Your New Design For Living – Rev. Aimee Daniels
This recording features the Sunday Talk portion of the service. For the full service watch here.
DESCRIPTION
We all have a vision for a better life but how do we move the vision from the “drafting board” into our daily reality? This Sunday we will look at how to clear mental limitations and align with Spiritual Law to create tangible shifts in our lives. Join us as we learn to stop living by default and start living by design to reflect the harmony of our inner conviction.
SUMMARY
Rev. Aimee Daniels explores the principles of conscious life creation through Ernest Holmes’ teachings in “A New Design for Living”. She emphasizes that the nature of life is God—a living spirit that created all things and expresses through individual minds. The core message centers on the recognition that humans are creative centers in mind, with thought being inherently creative and working through a power greater than themselves. Rather than being controlled by outward circumstances, individuals can shift their consciousness to understand that the same creative spirit that made everything resides at the center of their being. Daniels discusses two fundamental principles: the law of correspondence, where outer manifestations correspond to mental attitudes and thoughts, and the importance of faith—understood not as faith “in” something external, but as faith “of” the presence within oneself. She introduces the concept of mental equivalence, an inner state of consciousness corresponding to desired outer conditions, and encourages listeners to cultivate clarity about their mental atmosphere, release the need to control the “how,” and follow their joy. The teaching invites individuals to recognize their alibis and limited beliefs, expand their container for good, and ultimately understand that life is a co-creative partnership with the divine. By consciously recommitting to this partnership daily, individuals can design a new way of being and experience greater health, happiness, and abundance.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Aimee Daniels:
Good morning, Cityside. I feel a little echoey. Am I a little echoey? A little bit. I’m going old school this morning. My computer’s been acting up, so thank you for singing that song. Has anyone ever heard that song before? Anybody see the Dick Van Dyke video about his hundredth birthday with Chris Martin from Coldplay? That song was part of the video and it was all about how his life has been a life that has been well lived and how at 100 he’s still expressing his joy. He still finds things to be happy about. He’s still dancing and singing and bringing forth joy. And so I love the song for that reason, but I also like it from a personal perspective to remind me that my commitment in my life is to be loving to the people that I love and to be a loving presence.
And it also reminds me that spirit’s always loving us, that spirit is expressing through us and that that is the way that spirit loves us. So if we go to the first slide, Rob read to us from this book, A New Design for Living, and this idea that we want to consciously create our life and not be at the effect of it is really what this book this month is about. And as John shared last week in January, it’s customary for Centers for Spiritual Living to always cover the first four chapters of Science of Mind. We’re doing it a little different way this year. We’re working with this beautiful book, A New Design for Living, which was written in the last year of Earnest Holmes’ life. And I like to think it’s really a kind of a beautiful condensation of what he taught for 40 … I think it must have been about 40 years.
I don’t know exactly how long it was. So that’s what we’re focused on this month. And we really want to remember that the nature of life is God. That’s really what Ernest Holmes teaches us. And we live in a living world. We were not put here by a God who abandoned us on a dead planet and went someplace else. There is a living spirit, whether you call it God or spirit or the divine or the universe, whatever you call it, there is a living spirit and its mind created all of this and its mind is also our individual mind and it lives through us and that’s the good news. Earnest reminds us that we’re here to live life. And where do we begin that? Lao Su said, as rivers have their source in some far off fountain, so this human spirit has its source. And to find this fountain of spirit is to learn the secret of heaven and earth.
And that’s actually where we begin and end. We begin with source, we end with source, and we create with source throughout our life. And that’s where our new design for living begins. Isn’t that the good news? It’s a new year. We get to reset, right? And if you’ve been around for a while, you might say, “I already know this stuff.” But I just invite you to listen with new ears because I think we all have places that we can go deeper. And if you’re newer to the teaching, we’re just focusing on some of our core concepts this month, and this is a great place for you to just kick off and start to learn more about the teaching. So one of the things the book points us to is really trusting in God. And we’re going to talk a lot about that today. Having faith in its presence, earnest homes called God it, and working with the principles of science of mind to demonstrate them in our lives.
So Thoreau said he had his experiment with life. Your life is your experiment with life, right? You get to try things out and see what happens. And he really, Ernest set this example because he walked around all day and he saw God in all things. He really did. He practices all day, every day. And I have to say, when I think about that myself, it’s a little humbling because I’m like, “I could do better. I could do better.” I don’t know if anyone relates to that, but to really commit to not getting distracted, to really commit to practicing this presence, which is the truth of our being. So if you could go to the next slide, Marcus Aurelius, who was a stoic, said, “The soul becomes died with the color of its thoughts.” And we could say the same thing about our lives. Our lives become died with the color of our thoughts.
Ernest Holmes says there are two fundamental propositions. The first is that we are creative centers in mind, so spirit is working through us, right? And the second is that our thought is creative and it works through an action of a power which is greater than we are. And I always want to point up when I say that. I know that’s ridiculous, but there’s a science of mind VE teaching symbol. I always want to point up, it’s like I’m doing YMCA or something, but everything in our life depends on our mental and emotional reactions to life. And we want to have a deep realization of an intimate relationship with spirit. And I’ve never really thought about that word too much before, but an intimate relationship with a spirit like it is our first relationship, right? And that’s how we begin to understand that life is what we make it.
So there’s a lot of possibility, but there’s also a lot of responsibility in our own role in creating our life. And we need to recognize that life is not happening to us. It’s happening through us. And as we work with our principles, we can consciously create a new design for our life. So we’re either repelling or attracting what we want through our thinking. And I would go a step further. I would say we’re repelling or attracting based on our way of being, our energy. I like to think of it as a mental atmosphere, like what’s my mental atmosphere that I’m moving around in? And I don’t know about anybody else, but I have days where my mental atmosphere is probably not so good, right? It’s not so good. I’m not in a good place. And I have to consciously tell myself, don’t feed that. That can be kind of challenging right now because we have a lot of negativity around us, but like, what is my mental atmosphere?
And to check in with it all day, because I’ve noticed if I’m like a grumpy, I can go down a grumpy rabbit hole until it passes, right? I see some people laughing. So Ernest tells us what we need to do today is to start to make sure that the content of our conscious thought is good and think clearly and definitely about it. So how do we begin to shift? It’s a new year. What do you want to experience this year? What do you want your life to be like? And I’m not talking about an outcome, I’m talking about what do you want it to feel like, right? What is the energy you want your life to have? And I chose a word for this year. I encourage you to do the same. And my word, it could be a spiritual quality you pick, right? But my word is discernment this year because I was feeling a little bit of malaise around the holidays, even though I have like this super great life, right?
But I think that I’ve been running, I had been running so fast that like I felt like I was not feeding myself. And so I picked the word discernment because I was like, hmm, maybe I could pause and I could just, in the moment, I can just check in and discern. Or if I’m feeling grumpy, I can just check in and I can discern. And it also has a bigger meaning for me because it’s really about what do I want the future to look like and how do I discern that? It’s easy to just keep going through your days and to not really be conscious about what you’re doing. And Rich and I were talking about this. I’m pointing at him because he’s sitting in the front row. When we make resolutions, they’re often about regret, right? They’re often looking backwards like, “Oh, I said I was going to go to the gym twice a week and I didn’t do that.
So I’m going to resolve, man. I’m doing it this year.” But we want to focus on where we’re heading. We don’t want to put our energy in the past. It’s really easy to go down that rabbit hole, like our emotions take hold of us and we don’t want to ignore our emotions. As John said last week, it’s just spirit giving us a message, right? If you’re feeling emotional about something, it’s just your spirit to speaking to you, but you don’t want to go down that loop and that rabbit hole, you know the one I mean in your brain where your brain won’t stop. That’s like being in perpetual groundhog day. We don’t want to do that. That’s not fun because we get hooked by our story sometimes, or we get hooked by believing that what happened in the past is what’s possible. And now we know today, and I’m going to shout Tony out back there, those bears didn’t look like they were going to win last night.
And if the bears can win in the circumstances that they’re in, anything is possible. I’m just saying, anything is possible. Okay, could you go to the next slide? So if we take this as our key in our use of cause and effect, we shall see that the starting point so far as we’re concerned in designing a new life is to shift the whole basis of our thought from the belief that we’re controlled by outward circumstances and enslaved by them to a realization that the same creative spirit that made everything that is the cause of everything is at the center of our being in all its fullness. Just take that in for a second. It’s at the center of your being in all its fullness. Ernest Holmes taught love and law, but there was a whole lot of time spent on the thinking part of it, right?
And I’m going to talk about the thinking part of it today, but there’s this part of it that’s the love part of it and that love is expressing through you. And if you can remind yourself that that’s the truth of your being, that’s your true essence, right? It doesn’t matter what else happens, right? When you know that, when you’re feeling that, everything else is good, right? So we need to consciously bring ourselves back to it. And then the other part of it is the law. And one of the first laws that we teach is the law of correspondence and this is the idea that the outer manifestation corresponds to our mental attitudes and thoughts. Another way to say it is that spirit responds by corresponding. So what we’re putting out is coming back to us. And that’s why I think it’s super important to be aware of our mental atmosphere, not just our thoughts, right?
Because it’s energy. It’s all energy. All of this is energy. And so we want to pay attention.
And earnest also reminds us not to effort or labor. And I think in our teaching, people can really get into efforting and laboring like, “Hey, I’m going to affirm this. I’m going to pray for this, whatever.” But that can start to feel like our own will. You guys following me? Like that we’re trying to make it happen. And the invitation is to let go of the how, right? Let go of the how. Our human mind, at least mine wants to map like, “Okay, I want to go from here to here. What am I going to do? ” Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But sometimes life is not that clear. Sometimes we need to just let it unfold because the how doesn’t belong to us. And how can you know that this is going to work? Have you ever had an experience where you felt like your life was just flowing, like you started to think about something and then it started to show up and it was effortless.
That’s how we know it’s working and sometimes it’s not working. Okay, let’s be honest. There are times it’s not working. And I always remind myself like, maybe there’s something in me I need to shift or maybe whatever it is I think I want or need is not my highest good. Sometimes spirit has a better idea for us than we have for ourselves. And we all probably have areas of work in our life, right? Some things feel easy, some things feel harder, and we shouldn’t fear those areas. There was a podcast with Ezra Klein recently with a Buddhist named Steven Bachelor, and he was talking about our growth comes from our discomfort. If we’re super comfortable, we’re not growing, right? If we’re not stretching ourselves, we’re not growing. And I think life is about growth. You look at these people who thrive like Dick Van Dyke or my friends in the back row also saw Mavis Staples last night.
We saw Mavis Staples performing at 86 years old. She’s still thriving because she’s following her passion, right? And so Ernest encourages us to follow our joy. Do you think a lot about your joy? Yeah. Do you? Good. I need to think more about my joy, but follow our joy. Like what do you want to do just like out of sheer joy because you notice in the doing of it, you just get lost. Time stops. Or you notice like you’re happy and having fun and laughing like Paige who’s always laughing when she’s singing, right? That’s joy. That’s joy. So don’t fear the change. Ernest also encourages us to look at our alibis. I thought that was hysterical.
I just thought it was, he’s very funny if you haven’t read him. He’s very funny. And an alibi, you know what an alibi is, right? It’s this idea that we’re limited because of something in our life and we create our own alibis. And where do they come from? They come from our thoughts. And I had to look at my own alibis. I’m like, “What are my alibis?” I think one of my alibis is time. I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have enough time. Another one is I’m not good enough to do that or no one would care or whatever, but I made all of those up, right? We’re always a choice. I can make a different choice, right? And so I encourage you to really think about your alibis. What are they? What are those old stories, those old tapes, those things that keep you kind of stuck in that perpetual groundhog day or those things that you notice when it comes up, it grabs you and it doesn’t want to let go of you.
What are those things? And we never shift from here to here in like a second. So we just want to kind of work our way up. Can you believe that a little more is possible for you? And I think that’s another mistake we make. We just try to jump from like first grade to like being a master’s student sometimes and how we’re living our life. But moving up a little at a time, Esther Hicks talks about that better feeling, picking a better feeling thought.
And the other thing I want to say to you is that any of these ideas you have about yourself or any of these alibis or stories, they’re not the truth of you, right? There’s an expression people use in new thought that God and I are a majority. Say it with me. God and I are a majority. What does that mean? It means that that presence that you’re working within yourself, that that is a majority, that that is what … If your focus is there, everything is good. Everything is good. And it’s easy for us to listen to everybody else and what everyone else wants. But what I love about spirit is there’s uniqueness in all of us, even though we come from the same source, right? We’re not all equally interested in things. We’re not all equally gifted in things where each of us is unique and we have something we bring and that’s really the beauty of it, right?
And so to … I’m going to talk in a minute about faith, but to really cultivate your faith that if an idea has been planted in your heart, then it’s your idea and that’s God’s idea of you. That’s God’s idea of you. If we can go to the next … Oh, we’re already on the next slide. See, I’m not used to being old school anymore. So at all times, we’re freely creating the life we live. The ability consciously and specifically to better our lives depends on the degree to which we are able to believe in our basic concepts of the nature of life with faith. And he says, a faith that rests on both intellectual and emotional conviction. So I want to make a distinction about faith. You may have heard this before. There’s faith in and faith of. When we have faith in something, that is faith in something outside of ourselves, right?
That is kind of a conventional understanding of faith that some of us may have grown up with. Like we’re praying to something outside of us, right? But if we have faith of, our faith means faith is the activity of spirit itself expressing through you. And it’s faith of the presence within. I have faith that this presence is within me. I have faith in the law, which responds to consciousness. I have faith that spirit is knowing itself through me and I have faith. I have an inner knowing about it. It’s not a request or a plea that I’m making to something outside of myself. It’s an inner faith.
And earnest also teaches there are two great realities of life, personal and principle. He also calls it spirit and law. We could call that love and law, or you could call it if you’ve read the science of mind, the thing itself, which is what earnest calls God, spirit, whatever, and the way it works. So in our mind, there is a point of contact with the infinite, but we each do this our own way. And we know that we’re working also with the law of attraction, so like attracts like, and we want to sow what we want to reap, right?
And it’s important to remember we’re not doing this alone. We’re doing this together. I and God are my majority. I’m not doing this on my own. And Ernest also tells us that we need to create a bigger container for our good. Again, he’s funny. You can have a thimble, you can have a cup, you can have a container, or you can have a whole bunch of it. I like to say you could have an ocean, but how big is your container for your good? How much good are you ready and able to receive? Again, I think that this is something we stretch over time, right? If there’s an area in our life we would want to shift, it’s like it begins by just believing a little more is possible, right? A little more is possible and we do it over time. I think about that in my work in the world.
I had the thought many years ago, probably 20, that I wanted my work to be different and it took a long time for that to happen in the world of form, but slowly by trying things and just like trying things on and experimenting, I came to realize where I wanted to go, but I didn’t know that immediately, but I had to try it on. It’s like, what is my spirit wanting to call in here?
So faith is a definite way of thinking. Faith is in knowing that we can trust that spirit, which we actually are, that spirit, which I know that’s a little hard to get your head around, because we can’t prove God, can we? Right? You think about it, you plant a seed, you get a plant. You eat something or drink something and your body is nourished, right? But God, we can’t really explain. And we don’t know how the plant grows and we don’t, maybe we do if we look it up, but we don’t know how we get nourished, right? But you can’t do a Wikipedia search on God and understand the nature of God, right? You have to experience it and we just have to trust that it’s true and in practicing, then we begin to know that it is true.
So faith is a transcendent principle and through it we overcome situation and the container of our good is defined by two things. One is our faith, so we really want to work on that faith of, and the other is our mental equivalence. And a mental equivalent is an inner state of consciousness that corresponds to the outer condition you desire to experience. And it’s really more than just saying an affirmation or doing a prayer or anything like that. It’s actually beginning to have a feeling sense of what you want to experience in your life. And you get what your consciousness is ready to receive. And I know that can sound harsh sometimes, but I want to give an example from my own life just to help you think about what a mental equivalent is. For years, I was single, I had a lot of dating practice, and I had a lot of time where I was by myself, but I had a friend who’s been married for 40 years, and I watched she and her husband, and I thought, “That’s my mental equivalent.” I look at their relationship like they’re really happy together, they’re best friends, they have fun, they’ve been better for a long time.
And I’m like, “Well, if it’s possible for them, it’s possible for me. ” And I also looked at my friendships and thought, “Well, I know how to be a good friend, right? So if it’s possible for me to have that there, then it’s possible for me to have that anywhere.” So our mental equivalent is like building a muscle of acceptance for what we want to have more of in our life. And there are tools we can use that support us in this. I think visualization is a great one, but if you’re just trying to call forth a quality, I also think it’s just fine to meditate on that quality and to ask some questions and journal on them. For me, if I want to have more discernment and have my life flow a certain way, what does that look like? How do I start to call in the energy of that?
So law is neutral, and so we need to cultivate our clarity, our acceptance, and its inner congruence, and through our mental equivalent, inner readiness to experience more of that. I could go to the last, I think it’s the last line, second to last slide. If we can but realize that fact that there is a how and a way, even though we do not fully understand it, and understand that which is seen comes from that which is not seen, then we will know that thoughts are things. Life makes them out of itself and becomes what it makes. If we cannot fully comprehend it, we can just trust it. God is not only the creator, God is what it creates, and that is you.
That’s you, right? And it’s not about being good enough. I can’t help but say that. It’s not about being good enough. You’re worthy simply because God made you. And our lives are primarily mental. So when we consciously use our consciousness as a focal point, then we are co-creating with the divine. So if you could go to the last slide. So we are in an internal partnership of activity and creativity with life, with God. Life established the partnership, but we have to become aware of it. That’s my main point to come today, becoming aware of our partnership with the divine.
All the condition of our lives will be filled with health, happiness, and abundance, and we need to let life God be a co-designer with us. I love that. And a co-designer of the new life that we want to live. And when we do, we will be surprised at the assistance that will be forthcoming. So I invite you to consciously recommit to working with this partnership every day, every day. What’s a bigger idea for your life that you want to call in this year? And what idea of limitation or alibi do you want to set aside so that you can move forward in your life? And where could you expand the container for your good? What’s the way of being you want to have this year? Not just an outcome, but really a new design, a new way of being for your life. And if we were here a year from now, what would your life feel like?
What would be different about it? And what would be the mental atmosphere of your life a year from now?
What would be bringing you joy? And what would be bringing you a feeling that you’re really living your life? God’s the co-designer of your life, and as we turn to God, God turns to us. So let’s pray. So in this moment, I know the presence and power of God, this presence which is never an absence, this infinite life, this one life that is expressing in as and through all things. That is the source of all being that is expressing with love and grace and goodness and joy and prosperity and health and divine wellbeing. And I know that I am one with this creative spirit. I am one with this energy of life itself that is expressing in as and through me with goodness, with love, with grace, with ease, with joy and happiness and abundance, perfect wellbeing. And as I know this for myself, I know this for each and every person who is hearing my words, I know that you are one with God, that there is no place that your life is not completely connected to God, that right where you are, God is and all the possibility of God is right there as you.
It is you, that you are one with grace, with ease, with plow, with abundance, with the divine created power and possibility. So from this place of oneness, I just speak my word for all of us, just knowing that we are uplifted in our consciousness, knowing that the higher idea for our life is already known in the mind of God and being willing to listen, listening to spirit’s whisperings in our life. Look here. I know that God is speaking to all of us all the time, and I know a deep and profound realization for every one of us of God is the center of our being. And I know that we are consciously co-creating with God. I know that we are opening up to more and more good, more and more love, more and more joy. This is what I say yes to for all of it.
I know that it is God God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom. So I say yes to this. I know that God’s got this. It’s already done and I am grateful for this. I’m grateful for the greater sense of joy that we are all experiencing. I’m grateful for the realization of our co-creation with spirit. I’m grateful for the realization of the spirit at the center of all of our beings. And I’m grateful to know that God’s got all of this. And with so much gratitude together we say, and so it is.