and emotional and a mental truth. If the law is always working, it can only become an experience, a physical truth.
Does anyone know the phrase negativity, bias? Something that we talk about all the time in diversity, equity, and inclusion work. And it’s so funny, we separate that as something special. But to me, that’s all that we’re ever trying to do, is to be more inclusive, to be inclusive of the Holy Spirit is not sometimes over here and sometimes over there, but in everywhere, in every space. But the challenge in our humanity, the challenge of bringing our human self and our spiritual self together is that the human tendency, the default tendency of the human mind is to be negative. Whether you want to believe that about yourself or not, there’s research. If you need data, go to Harvard and their business review. 80% of your thoughts are negative. Now, this isn’t that. You’re walking around like Eor going, oh my gosh, everything’s so horrible. Although it can look that way.
Here’s an example. I was looking up some things in, in positive psychology, and this colleague, uh, this woman was talking about a presentation that she had to give. She was very anxious about it and excited about it. She gave the presentation at this conference, comes off the podium and one of her colleagues walks up to her and says, that was the dopest thing I’ve heard all day. And she wrote about her experience and her pos, you know, it was a conference on positive psychology and her grappling as a psychologist with her own positivity and illustrate negativity bias. Her friend, her colleague, who was championing her, said that was the dopest thing. So this is some colloquialism, but dope not being about something you smoke, but something that’s good just in case you can’t track. That was the dopest thing. That was the greatest thing that I’ve heard all day. But what she heard first was, you are nothing but a dope on stage.
That’s negativity bias. That’s what the mind is doing all the time. It is constantly trying to make sense of a truth that is not necessarily true. That the world is unsafe and you need to protect yourself from it. That everything that approaches you is trying to take away from your comfort. So on some level, the good fight, my friends, is to fight against that default tendency of negativity in the mind. For some it’s easy. For most it’s hard. Let me say that again. For some it’s easy. For most of us, it’s hard to fight that tendency. So the fact that it’s hard for you to think positive about a situation, whether you like the situation or not, doesn’t mean that you are less holy than someone else. It doesn’t mean that you’re less spiritual than someone else. It just means that you’re human and you’re having a hard time. But the good fight is about pushing up against that tendency. The only reason that that has become this concretized way of thinking individually and collectively is that we’ve been doing it for millennia. It’s one of the things that kept us alive and survive. Tribes running in and running out, taking things pillaging. But we don’t have to live that way anymore. But most of us do. Our governments do.
I can’t wait. I cannot wait to believe through seeing what the government is or isn’t going to do to know that peace is a possibility on this planet. I have to believe at first because they’re waiting to see. They won’t believe anything unless they see it. We have to be the ones to believe first. Be the one in your life that believes first. Somewhere in your life right now, there is a struggle, there is a challenge, there is a fight. Yes, anyone not in any fights right now, okay, wherever that may be in your world right now, just, just try this on for a second. Take a deep breath in. Close your eyes. What if there was nothing for you to fight outside of yourself?
What if it was truly all about something within you to remember to continue in this conversation of negativity bias and the way that the mind works in the world and in the teachings of positive psychology. Many say that for every negative thought that we have, does anyone know how many positive ones we need to have? Three, three to one. So every time you go, oh, that’s stupid, we need three. Oh, that’s awesome. To follow up, if you’ve ever been in any group sharing here or if you’ve ever been in any positive constructive feedback sessions with someone, whether at work or in a, in a coaching session, usually there might be some points of, of, of, of contingency, some points of like, okay, this didn’t work so well, but what do you want to end with something that’s positive and affirmative? Because the mind has a bias towards negativity and that’s what it holds onto.
Whether you’re talking to someone else or you’re thinking inside your own head. That’s what the tendency is to go and lean and remember and know and hold on to the negative or the presumed negativity. Each time we have a negative thought, we need three to kind of just mellow that out. Now, I’m not saying walk around all day with like a piece pad of paper going, oh, that was a negative thought. Everything’s good, everything’s good, everything’s good, everything’s good. And then you have bump up Another thought. You don’t need to be that kind of, um, out of sorts around it. But just to recognize and honor that in your humanity, the tendency is to go towards negative. And if it does take three positive affirmative thoughts to balance out that negative, then no wonder our only purpose on the planet is to remember one thing. God is good. Love is possible. Peace is a truth because it’s easy. And everything around us, we actually see it because we truly try to believe only when we see it. We’re working it backwards. We’re trying to work the law backwards. You tracking that, right? When we say believing a seeing, we’re working the law backwards. We’re trying to make it work in a way that actually is not the way we want it to work.
So this is the work that we must do is constantly come back to some powerful positive affirmative truth. One last thing, I’m not talking about magical thinking. This is one of the challenges, especially in the world of uh, affirmations in, in the law of attraction. It gets oversimplified that your life is good if you simply just have a good thought. We’ve been practicing most of our life creating a world of challenge ancestrally as well as in our contemporary living. So it’s not one thought, it’s not one good workshop, it’s not one good seminar, it’s not one good service here. It’s not one good anything. It is a continual living of affirmation, believing lets you see it.
What is faith again? Faith means a conviction about something that is stronger than anything, which we may, that may appear to deny it. A conviction in something stronger in the face of anything that may deny. So if your, uh, if your intention this year is greater health in your body, I would imagine that the current state of your body right now is denying that truth. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have that as an intention for the year, right? If your body was already in the perfect design that you wanted it to be, then you wouldn’t have that as your intention for the year.
I wanna lose 20 pounds, I wanna lower my cholesterol, I wanna do lots of things and I actually know all the ways that I can do it. The challenge is, is practicing it day to day to day, day today, if I was to say believing is seeing, then I would wake up every morning, look at the scale and go, Nope, I don’t believe it. There’s nothing I can do. Do you see how ridiculous that thinking is? Waking up every day looking at the scale, Nope, haven’t lost a pound. It does it exercise doesn’t work. Walking around doesn’t work. Eating the right things doesn’t work cause I’m not seeing it. But if I believe and I remember, oh yes, that’s the truth, and I move from that space and let go of needing the proving needing to be on the scale, I’ll start living from a space of believing that what I do, what I put in my body, how I move it, how I sleep, how I do everything, all the water that I drink or don’t drink is going to impact the wellness state of this thing here.
Then maybe one day I’ll step on the scale and I’ll go, oh wow, what I knew all along, it’s working. I can see it, I can feel it in my waistline. Now that’s just a very specific example, but this principle works everywhere cuz it’s working all the time. The law works all the time. It’s the one thing in your life that is always working with you, always. So it behooves us to work with it consciously. I’m gonna ask, um, for, uh, Judy and Don to pass out some little slips of paper online. Uh, there should be in the chat or maybe a a slide coming up, some affirmations. And I’m gonna give you a specific mental exercise, a specific training. The book that I wrote is called Soul Jim and I like to approach this work as if you are working out a spiritual gym, a soul gym. This is a specific exercise that will put you in the place of consciously using this law that is always working for you in a way that will harness its power. That is something that you can utilize. We do not face an, uh, an eternal struggle against something external for an external force which desires our downfall. This is Ernest Holmes again. We do not face an eternal struggle against some external force which desires our downfall. The only struggle, the only battle, the only fight, the only thing that needs to be overcome is our own ignorance, our own lack of awareness and recognition of the beneficial power and creativity that is the very source of your living.
So take this phrase, everyone got one? All right. Take this phrase. And so think of it this way, we’re, we’re gonna do, uh, an an, an affirmation. It’s almost like doing reps. So five times in a row, I am strong willed in mind, body, and heart. Let’s do that together out loud. Take a deep breath in. Exhale. I am strong willed in mind, body, and heart. Again, I am strong-willed in mind, body, and heart. A third time I am strong-willed and mind, body and heart. Four, I am strong-willed in mind, body, and heart. Five, I am strong-willed in mind, body and heart. Close your eyes and remember a time that you were strong-willed in mind, body, and heart. Whether you were five, whether you were 15 or it was five days ago, just connect to a memory of when you were in the good fight, where you were strong-willed and determined in your mind, body, and heart.
And now from that memory, repeat five times with me. I am possibility. 1, 2, 3. I am possibility, I am possibility, I am possibility, I am possibility. I am possibility. Take a deep breath in, exhale. And the last affirmation is, my life is possibility. Say that five times my life is possibility. My life is possibility. My life is possibility. My life is possibility. My life is possibility. My life is possibility. This is not a statement that says my life is possibility because that’s wanting to see it outside of you. Your life is possibility just believing that your life is possibility. If you wake up tomorrow morning and affirm these statements to yourself, think of how that day might go. This is the work that we’re talking about. This is consciously using the law. This is the way it works all the time. What are you putting into it?
You can’t, um, watch yourself every single second, but if you do some regular exercise every single day starting with these statements, it’s going to shift, it’s going to bring in awareness. You’re gonna know those moments where you fall asleep and all of a sudden you’re like walking down the street and you’re like, wow. Look at how I’m walking. What am I thinking about? I’m thinking about how crappy the world is and how I can’t stand X. That is what I’m putting into my mind. That’s what’s going into the law. Let me shift and come back to my life as possibility. My life is possibility. My life is possibility. And this may seem and feel uncomfortable. Too bad. If you want to work this law positively, you have to get uncomfortable. Just like if you want some stronger core muscles, you gotta get down on the floor. It doesn’t feel good to do sit-ups incessantly, but if you do it, you’re going to strengthen those muscles. This is the same thing. Get down on the floor of your life and work out. You feel me? You with me? Yes. All right. Thank you so much for being patient. There’s so much more to say, but we are shifting from seeing is believing to believing is seeing what is it that you want to believe? Let it be so and it shall be. And so it is.