The Science of Change – Rev. John Adams
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
Change doesn’t begin “out there”—it begins within. This Sunday, we’ll review the basic principles of Science of Mind and uncover how they guide real, lasting change. As consciousness shifts, new possibilities emerge and life responds accordingly.
SUMMARY
The transcript summarizes the following key points:
1. Rev. John Adams discusses the highly precise “six numbers” identified by physicist Martin Rees that describe the fundamental parameters of the universe, arguing that they demonstrate the perfection of the universe’s “outpicturing” or manifestation of consciousness.
2. He explains the Science of Mind philosophy of Ernest Holmes, emphasizing that consciousness precedes and creates physical reality, and that our individual consciousness shapes our experience of the world.
3. Rev. John uses the example of one’s understanding of gender to illustrate how expanding one’s consciousness and being willing to let go of old beliefs can shift one’s outpicturing and experience.
4. He discusses how one’s individual thoughts and consciousness can impact the collective consciousness, using the metaphor of a choir to explain how a single “dissonant” voice can shape the overall harmony.
5. Rev. John encourages the audience to use a worksheet exercise to identify world events that are impacting them, and then reflect on how they can shift their own consciousness in response.
6. He concludes with a prayer affirming the audience’s connection to the divine consciousness and their power to outpicture love, harmony, and abundance through their thoughts and beliefs.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. John Adams:
Come on. Good morning. Happy New Year. You know what? I am. Hi, Pam. I’m going to need some help. Can I get a couple volunteers to just pass these out and maybe split that up with Jason? So that’s a worksheet we’re going to work on a little bit later. And if you’re completely and totally bored, you can flip it over. The back is blank and you can just draw or write or whatever you want on the back. Okay? So that’s perfectly valid. This time of year, the first month of the year in January, CSL community, Centers for Spiritual Living Communities across the globe typically lean into the first four chapters of Science of Mind. We go back to the fundamentals. And we’re doing something similar here. We’re working with the book, A New Design for Living, and it’s a beautiful book. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.
And we’re going to do a refresh on some of these fundamentals. And so the place that I want to start to … 99 by Martin Reese, he wrote a book called Just Six Numbers. And in this book, he clarifies these six very highly calibrated numbers that without that fine tuning, the universe that we’re in couldn’t and wouldn’t exist. And so we’re going to look at these numbers really quickly. And in the book, he calls out these six numbers and here’s a summary of them. So the first number is strength of gravity versus electromagnetism. And this is the ratio of the strength of gravity to the electrical force between two protons is enormous. It’s enormous. If gravity were stronger relative to electromagnetism, stars would burn out too quickly or not form at all. So this has to be very precise. The next number is nuclear efficiency.
About 0.007 as a mass is converted to energy when hydrogen fuses into helium. Slight changes would prevent stable stars or the creation of chemical elements needed for complexity. The third one is omega, matter, density of the universe. This measures how much matter there is compared to critical amount needed to influence cosmic expansion. Too much, and the universe collapses. Too little and galaxies never form. It has to be precise. Lambda cosmetological constant, this describes the energy density of empty space that drives the universe’s accelerated expansion. If it were much larger, galaxies would never form. Primordial fluctuations, roughly one part in 100,000. This number quantifies the slight irregularities in the early universe that seed the formation of galaxies. Too smooth and nothing clusters, too lumpy, and we have nothing but black holes.
And then the sixth number of spatial dimensions. We live in three spatial dimensions. If this were different, if it were two or four or some other number, stable planetary orbits and complex chemistry would not be possible. So what Martin is telling us here is that these six numbers are highly precise in their expressing of the universe. And so what does this have to do with science of mind and with Ernest Holmes and our teaching and our philosophy? And what this says to me, and the reason I get very excited about this kind of information is that I know that all of that that’s happening is a outpicturing of consciousness. And what it tells me is that that outpicturing is happening perfectly. And so this view of physical reality is this beautiful outpicturing. It’s really in this case, because if you listen to this, we go through our education system, we come into this world, it’s very easy to get caught up in the idea that we just entered into a world that’s been running along.
We’re just entering into it and we’re experiencing it and reacting to it. When in reality, in our philosophy and our principle, what we’re experiencing out here is an outpicturing of consciousness. The consciousness comes first. The outpicturing happens after.
And we can continually wrestle with this, right? We kind of keep getting called back to it. We experience the world of form as demonstrated by Martin Reese that this outpicturing is rendering itself in perfect harmony with that pattern, that template, that understanding that we have. So this is the experience that we are having. And because these six numbers demonstrate that perfection of our outpicturing, anything we outpicture is perfect through that lens, through that filter, through that template. So if, as we’re rendering through that consciousness, I think it’s important to understand what I mean when I use the word consciousness. For me, consciousness is … We are all individualized expressions of consciousness, and our individualized expressions of consciousness consist of our surface thoughts, our subconscious, our superconscious. It’s our instinct, that flight or fight, that’s all part of consciousness, intuition, dreams, imagination, creativity. This is all part of consciousness.
And so we start to understand that consciousness is multidimensional, is multi-leveled, that it is this thing that lives and exists outside of time and space. And so it is infinite. And what we learned from that, of course, is that then therefore we are multidimensional infinite beings having this human experience. And our consciousness is holding these ideas, these beliefs, this understanding, and outpicturing it in a perfect way, so perfect that it seems absolutely real, like this all feels really real, right?
So this idea of believing that events happen first and then we get to respond to it is actually backwards. We are always, it’s always coming through consciousness first and out picturing. And so that outpicturing becomes a way of reporting back to us what’s happening in our consciousness. So when we look out in the world and we see these things that are happening, it is an opportunity for us to not go, “Well, that’s happening over there and isn’t that too bad and la, la, la, la.” But it’s an opportunity to say, “Oh, wait a minute, this is happening through consciousness. Where is my consciousness in this? Why am I becoming aware of it? And what is my work to do with this idea of cleaning up that consciousness?” And that work that we do in terms of that shifting of our consciousness, that contribution that we make into the collective consciousness that’s happening in the world around us, this is the science of change, which is what I was talking about.
And I think science of change, science of mind, very similar. I think science of change might be like a subheading.
I want to jump into Ernest Holmes a little bit. So if you don’t know, Ernest Holmes wrote a book called The Science of Mind. He is a teacher, philosopher and wisdom expressor who came around the beginning of the 20th century and really started to do a lot of writing. And we follow his philosophy. The thing about Ernest that I think a lot of us find very, really we are very fond of him for is that first of all, he never wanted a church. He never wanted to have a church and he never wanted to center himself. And that’s one of the reasons why a lot of times you may never have heard of him before. It was never about him. It was always about the teaching. It was always about the principle. Anyway, there’s a quote in the book that is really, really beautiful. It is probably quickly becoming one of my favorite quotes.
And in it, Ernest Holmes writes, “We cannot help thinking, but we can learn to think in a way that is for our betterment rather than our detriment. Not only can we learn to think in this way, it is our obligation to ourselves and to others and to our maker or creator higher power or higher self to do so. We have no right deliberately or unconsciously to deprive the life within us of its fullest possible expression or to bar ourselves from the abundance of all good things, which are ours for the accepting.” So I love this idea of the life within us and its fullest possible expression and that that is our obligation, that we are here to channel that, express that, live that, be that in the world.
And I think what we’re learning here is that as we work with this idea of consciousness projecting out into the world and outpicturing, we are finding feedback that helps us understand where we might be holding back, where we might be shutting down, where we might be holding onto an old idea that no longer serves, right? In today’s reading, I’m going back to Ernest for a minute. In today’s reading, thank you. Thank you, Jason, for sharing that. Ernest Holmes said, he said this, this is like the last sentence of the reading, “Our mind partakes of the creativeness of infinite mind and we may direct this creativity in our experience at the level of our understanding of it. We may direct this creativity in our experience at the level of our understanding of it, which makes sense. We can only hold an idea of what we can understand.” And so the call here is to understand, our capacity to understand is limited by our willingness to give up our attachment to our previous understanding.
How attached am I to this understanding and how willing am I to let that shift and change and grow and expand? So what was the example that I used? Oh, I did. So the example that I have is gender. So if my understanding and belief is that gender is fixed at birth, and that’s my understanding and I’m super attached to that understanding, it is going to be very difficult for me to gain a deeper understanding of the human experience as it relates to gender, that to understand that that may be even my personal experience, but I can be open and available to understand that that is something that other people are moving through more fluidly. And if I can allow that and gently soften my attachment to that original belief and embrace a new idea, I can start to outpicture a world in which love and acceptance happens regardless of gender, right?
So I’m expanding my consciousness, my outpicturing is being affected by my willingness to expand my understanding.
Ernest Holmes tells us life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what they think into it. I think that’s a nice, simple way to phrase it because some of this gets a little cerebral and I understand that, but I think we’re okay. We’re good with that. We can do that. We can handle that. An example that comes up for me is, I was thinking about like, how do I talk about this? In the world of form, there are world events and one of the world events that’s happening is I’m just going to thumbnail it with just one word and I’m going to call it Gaza. There are events happening in Gaza that I find disquieting, I find troubling. People getting hurt, people getting wounded, there’s people getting killed, there’s this, this stuff is happening. And it isn’t really in my direct path of life, but I’m aware of it because this feedback came to me in consciousness and in my consciousness, I find this very disquieting.
And so to me, that is spirit source, life telling me that there’s something for me here to address in my own consciousness. And so I sit with that and I think about that. And as I think about it, I think about, well, what is it in that that is really there for me, that is really, that I’m responding to, that I’m reacting to? And it’s a complicated issue. I mean, there’s a lot of different people with lots of different perspectives and lots of different things to say about it. And I am not an expert on that part of the world. So I landed on an idea you may come up with a different ideas. There could be many, many different ways of framing it. But for me, the way I framed it in its essence was us versus them, an us that feels absolutely right and a them that feels absolutely wrong and that creates this conflict.
And we can see this in other areas. Sometimes we see it in spiritual paths. Have you ever encountered that in a spiritual path where someone will say, “Well, my way is the right way, and if only you would listen to me, you would be saved, you would be fine, everything would be great.” But the fact that you’re not means that you’re not going to have that experience and they’re just very sure of it. And so I like to soften all of that and invite in the question. So there has to be a turnaround for me and my consciousness because I want to put a different thought out there. I don’t want to hold this idea of us versus them. I can find it in me. I can see where it lives in me, but I don’t want it to be there. So now that I’ve gained that awareness, I want to turn it around.
And the turnaround for me for this particular example is there is only one. There isn’t two. There isn’t us and them and this and that. There’s only one. And in that oneness, I recognize that you are me and me and you and we are one, then we start to find compassion, we start to find kindness, we start to ease up on the judgment, we start to ease up on the has to be my way, not your way. It starts to become much more loving, right?
And we also have to become aware of where I’m getting attached to the idea of it. This happens in spiritual community, can happen in nonprofit work. I work in a nonprofit I have for many, many years. And in nonprofit work, the trap to it can be becoming the hero. “Oh, I see there’s something wrong over here. I’m going to swoop in and be the hero to fix it. ” That’s actually very egoic, that’s actually ego at play. And it can be a trap because what happens when you solve that, you’re still the hero, so now you need another problem to solve. So now we’re creating another problem in consciousness that we’re out picturing that I can jump in and try to solve. So we really want to be thoughtful about just coming from love, coming from altruism, coming from that place of just letting it be, right?
So I think that the power of this is sort of astonishing to me, right? We’re not just floating through life, experiencing and responding, but we are in fact these infinite beings with this powerful consciousness. We saw it in Martin Reese’s numbers. That’s our consciousness that’s creating that. Look at the perfection that happens to create this world in which we’re living and having this life experience. Our outpicturing always happens perfectly and we have the power to affect it, to change it. Now, I know like in the Gaza example that I gave you that you could say, “Well, there are a million voices around that, a million thoughts, a million consciousnesses that are thinking about that. ” And mine’s just my one little voice, my one little thought. Okay. What I think is, I think about it this way, imagine that it’s a choir of voices that are all singing the same song from the same hymnal or the same songbook and they’re harmonizing in the perfect way about this situation and along comes your thought and you’re that clanky, dissonant voice in the choir that’s singing something very different that’s just like, that’s coming through.
And you know, even if there’s a million voices, that one voice that isn’t in alignment with everybody else is going to stand out. And what happens is it starts to pull other voices to it, right? And so we know that even my one thought as a one individual person throwing that out into consciousness is affecting and shaping and shifting the collective consciousness that’s happening.
There’s a wonderful classical pianist named Martha Agarich and she’s a character. If you’ve never seen her, you should YouTube her because not only is she brilliant, she’s a brilliant technician and an artist, but she’s hilarious to watch because she’s always pulling the orchestra to her. You can see her like one of her conductors was interviewed and they say, “Well, we’re always trying to pull Martha a little bit more towards us as the orchestras, the collective.” And she’s always just doing her thing. She’s such an artist that she’s pulling the orchestra to her way of interpreting the music. There’s one video in particular where, and she’s like in her 80s now, I think, where you can see her literally conducting the orchestra herself. That’s why I love her. I just think she’s great. But that’s the idea that this one instrument and an orchestra of many instruments is pulling that energy in that particular direction.
That’s the kind of power we have.
I think it was Marianne Williamson who said, “Stop playing small.” We’re not small. We’re these powerful, powerful consciousnesses and our work of holding that idea, that new thought, that loving thought, that peaceful thought, that shift in the way things are in these events in the world, events in our life, that is impactful. And I know that there are cynics out there that will say, “Really, that’s all you’re going to do. You’re going to sit and pray. You really think that’s going to do something?” And my answer is, yes, I really think that’s going to do something. In fact, I know it’s going to do something and that may be all it is for you to do with the example that I gave in the world event, that might be all that I do. And there may be those here in the room where you’re addressing a particular issue where you feel like, “I’m going to do that.
That’s a good starting point and I’m going to get out into the world and do more. I’m going to do a march or I’m going to do a boycott or I’m going to do whatever I’m going to do. ” That’s perfect. That’s great. Whatever you’re feeling called to do, I honor that and I respect that. But if your work is just to come into conscious alignment with your thought about what you want to have happen here, you are doing something very powerful and it can be absolutely enough. You are enough.
So I could talk about this a lot, a lot. And it gets, like I said, it gets a little heady, but I want to go into the worksheet that I had. I had my friends, Connie and Willie, hand out or Jason. Thank you for handing those out. So this is a really simple way of doing what I was just talking about with my Gaza example. And for people at home, I’m sorry, I can’t beam you a worksheet, but you can create your own. So it’s just a piece of paper and it’s two columns and on the left side is world and on the right side is me. And the invitation is to think about what are the world events that are popping up for you, that are impacting you in some way, that you’re feeling into. I mean, there’s a lot of things going on in the world and a lot of them don’t even come into my consciousness, but they may come into yours.
And there are things that pop up that are just so like, “Oh, this so affects me for some reason.” That’s what goes in the world column. And the world can be the world and the world can be your world, what’s coming up for you in your world. And so it doesn’t have to be ginormous, but even in those things that don’t feel as globally impactful, we are making a global impact in the shifting of our consciousness. So on the left hand side, we put the world event that’s happening that we … And I like to use just keywords. I don’t have to write the whole story, but like the example that I gave, I would just write the word Gaza and that means so much. There’s so much behind that. So I just invite you to think about that. And on the me side, we’re thinking about what’s the turnaround.
If I’m seeing discord, if I’m seeing violence, if I’m seeing conflict, what’s the turnaround for me? And for me, and the example I gave my turnaround was, there’s only one. There’s only love, there’s only peace.
Whatever it is, whatever the thought is, whatever the consciousness is, whatever your understanding is, right? We talked about understanding. Whatever your understanding is and whatever awareness it’s bringing to you that may be an invitation to even shift and expand that consciousness, that understanding, to let that old understanding go and embrace a new understanding, this is the opportunity to do that. So we have to get reflective. We do our work. We kind of go, okay, there’s this thing going on in the world and it’s really bothering me. What is it really about? What is it about it that’s bothering me? And it’s the lack of compassion. So what’s the turnaround for me then? On the me side, the turnaround would be perfect love, perfect compassion, perfect kindness, right? And I know that for me and I, as I know that, as I embrace that in my consciousness, I live it.
So if I’m affirming and knowing perfect compassion, I am treating each person with compassion that I meet. I am living that value. I am living that understanding. I’m living that consciousness and I am allowing myself to really dig deep into being that in the world. And the more I be that in the world, the more the world’s going to move towards me in that action, right? The other thing I would say is that it’s very easy to catch yourself being judging or kind of falling back into some old habitual ways of thinking that don’t really serve. By counsel, for what it’s worth, laugh it off. Okay, I caught myself being petty, or I caught myself being judgmental, or I caught myself being small in some way. Laugh it off. It’s like, okay, I get it. I can do better. That’s fine. Because the more we can just kind of let it go and laugh it off.
First of all, we’re putting laughter into our consciousness and into the world, which I think is always a good thing. And secondly, we’re not making ourselves wrong. We’re not getting into judgment. We’re not perpetuating a negativity. We’re allowing it to simply be, “Oh yeah, okay. I get it. Bad habit, I’m moving past it and let it go. ” Just laugh it off. So I want to just take this into prayer now with y’all. So I’m going to leave this with you to do your work, to consider it, to read the chapters in the book, because there’s a powerful, powerful book.
So just breathing it in now and just taking a moment to recognize our true colors. Our true colors are that we are this powerful consciousness and this powerful consciousness connects to all the consciousness in the world and there is a higher power, a higher light, a higher life that is calling us home, calling us forward. This divine energy, this divine truth is expressing us all that is. It is the love and life and joy and peace and harmony and wholeness and abundance that is the truth of us, each of us, as we are one with this, this consciousness. We are one with this powerful, powerful source, this source that is expressing in our lives right here, right now as this beautiful abundance, this wholeness, this peace, this joy, this compassion, this shift to something even better, the betterment, as Ernest Holmes said in our thinking.
And so I just celebrate that now as each person says yes to this beautiful consciousness that is deepening and awakening and this awareness, this softening of old understandings that no longer serve and this transition into a deeper, more profound, bountiful, beautiful understanding of how life is. We just sit in the jet stream of Love and just know that it is and we hold that. And as we hold that, it projects itself out perfectly. It is a perfect projection of love, light, laughter, joy, harmony, peace, abundance, wholeness. It is rendering itself perfectly with the clear, perfect template that I hold in mind that each of us hold in mind. And so I just allow that beautiful, beautiful rendering to happen. I celebrate it, I release it, giving thanks for it, giving thanks for this awareness, giving thanks for this powerful consciousness that is such a gift for all of us.
Giving thanks for this teaching and all that comes with it. Letting it go into what we call the action of the law, which means that it is active. It’s actively projecting out and it’s outpicturing in the world and shifting what is happening in the world. So I give great thanks for that, allow it to be, and collectively and together we say. And so it is.
Thank you, John.