WHY IS IT SO HARD TO REMEMBER?

I’m so grateful to be here this morning and in a personal commitment that has been renewed within me in the past week. I just have to speak out loud that I am here to be of service, to spirit. Nothing else that I am here to be of service to the rainbow, hanging over our head. I’m here to be of service, to the truth that is always available to us. And the calling upon my personal and professional work is to be in the practice of remembering that there is a rainbow over our head, that there is this spirit, that there is this divine intelligence that is always available to us. But dang it. I forget daily, multiple times I have to share an exchange. So the, the, I I’m gonna, I’m gonna get to the book, the Florence Scoville shin. Um, I was assigned lesson seven and eight because I think the really important ones. But whenever I find myself in the conversation of the law of attraction, which is ultimately what Florence Scoville shin is a champion of, there’s this weird dialogue that happens inside my head, because it’s just like, well, if you just believe this, then everything’s gonna be cool. If you just think the right thought, then the right thing will come into your life.And I get that, but then I wake up and I have a different experience. Oftentimes then this intellectual understanding. So I was grappling with that in my own mind and heart. And then I got a text message from, uh, a dear friend and colleague who is having a minute. I think as, as if does everyone get that phrase? You’re having a minute. It feels like much longer than a minute, but you’re having a minute. So I wanna share a little bit of our back and forth. And this is what gave way to the talk title today. They wrote to me, if God is this everywhere, existing thing, why is it so easy to lose sight of that and live in total ignorance of all that quote unquote, goodness, anyone. Okay. <laugh> they continue to say, I don’t understand, like, why is it such a draining challenge for some of us to remember that and live in it? I don’t get it. Shouldn’t it be easier? Shouldn’t God want to make it easier. And so I replied with all of my ministerial wisdom.

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On some level, I think you answer your own question. We forget God made it quote unquote, easy from the get go. But we humans like to muddy the waters and then they wrote back, well, why do we like the muddy of the waters? What’s the point of that? Has anyone ever had this conversation? It often shows up in one simple phrase or question, why me, why them, why now? Why, why, why is this happening? And that’s an important question to ask, but I was at a conference this week with, uh, Reverend Linda and Reverend Amy and with John and with Connie and all these people in the new thought tradition from unity to religious science, to divine science, to there was something else in there. I can’t remember. Did I miss anyone?The foundation of, of, of living with the, uh, Christ universal temple who hosted it down on the south side? And so all of these thought leaders were in the room, uh, had the privilege of hearing so many profound individuals, uh, speak their truth in terms of how they understand God. And one of my mentors, I consider him my spiritual grandfather, Reverend, uh, the doctor, Reverend Michael Bernard Beckwith was there and he inspired me. He dropped some little tidbits that I’ll pass on in a moment, but I realized that we’re having this conversation all the time that we forget. And we remember, we forget and we remember, we forget. And we remember, and as we watch the horrors unfold on television, as we read them in the newspaper, as you watch yourself, struggle with your own issues and life and stumble and get back up and stumble, as you see others that you love.So dearly grapple with their own challenges over and over again. And you just know that if they could let something go, or if you could just let something go, or if the world could just stop being the world for a minute, everything would be better, but it’s hard for people to let go. This is to me, the existential question that follows us around as new thought practitioners, why is it so hard to remember? And why do we forget? For many of us, it shows up in the language that we call it evil. If God is so good, then why is there this evil? Why do people do what they do? I don’t have a definitive answer, but the one thing I do know is when I forget my spiritual truth, I do some stupid stuff.Again. Maybe I’m the only one who forgets their spiritual truth and does stupid stuff. So I’ll just keep talking to myself, anyone out there forget their spiritual truth and do some things that they wish they hadn’t done. And maybe even happened last night. It may have even happened this morning. It may have even happened just a second ago. And a thought that passed through your mind, this, this constant judging that we do to ourselves. Why do we forget? Why is it so hard to remember? So this is what informed the talk title, this, this text exchange that I had with the friend, and then just coming back to 2003, the first time I really stepped into the teachings of new thought. I was angry. I was frustrated with life. I didn’t like my myself that much. I definitely was like kicking God to the curb because I didn’t understand. I thought that there was this place that you get to you graduate from college, and somehow you get a piece of paper or you graduate from high school or someone just blesses you and you pass this threshold. And all of a sudden life is okay.I see some of you chuckling because you, I think you might be still believing the same thing, right? We think we’re gonna get to this destination in our life. And then we can put on our roller skates and just zoom, zoom, zoom, just keep skating around.We forget. So often our greatest truths that we are whole, that we are enough, that life itself is sufficient that within it, it contains everything that you need. That life is ripe with possibility. Why is it so hard to remember that? So I, I have to acknowledge a little bit of a, um, a theological invitation that new thought invites. And I think this is one of the hardest things for us to let go in our humanity in religious science in particular, we talk about this law that God is law, and that God is everything. We don’t put anything outside of it, but most of us have grown up in traditions where we like to call God he or she, or they, we want to make it somehow in our image because how can we actually understand something so great and big that is the star like to trip on the moment like it, sometimes I just have to stop. It’s like the light that I’m seeing from those stars, that star could be like burned out and I’m still gonna see it for the rest of my life.If you want to just get quantum for a minute, that’s how expansive God is. So if God is that amazing, the invitation of taking away some of these human qualities, that God would actually get angry with you, that God has an opinion of what we do or what we don’t do from the very beginning. If you look at some of the mythological language and any of the traditions in terms of the start of life, God created everything that was needed to begin. And so it is, and the very thing that we were given in our humanity over the development of time, this capacity to think critically this capacity to dream and come up with things that allows us to co-create and partner with the creative forces of life is the very thing that causes our demise. Most of the time, I often talk about in teaching mindfulness in terms of its physiological benefit, when we meditate and in particular with visualization that oftentimes we visualize something in our mind, but the nervous system doesn’t know the difference between what is actually being held in your mind and what might be driving by you. It thinks it’s all the same. So whatever we hold in our attention is what really starts to concretize and coagulate and, and, and, and permeate through our experience.So I want to come back to the book. The title is the magic path of intuition. I’m, I’m just gonna own the word magic as a trigger for me right now. Um, magic thinking because I like magic. My mom is here with me today. I don’t know. Do you remember when I used to do magic shows, my dad would buy me all these magic tricks. He gave me one of his old briefcase and it was like, you know, coloring books that you’d wave a thing over and you’d turn your hand to just the right page. And all of a sudden, all of the pages were, uh, colored or, you know, things flying out of a magic wand. And so we love magic. We love this, this playfulness, but I, I I’ve started to notice that I have some emotional charge around magic because I want magic, but my intellect knows that it doesn’t work that way. Not that life isn’t magical, not that there aren’t miraculous or miracle things that can happen, but the downside of magic to me is that it causes immobility because magic implies that something happens with little to no effort on our part.So there is magic the magic path of intuition. But if we stay in the language of things, the path of intuition, this is the spiritual path and it is magical. It requires us to listen to pay attention. I’m way, way off course right now, from where I started spirit, we were just talking about this, Laura and I, in terms of the things that we forget, and we forget all the stuff that we’ve spent time doing. And then spirit gets excited and wants to go another avenue. I’m gonna reel it back in and come back to lesson number seven and lesson number seven has the title. That’s what the reading came from that John, uh, read today, the house that faith built, that’s the title of that section. And the reading is many people keep back their demonstrations. They keep back they’re, they’re not allowing. And the word demonstration means is if there’s something that you hold in consciousness or something that you’re praying for, something that you’re wanting to call or create or manifest in your life, then for it to come to a realization is a demonstration, right? I’m going to demonstrate that the law works. I’m going to demonstrate that God is for me and not against me, but she says many people keep back their demonstrations by fretting because of evil doers, anyone watch the news. What do they talk about? Evil doers all day.It’s the same thing in the morning. At 10 o’clock at 10 25 at 10 26 at 1192. Even that’s even a time. Many people keep back their demonstrations by fretting because of evil doers, someone is mean someone is unjust or cruel. This is a good one. Resentment has anyone ever experienced resentment before?Resentment is a violation of the law of love. The next time you feel resentment. I hope that that phrase comes into your awareness. You are violating the law of love by holding resentment in your heart. We want to think that being resentful is gonna do something to make that person realize why they’re thinking is so wrong. Mm-hmm we are violating the law of love. And I’m not saying don’t be angry. I’m not saying don’t be upset. One of the things we talked about this week is how do we engage new thought in a sense of justice and social justice, but resentment is not the vibration in the frequency of healing. It is the frequency and the vibration of shame and put down and continuing to marginalize.Resentment is the violation of the law of love. And it is a barrier to your desires, trust in the Lord and do good means to never doubt the power of God. Trust infinite intelligence with the management of your affairs, never interfere with doubts or worry and let every act be prompted by good motives. I’m gonna continue. The reading goes on, follow your intuitive leads and prepare for the blessings you have asked for regardless of adverse appearances. Hmm, true. Prayer means preparation. For example, she says a lady wanted a radio and made a place in the corner of her house and kept that spot. Dusted preparation, getting ready expectation. If your demonstration, if the manifestation of the things that you want in your life are lagging. She challenges that we haven’t been doing are dusting. We have not been preparing our lives truly to receive that, which we desire the Explorer and the adventure in.You will see through it is your divine self. The super conscious, which knows no defeat or failure with fearless faith, mountains are moved from your subconscious. Therefore they disappear in the external. Does everyone get that intellectually? You want to clean and clear out the space to receive your good and to hold true faith in the possibility that it will come to manifest. She uses the word fearless faith, but here is one of my desires. And I feel like one of the reasons I’m here on the planet at this time is to make spirituality real, pragmatic and honest, not magical and something that feels like we can’t attain because we haven’t gotten there yet.Fearless faith is not a perfect state. We don’t rest in fearless faith. We don’t attain it and then hold onto it forever. It is a state that we practice returning to it is a perfect state, but we wander away. We walk away from that thing that God created at the very beginning, that was whole perfect and complete. We have this amazing machine up here that creates another story other than wholeness, perfection, and completion. So our work is to come back, but we set ourselves up by that magical thinking. We think that there is a state that we will reach and hardship won’t exist anymore. For anyone we expect that we shouldn’t have that experience. And a lot of people joked about how the, uh, the very language that we use and new thought about consciousness can be said with a tone and a tinge that can cut people, oh, what’s in your consciousness or what’s in their consciousness.Why are they thinking that way, implying that there’s something wrong or stinking in their thinking that they haven’t attained. That lofty level, that we’ve all stepped into with our amazing right consciousness that is there all the time, that never doubts. That never worries that never gets angry. That never gets upset. Bull. Uh, I got worked up this morning on my way here. My life’s conditions. They’re tiring for me right now. This is human thinking though. Not so much spiritual thinking. And I’ll return to this in a moment. So let, in terms of the lesson, lesson seven, the house that faith built, this is the foundation of spiritual living. And you can even take out the word. Spiritual faith is the foundation of living period. I’m gonna give you an equation. Hopefully it will bring you to a realization. Your faith builds your beliefs. Cool. Seem simple enough.All right. It’s well, it’s a long equation. We’re gonna do some long spiritual math today. Your faith builds your beliefs, your beliefs influence how you see the world track that. So we’ve got our faith influencing our beliefs, and then our beliefs influence how we see the world. How you see the world for tells your actions, your behaviors, and your habits and the habits, the behaviors, those things are concretized, right? It, it takes a minute for them to get up there, right? You didn’t just become the person you are overnight. You’ve been working on it for however long you’ve been on the planet. So you’re a pro at your beliefs, your outlook on life in your faith. But there are two moments in this chain where we can practice what some might call liberation.Your faith builds your beliefs. So here, this is, this is the beginning of spiritual practice. I’ve said this over and over again, cuz I don’t think it can be said enough. I have to remind myself daily. Your faith is nothing more than your attention. Faith is not there. There’s there’s religious faith, which a lot of people associate with. It’s like, what is your faith? What do you believe in Uhuh? Your faith is your attention. Where from the standpoint of science, of mine and religious science and you being the only person that can actually be responsible for the experience of your good, your attention is your faith where you place it. So how many hours of, um, CNN you watch is directing your atta, your attention and your faith and whatever you are seeing, whether you intellectually agree with it or not. Whatever you give your attention to is what is building your faith. So this is what it looks like. We may think that we are doing something to be of service to the world because we are getting angry and placing our attention on what is wrong, what isn’t working, the choices and the decisions that are not serving the world. This is where the social justice work is. Right? We see what’s wrong. And we say that person’s mean that person’s stupid. That person we start using really, really intense language. But when we are saying that, that is where you are placing your attention.That is where you are directing your faith. I believe that the world is screwed up. Look at the proof right there. They’re showing me on the news in the paper. We talked about some of it this morning. I’m sure. And you’ll talk about it again tomorrow. So if that is where we are building our faith upon, we’re giving our attention to all that’s wrong. Then all of a sudden we start walking around with the belief that the world is wrong. I’m wrong. They are wrong. We are wrong, but here’s an opportunity for us to manage our faith or our attention and direct it in a place that we would actually want it to be.Now I see some shriveled up foreheads in the room, cause everyone’s like, wait a minute now, Darrell. So I gotta stop watching CNN period. I can’t open up the newspaper anymore. No, I’m not saying that, but I’m inviting you to check where and how long you are placing your attention and your faith in things that you actually don’t want or desire in your experience of living because chances are. And I hold my hand up on this. I am giving my attention to the thing that I actually don’t want more than to the thing I actually do want.So there’s another opportunity in this chain. Your faith builds your belief. So if you start playing with your faith, you start playing with your attention. This is why meditation and prayer I think are the foundational practices to a spiritual life in meditation. We become aware. We are in this space of not being passive. We are fully engaged. We’re fully responsible for our attention, but we’re watching and observing. We’re learning and witnessing and discovering where our attention and faith is flowing. And from that awareness, then we get to use this thing called prayer or spiritual mind treatment or affirmations and consciously say, this is where I’m going to direct my faith. There is a power and presence that is whole and complete. That is not outside of me. It’s actually within me. It’s around me. It’s as us. This is what I like to call God mother, father intelligence spirit.And just in saying those words I feel has shift in me right now. There is a power and presence that is loving, that wants to do nothing but express itself through life. I can feel a release of tension of all of a sudden my body needing to control everything that needs to happen. My mind needing to put everything in a perfect row to understand life. When we engage in that spiritual mind treatment. When we engage in that prayer, we are taking our faith and pointing it in the direction of good capital G good, not a certain manifestation, not a certain result, just getting into the vibration and frequency of good. So then if we’re shifting our faith, then all of a sudden our beliefs may start to wiggle a little bit and low and behold, if we’re doing it enough on a daily basis, our beliefs and our look outlook on the world may shift a little bit too.But I, I use these words very specifically, how you see the world Fort tells your actions, beliefs, and habits, and the reason I didn’t use a word like it makes your beliefs. It Fort tells. So when you forte something, it’s a possibility. And the reason that it’s liberating, I believe is that most of the time we catch ourselves before we start playing with our faith, this is where we ask the question. Why is it so hard to remember? Cuz we forget almost instantaneously. And all of a sudden we bump up into something in our world that makes us grim a little bit, but it’s just a foretelling of what we’ve been working on for decades. We have an opportunity in that moment to shift as well, just as we did in conscious disciplined work, where we sit down and say, okay, right now I’m going to pray.This is gonna be a very serious moment where I direct my faith, my attention in the direction of good. So those are those formal moments. And then you get up from that seat or from that prayer cushion or whatever that moment is. And you walk out the front door and all of a sudden you are sucked into everyone else’s living. And almost instantaneously. We forget every single prayer that we’ve spoken, but we have an opportunity not to stop what we’re doing. Be like, excuse me. Um, I need to leave the meeting for a moment. You guys just totally triggered me. I need to go pray. So I’ll be right back. Okay. No, you don’t have to do that in that moment. All you gotta do is take a breath and reconnect to one of the qualities of the divine, just for a breath, love, peace, joy, creativity, possibilityThis the next lesson, uh, was lesson eight and it says, do not let your heart’s desire becomes a heart’s disease. This could be a whole other talk, but just to speak to it for those of you who may be following along and reading the book, this is some really good advice here. We like, does anyone like to control their life? <laugh> right. We wanna know what’s gonna happen. This is where our desire and need to control things gets the best of us, where we spend so much time and energy holding on so tight to our heart’s. We’ve got like 10 other possibilities of that heart’s desire that might even be greater than what we can hold in our consciousness. Just passing us by. We’re like, it’s gotta look this way. It’s gotta look this way. It’s gotta look this way. It’s gotta look this way. And you just had 10 possibilities. Literally someone may have been calling you and you’re like, I don’t recognize that phone number. I’m not gonna answer that phone call. That could have been your next client.I don’t know that number. I don’t know it. I don’t understand it. So don’t let your heart’s desire become a heart’s disease where you get so caught up in having to know for sure, this is the way it’s gonna happen, that you lose sight of one of the divine qualities. And that is possibility. That’s another way that we can forget. We get too caught up in needing to be right. All right, here comes to Michael Benard Beckwith. I’m sure he didn’t originate this, but he just, it, it vibrated. It hit my heart because around all of this, in terms of holding onto tightly, in terms of our faith, people talk about us being spiritual beings, having a human experience, this is true. It’s a dance back and forth constantly. We are constantly human and we are constantly spiritual, but so often we base our truth. Only upon our human experience.The lack of evidence is not the evidence of lack. I’m gonna say that again. The lack of evidence is not the evidence of lack, whether it’s health, whether it’s romantic relationship, whether it’s deeper connection with friends and family, whatever, it may be. The fact that you don’t have some evidence of it right now is not evidence that, that there is lack of it. But if we go into the human space, we’ll go see it’s not gonna happen. And when we say that, yeah, it’s not gonna happen. It’s not for me. We say it with a little bit of energy behind it and this law, it’s not some being that’s going, oh yes, they haven’t gotten it yet. So I’m not gonna give it to ’em no, the law is only saying yes, yes, yes. I will partner with you in this adventure. See it doesn’t exist. You’re right.This is human thinking. Once again, not spiritual thinking. When we ask why questions a lot? Why is this happening? It’s not that those aren’t important, but those aren’t the only questions to ask. Whenever I work with couples and in particular, before a wedding, I like to call in teachings from a course in miracles, but it’s not specific to course in miracles, which is a new thought tradition. It’s also exists in religious science. What is the fundamental first law of religious science? What is all that there is love God, that’s it. That’s it. If that’s true. So just think about it for a minute. That’s all that there is.If that is true, then there’s one of two things happening in terms of our consciousness and our relationship to the world. We have our faith that builds our beliefs and our beliefs brings us into our vision and how we see the world. When we see something that we understand when we see yep. There’s God over there. Hi God, how you doing? Yep. There’s love. Oh, look at that baby. There’s love over there. It’s really easy to go and point and say, yes, that is God. That is love. That is creativity. That is freedom. But when something comes up that we don’t understand if God is all that there is then all that, that misunderstanding is, is an opportunity to go into greater practice. It is an opportunity to discover God and love and intelligence and wisdom and freedom and all the qualities that we love in a way that we have yet to understand.We aren’t here to get to a plateau that is not the nature of life. If you look outside in the world, whether it’s the human world that we’ve created or even the natural world, there is no plateau. Life is constantly evolving and changing. The, the city scape of the city is constantly going up and down. The trees are constantly getting full and then they go away and then they get full again and they expand and growth goes over here. We are not here to find this perfect plateau. We are here to understand and have some foundation and to have life pull us into our next level of understanding.So to come back to that question, why is it so hard to remember in those moments, we are being invited to remember even greater what we’ve already known, that God is all that there is that love is all that there is that there is enough for me and for you and the whole planet, if we could all get into remembering that on a regular basis. But just because there’s lack of evidence doesn’t mean what there’s evidence of lack. It is a calling. It was one of the things that I took away from the talk from the, uh, convention this week, cuz I’m one who likes, I mean, I’m always harping on CNN and I do think that it’s important for us to have news, right? I do think it’s important for us to have Doritos, uh, to snack on. But I also know it’s not good for me to eat Doritos every day in the morning and in the evening I’ve tried that it didn’t work out too, too. Great. So why would we have that same relationship with anything else in our life in particular news, which has a certain frequency and vibration to it, it’s good to be informed, but here was the, the liberating thing for me. And when it came to the news, it was invited that all of the headlines are simply community prayer requests.It is a community calling to remember, cuz it’s so easy to go, oh my gosh. And we may not be able to go over to the Ukraine and do anything. We may not be able to go into Washington and do something to change legislation on guns. We may not be able to go and pick out and find all of the individuals that are walking around with mental health challenges that would make them, uh, fall into decision making and crisis thinking that they think they’ve got to destroy something to make life better. We can’t go back 200, 300, 400 years in this country to do something, to shift the consciousness that brought slavery and misogyny. And so many things into this world. We can’t do that. But right now when we see these things flare up, we have an opportunity in that chain that I brought forward. The world is placing its faith on something.But we are very, very, very, very powerful in that sea of faith. We can change the world through our individual consciousness. And if you and I get together and we do some work and we do something to change our consciousness, whether we’re sitting in the room here or you are sitting wherever you may be online, we right now are doing something to shift in that chain of faith all the way up to our habits and behaviors. We are doing something collectively. There’s no single answer, but instead of asking, why is this happening? We can ask, what is it that God is calling me to be today? What is this headline? What is the prayer that I can offer in my words? And what is the prayer that I can be in the world? Has anyone ever thought of that, that you are here to be a answered prayer? That is one of the ways that I find back to my center of not being in the space of why is this happening? I ask, how can I serve? How can I be of service right now? I know I’ve been talking for a minute. Give me one more minute. And I swear, I’ll wrap it up.One of the biggest things that gave me space of license and liberation into living a true life for me in relationship with the divine was the notion that I was a practitioner. Not because I went through a bunch of classes, not because I went to grad school and became a minister. If you open up the science of mind, text, it is written to the practitioner. We all are practitioners. We practice the law day in and day out. A lot of the times we’re practicing unconsciously. What if we just change 5%? Would anyone like a 5% increase in their, uh, bottom line this year?What if you spent 5% more time in relationship with directing your faith where you’d like it to be? How might that play out? Not only financially, but in everything. We are here to be practitioners. We are practitioners of consciousness. Embrace your responsibility when we do, we won’t forget so much. And then when we forget, we know we’ve just got more exercise to do. That is the life. That is the life we practice. We remember we forget and we come back over and over and over and over again. And you invite people like those here, like those online to support you, to walk with you. And then sometimes it’s not so easy. You’ve got someone to send a text message to when you’re having a tough day and you go like, why is God making it so hard? And you realize, oh, why am I making it so hard? And then we get some support and we step back in to remembering, remembering the truth that God is period. And I know God at some level, but right now life is asking me to understand in a God, in a way that I’ve never known, let’s practice a little bit of that right now, take a deep breath in. As you exhale, bring your attention to your physical heart.You want to touch the physical heart. You wanna hold your hands in a prayerful position. As a moodra reminding your conscious and subconscious mind of what you are about to engage in. And this is where we place into the very beginning of the chain of consciousness at the path, the place of our faith, the place of our attention, we choose where and how to direct it. So first I invite you to welcome compassion and kindness. This is the how you place your attention in this moment. Be kind, be patient. And now what is the vibration, the frequency of the divine that you choose to place your attention on right now? There’s no right answer. There’s no wrong answer. Just your choosing. Is it love? Is it wisdom? Is it freedom? Is it intelligence? Is it creativity, possibility, forgiveness, hope,Breathe into that word, exhale and hold that word in your heart. And that is what I recognize God to be for you in this moment for me right now, it’s wisdom. So I recognize wisdom, but I recognize all of the vibrations and the frequencies of the whole spirit that has been here and will always be here and never goes away. It is all that is, it is my life and it is your life. Now we are living expressions. And let us remember that right now, once again, we are living expressions of that, which we know God to be. We are living expressions of that, which we desire life to be. We are the access point. We are the portal through which it expresses into the world. So let us surrender and let go of a little bit of control today and let this essence, that is our very foundation seep into all of our being and doing and thinking and breathing today and tomorrow and the day after that. And I bless all the opportunities that life gives us to remember. I know that forgetting our spiritual truth does not make us a bad person. It means that we have a little bit more practice to do so. I bless all the opportunities to practice today and tomorrow. And I’m grateful to know that those opportunities actually serve our highest and greatest good. That is the truth. And we let that be. And so it is amen. Peace and blessings to you all.