This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
You Are Not Finished Yet – Rev. Darrell Jones
DESCRIPTION
Your life is not a finished story—it is a living draft shaped by intention, action, and revision. Real transformation begins within, as we become clear about who we are choosing to be and allow that inner clarity to guide how we move through the world. Growth then invites us into continual revision: refining how we live and reimagining what is possible, even before we know how change will unfold. Come discover practices that will help you intentionally revise your inner world so you can live more consciously, creatively, and freely.
SUMMARY
Rev. Darrell Jones discusses the concept of identity and spirituality, expressing that he identifies with multiple religious traditions and pronouns, emphasizing the importance of embracing all aspects of oneself. He reflects on the metaphysical implications of Miley Cyrus’s song “The Climb,” suggesting that while the journey is important, understanding what lies beyond is also crucial. The theme of the month is “What If?” inspired by Neville Goddard’s book Awakened Imagination, focusing on imagination as a creative power.
Rev. Darrell shares personal anecdotes about the challenges of controlling life and the importance of placing confidence in the divine rather than trying to manipulate outcomes. He illustrates the concept of imagination through examples of saving money and the pitfalls of fear-based decision-making.
The talk emphasizes the practice of “inner revision,” where individuals use imagination to revise their experiences and cultivate a sense of success and fulfillment. The session concludes with a call to embrace the power of imagination and the law of cause and effect to manifest desired outcomes.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones:
Amazing. Good morning everybody. Anybody on the mountain? Was it just me? Trying to climb, trying to figure it out. There’s always going to be another mountain. I’m always going to want to make it move. Anyone want to move the mountain? Kick it in the pants maybe? I don’t think that this is a … Oh, hi, I’m Darrell Jones. I’m just jumping right in. My pronouns are he/him, but I am also she. I am also they. I am Christian. I am Muslim. I am Jewish. I am Hindu. I am Buddhist. I am. All of those things. That’s my what if that came up in meditation for me today. I was recently at a training last week where someone, it’s always so interesting, people find out you’re a minister and they’re like, oh. And then they have tons of questions or they clam up because they’re afraid to say shit.
Or some word they’re like, oh, well, the last time I went to church, I’m like, I’m not here to judge you. Go when you go. But I noticed this interesting thing, at least in this tradition, I’m always trying to help people understand my point of view and where I’m coming from. And I’m doing it from a space of not. Because when you say minister or pastor, people assume Christianity. And I’m like, “Oh, I’m not a Christian minister.” I love Christianity, but I’m not Christian. And I was like, “That’s dumb.
I am Christian, but I’m also Jewish. I’m also Muslim. I’m also, I love all of those traditions. And the powerful statement is not what I am not. It’s what I am.” You feel me? Okay. So hi, my name’s Daryl. The pronouns that I use in this human form are he/him, but I am she, I am they. I am all the things because I am. Now we can talk about Miley Cyrus and this song, The Climb. I was sitting with him like, “Is it a good metaphysical song or is it not a good metaphysical song?” And I think it is great. I mean, it’s metaphysical from the standpoint of we are climbing this mountain. Now, I’m not on a mountain. I’m in a building with you on the second floor, right? But we have these mountains in our life that we’re trying to get over. And the only questionable space, I’m like, “Well, I would want to sit down with Miley or whoever wrote the song and say, could we tweak this lyric a little bit?” She said, “It doesn’t matter what’s on the other side.
It’s the climb.” And it’s like, yeah, we’re always going to be on the climb, but it does matter what’s on the other side. We need to know what’s there, right? That’s to go back to the first week of this month with Reverend Linda talking, thinking from.
So if you haven’t been around, the theme this month is what if awakened imagination, the writings of Neville Goddard. And we explore imagination as this creative power through which life takes form, inspired from the writings of Neville Goddard, but these are the principles of new thought teaching. We may not use the word imagination all the time. I was talking, my dog had a very early morning vet appointment today and I was like, “Doc, I got to get out of here by 9:30, maybe 9:45.” She’s like, “Well, you have to do a sermon.” I was like, “Yeah.” She’s like, “What’s the talk?” And so she’s adjusting and doing things and I said, “Imagination.” And she was like, “Oh, when we were kids and there’s all these different levels of how we think about imagination, but imagination has nothing to do with age. There might be that playful imagination and it’s like, oh, I’m purple, whatever it may be.
” But imagination is the creative law. What we think, what we feel are our hopes, our aspirations, our intentions, all of those things are using imagination. Our fears, our doubts, our worries, our upsets are also using our imagination. The law doesn’t pick out and go, “Oh, well, I’m only going to give attention to the hopes and dreams.” No, it just says, “This is what you’re giving me. ” Yes, let’s give some fuel to that.
I am so off script, but that’s okay. So I want to review. I love what Cityside is doing here in terms of having all these different voices, myself, Reverend Amy, Reverend Linda and others and Judy to speak and bring the point of view because there’s not one way to sit with these teaching and philosophies. I’ll never forget, when I first started coming into this work, someone said to me, “How many people are on the planet?” And at that time, I think it was maybe seven billion, 7.5 billion, and my teacher said, “There are that many iterations of God.” So there’s so many ways to be with this teaching. I’m not here today to tell you what to think, but I’m here to challenge your thinking so that you can get into relationship with these principles and use them and work them in your life. Reverend Linda talked about thinking from, and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately.
So it really kind of brought it home to me as I was listening to her talk. I was like, “Oh yeah.” So my flight, when I go to the airport, I think from being at the gate successfully boarding. I know that it takes 30 minutes prior to the actual boarding time is when they start boarding and then an hour I should be there an hour prior to boarding time. It takes 30 minutes to get to the airport. So if my departure is at 2:45, then I know at 2:15 is when boarding starts and I should be at the airport by 1:15 and it takes me about 30 to 40 minutes depending upon traffic to get there. So I need to leave my house somewhere between 12:30 and 12:45. I’m making a decision right now from that successful imaginative space of seeing myself getting on the plane successfully.
Now, it’s a little oversimplified, but we do that all day long, right? Especially when it comes to timing, but I don’t know if we do that. At least I’ll speak for myself. I don’t know. You all probably practice a lot better than I do. I don’t always do that with the plans of my life, right? It’s like, I want this thing to happen and then let me just think from that and come back and click back. Well, what do I need to do three months from that? What do I need to do two months from that? What do I need to do today as if I’m going to be that person six months from now? I could do that a little bit better. So thank you, Reverend Linda, for the inspiration of thinking from. And then Reverend Amy picked up this idea of divine confidence is actually about having confidence in the divine, about faith.
That kind of put me back on my heels too. I was like, “Man, I got some work to do.
” Because if I’m honest with myself, I want to control everything. Any other control freaks in the room? Okay, sorry. I thought that I was an anomaly, but maybe I’m with my tribe. I trust and I love God the universal presence so much and I say I have faith in it and I do. And if I look at some of my behaviors, nope. Darrell’s trying to control and manipulate. It’s this unconscious default thing of like, I got to take care of stuff. So to question and really be in the space of, am I putting my confidence in the divine? It’s a different way of thinking about it as opposed to faith, my confidence.
And I’m grateful to say, yes, I am practicing putting my confidence in the divine every day. I want to illustrate if I can a little bit more of that. So anyone ever save money for something? Okay. So you save money to buy something and it’s a good idea and it works, right? We have the intention to purchase a thing and we save a little bit here with the belief that we actually have a surplus of income that we can set some aside. And over time, we amass the amount that we need to buy the thing outright. We are imagining ourselves with the thing and acting as if we are going to have it, and we let that inspire our behavior and actions today. However, see if you can notice this subtle shift. We may still save, but we believe that there will never be enough, right?
So we’re still doing the practice. We’re doing the thing. I’m going to put a little bit aside in this savings account, but you know what? There’s never enough. There’s never enough.
So instead of living our life and saving for the thing, we operate from a place of fear. And unless something significant happens, we’re looking for that magical thing to give us the windfall. Even though we’re saving, we’re in essence withholding from ourselves. It doesn’t feel good, right? It feels like we’re depriving ourselves of something. So we spend all our time, maybe two o’clock in the morning, I think is when most people do it, trolling the internet, looking for the next big thing. And we go down this rabbit hole of investment schemes and things that we can possibly do. And we get hooked into this idea. It’s only $1,500. I’ve got that. I’ve put it in savings. So we invest the $1,500 with a promise that we’re going to 10X it. We buy the thing and we’re waiting for the magic, but we don’t do anything different with ourselves.
And all we’ve done is sunk $1,500 that we once had set aside that was amassing us. Do you see that subtle shift? We were still doing the same practice, but was from this place and this idea of using our imagination to our negation.
And we may even go so far to say, “Oh, well, why is God punishing me with this bad idea?” God isn’t punishing us with anything. Life never, ever punishes us. However, there are consequences that we must take responsibility for, the effects from what we cause. This is the premise of the law of cause and effect, right? Life didn’t punish the person in that scenario that I just gave. The person made an impulsive decision from the consciousness that there was never enough. Can you follow that? The subtle difference? Okay. So this brings me to today. The title is You Are Not Finished Yet: Intentional Living and the Practice of Inner Revision. So if nothing else, hear this. You’re not done yet, folks. And I think we go in and out of times where we feel like, “Oh, I’ve missed my chance.” Anyone ever had that thought?
It’s all over. If I was only 10 years younger, if I was 20 years younger, if I only had this, if I only had that, you’re not done yet. And the fact, and the truth is, is the fact that you’re still here in this room or you’re online listening to this talk means you’re not done. So have some hope in that. Let that be a catalyst and a spark today. The two chapters that I was given to focus on for today’s talk from the book, Awakened Imagination by Neville Goddard, the titles are The Highways of the Inner World and the Pruning Shears of Revision. And I’m going to break down this quote because it’s a lot of woods. Here we go. “Man’s inner body is as real in the world of subjective experience as his outer physical body is real in the world of external realities.” So our internal world is just as real as this external experience, but the inner body expresses a fundamental part of reality.
This existing inner body of man must be consciously exercised and directed. That’s the thing. When it comes to the highways of the inner world, we often go into it without intent. It must be consciously exercised and directed, not just kind of willy-nilly, “Oh, I hope this happens.” The inner world of thought and feeling to which the inner body is attuned has its real structure and exists in its own higher space. There are two kinds of movement, one that is according to the inner body and another that is according to the outer body. Cool? Tracking so far. You with me, Don? Yes. Okay. All right. So we’ve got the inner body and the outer body. The movement, which is according to the inner body is causal. So this is principle. Cause, effect, outer body. The inner movement determines the outer which is joined to it. So they’re not separate, they’re one, they’re connected.
Bringing it to the outer movement that is similar to the actions of the inner body. Inner movement is the force by which all events are brought to pass.
You are using your imagination all the time. Even I like to call them yeah, buts, right? When I argue with myself and I’m like, “Yeah, but. ” And in that argument, and I’m trying to prove that something doesn’t work, the inner world is proving that it doesn’t work. So the compulsion of the external world is going to give me what? It doesn’t work. How powerful are we? There’s hope, hope. There’s hope, there’s hope. Okay. The outer movement is subject to the compulsion applied to it by the movement of the inner body. So this is the journey. This is the climb. We are always looking out, but we must come back in because the outer will be influenced by the inner. Now, I’m a little bummed, but it is what it is. I’m going to try to do a rendition of it. Does anyone know the comedian, Josh Johnson?
Yes. Oh my gosh. That dude has me on the floor. And if nothing else, we need more comedy in our very intense world right now. So the bit that I wanted to show is him talking about having a meditation practice. If you don’t know who Josh Johnson is, he’s this younger comedian who’s kind of come onto the social media scene. I mean, he travels around and does things. He started doing stuff with Trevor Noah. I think he’ll probably end up being a late night talk show host eventually. But he has this really interesting and powerful way of looking out the world and kind of scrutinizing it, but always kind of poking fun at it. So if we want to go back a couple of decades, if you liked to George Carlin or Richard Pryor, they had ways of like making fun of the world and kind of feeling included in it, but also making you go, “Hmm, that’s actually interesting.” He does a good job of it.
And so he’s talking about meditation and I thought that this was appropriate for the chapter on highways of the inner world. He said, “I’ve been reading about meditation.” And one of the things they say, he’d gone on a retreat that, “Don’t judge yourself. You are here to just be present and to connect to the breath. And if you find yourself drifting away, which you will, just come on back and be kind and compassionate to yourself.” And he’s like, “Okay.” So I sat down, he tried to cross his legs and all of a sudden immediately he was like, “Oh my gosh, why is my right leg tighter than my left? But that’s okay. I’m going to come back to my breath.” And he’s breathing in and he’s breathing out and he’s breathing in and he’s breathing out and he’s breathing in. And then he starts to say, “We built a financial system that mistakes abstraction for value, confusing numbers moving at light speed with human flourishing, moving at the space of breath.
But markets once meant exchange. Now they often resemble belief systems sustained by collective agreement rather than tangible productions. Wealth accumulates upward, not wisdom, but because scale amplifies advantage faster than ethics can respond, debt has become the invisible architecture of modern life, binding future labor to pass expectations that may never materialize. Institutions designed to stabilize uncertainty now depend on perpetual growth as if infinity were a reasonable economic assumption on a finite planet. When confidence falters, we discover that money is less a substance than a story we tell, oh, I’ve drifted. Let me come back to my breath.” And he says, “This is why I’ve stopped meditating.” He did a much better job of going through a rant, but this is the climb. This is the powerful cautionary tale that I think Neville Goddard is welcoming us into as it relates to this inner highway that we don’t … I mean, does anyone, it blows my mind sometimes living in the city that I’ve been in for 30 years, I know how to get to things and yet I still pull up ways and I’m like, “How am I going to get there?” But it also speaks to this idea that we intentionally don’t get on the road unless we know where we’re going, whether we ask someone where we pull up a paper map, whether we use a digital map.
So why would we not do that when we go into meditation? Why would we not do that when we go into the highways of the inner world? We need to bring high intent. And I think this is the common experience that a lot of people have in meditation and the instruction and the guidance that I’ve done, especially in the corporate space, the more common experiences people say, “Meditation doesn’t work because I can’t stop thinking.” They close their eyes and they have that rant that just goes off. Anyone ever have that experience? I did this morning when I meditated. That’s normal, but what we’re doing is training ourselves to be with that and we find peace in the midst of that. We find grounding in the midst of that. And when we find that grounding, all of a sudden we realize, “Oh, I can actually handle life.” And so you walk out of the door and immediately your neighbor spits in your face in some way, shape or form and you breathe and you keep going.
You stay on the climb. Okay. Well, we’re 20 minutes in, but let’s get to the point of today’s talk. The pruning shears of revision. This was chapter four and the quote from there, there’s no slide for this. It says, just taking these words of Mr. Neville, “The one requisite is to arouse your attention in a way and to such intensity that you become wholly absorbed in the revised action. You will experience an expansion and refinement of the senses by this imaginative exercise and eventually achieve vision.” So his whole idea here is that we must go into the practice of revising all the time. And this is one very specific exercise of using our imagination that he encourages the practitioner to use. And it’s in revision that we actually meet forgiveness. Forgiveness is, in fact, experiencing in imagination the revised version of our day, experiencing an imagination what you wish had happened in the flesh of your life where it didn’t.
Every time one really forgives, that is, every time one relives the event as if it had happened the way they wanted to, we are using our imagination. So the practice that he invites is at the end of the day, many of us kind of review things, right? And again, we’re always using our imagination. We may sit and go, “Okay, this happened. That was good. This was good. I was productive. I got that done.” But then there’s that one thing that didn’t happen. And we’re like, “Why didn’t I do that? I’m so stupid. Why didn’t I get that done? Why did I spend all that time playing that stupid game on my phone when I could have been doing that? ” And we start going into this space of using our imagination to focus on what is not working, what is wrong, what is incomplete and guess what we are creating incompletion, a sense of incompleteness inside.
So then what do we experience outside? We wake up and the next day, we begin, we have good hopes and desires and wishes and dreams, and we find ourselves landing and incompletion again. So the invitation that Neville Goddard offers is what if, and this is where we can be playful, right? We can welcome that kind of childlike relationship with imagination, not to be sticking our head into the sand, but to cultivate this inner world, to prepare ourselves, to prepare our nervous system, to prepare our neurology, to prepare all levels of who we are, to sit in the possibility of success, to sit in the revised experience of our day, forgiving ourselves for what didn’t go the way we wanted to, forgiving others for not doing or showing up in the way that we wanted them to, and then just living from, to go back to Reverend Linda’s talk, right?
We are experiencing and living from as if success had been that day, that we did complete the task, that we did get the yes from the ask, that we did get the hug that we wanted from our partner, whatever it may be. You tracking? All right, Greg, can you give me some tunes here? I want to take us into a little exercise.
One of the last little tidbits that Neville Goddard challenges us with is this phrase, “Embrace your will to be stronger than the habits of old. Embrace your will. The fact that you are here, the fact that you are online shows to me that you have an interest in embracing something greater than the habituation that’s got you into this mess that you might be in today.” Everything that we are experiencing today is the result of what we have habituated over, over, over and over again, but we sit here in this very powerful moment where we can positively disrupt that habituation. So let’s revise what we do all the time and let’s sit in the space of possibility, pure imagination. Won’t you come with me? All right, take a deep breath in.
Hands to heart, close the eyes if that feels good. Somewhere in your life, in this past week, you’ve experienced a disappointment, a failure, a breakdown, a letdown, acknowledge it. And instead of dissecting what went wrong, why it didn’t happen, let’s go to the what if. What would it feel like had it come to fruition? What would it feel like to be in the vibration of joy, success, freedom, abundance, sufficiency, love, acceptance, hope, and more? This is not a practice in how to make it happen. Play in the imagination of what it might feel like, how you might live in the success of this dream.
Let that settle in. And what I recognize right here and right now is that we are affirmatively using the law. We are consciously pointing our attention upon the thing in our life and saying, “Yes, it is possible. It’s so possible that I’m going to use my imagination and dream what it feels like to be in the success of it. ” Not to be detached from reality, but to cultivate an inner reality to express in the outer world. We are mighty creators. We are manifesting all the time. And what I affirm right here and right now is that we are awakening the power of our imagination. We are awakening awareness. Maybe our work right now is to pull our attention away from the doubt. Doubt will still surface, but I know that there’s something greater than our doubt. It is called possibility. So let us imagine a possible life, a whole life, a fulfilled life.
Choose to be in fulfillment right now. Here on this day, what does fulfillment feel like? I am. You are everything. There is no place that the divine is not. It is only here, right here, seeking to work as you let it. So by the power of our collective intention, I say yes, spirit. I say yes, divine. I say yes to your universal presence. Work your apparent magic. But what I know is it is not magical. It is law. So as we continue to consciously work this law to say yes and to offer it a picture inside of what it could look outside, I know it comes to pass in due time, and so it is, and so it shall be. Peace and blessings, my friends. Thank you for