Fearlessly Feral Living!
Fearlessly Feral Living!
Principle is Not Bound by Precedent
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One of my favorite Ernest Holmes quotes is this: “Principle is Not Bound by Precedent.” This episode discusses the meaning of this quote.
Well, hello everybody. This is Reverend Karen speaking to you. Welcome back to Fearlessly Feral Living, broadcasting to you from the Woody Ranch in the back 40 of northern Nevada, where I'm a good half an hour away from the nearest gas station and the nearest grocery store, and where wide open space is both a lifestyle and a spiritual teacher. And I just want to say something here. My internet is being very wonky today. So I'm recording this on my iPad and I'm reading the text from my computer. So if you see my eyes going up there, that's where I'm reading, and down here, that's where the camera is. So I hope that that doesn't distract you too badly. So let's get started, shall we? This podcast explores practical, real life ways to apply new thought, spiritual principles, and practices, so you can create a deeply successful and meaningful life and live creatively, courageously, and successfully. Fearlessly Feral Living is a focused ministry of centers for spiritual living, devoted to cultivating a world where every person lives wild, awake, free, and unapologetically alive. Our mission statement is to awaken the capacity within every person to live successfully because of fear, not in spite of it. Our purpose is to cultivate spiritual awarenesses and practices that transcend fear, conditioning, and limitation, supporting courageous, authentic, and consciously creative living. And our vision is a world where people live wild enough to be authentic and wise enough to be loving. Our topic today is a quote from Ernest Holmes. Principle is not bound by precedent. Now, before we get into just what the hell does he mean by that, I have some fearlessly feral news to share with you. Now, you may have noticed that the mission, the vision, and the purpose statements have changed, as well as my introduction. The introduction is a little fine-tuned. Well, what happened is I got really bored with the mission, vision, and purpose statements that I had written. So I went to Chat GPT and showed the robot my uh mission, vision, and purpose statements and said, they're boring. Please help me with them. And boy, did it ever. Oh my god. It came up with a whole bunch of really good stuff for me, and I'm pretty excited. But I love those new vision, vision, mission, and purpose statements. I hope you liked them too. So here's some other fun things happening in the world of living fearlessly feral. I just have some news for you. So once a month, well, first of all, my third book is out. It's called How to Live Fearlessly Feral. And I'm pretty pleased with this book. I'm not so pleased with the distribution of it. There might be a re-release soon with a different company, but I love what I love this book. This book is my seminal work. So I am creating, I have created a one-hour discussion group. We meet monthly. It's free. And each month we meet, we get together via Zoom to go over the prep the principle and the practice that's in the monthly guide at the back of the book. And you're welcome to join us. It's the first Tuesday of every month, again, via Zoom, again, free at 4 p.m. Pacific. If you are interested in joining this discussion, please just contact me and I will send you the Zoom link. It's a year-long discussion, and we're going to go through the whole book in a year, each month, again, a guide. Some of the other things I'm doing with Fearlessly Feral is I this these discussions are going to be part of the foundation for what will eventually be a year-long class, a deep dive into spiritual principles and practices. So I'm pretty excited about that. The other thing that's been going on over here in the back 40 of the Woogie Ranch in Fearlessly Feral Land is that uh in April we are having our annual Centers for Spiritual Living convention. And I will be having an exhibitor table there where my book will be for sale. I'll have some of my other my previous books for sale there too. So I'm pretty excited about that. If you're coming to the convention, be sure and stop by the table and see me. I would love to talk with you, maybe give you a hug if you're a hugger, uh chat with you, sell you a book, of course. And last but not least, Substack. So if you haven't heard of Substack, I encourage you to check it out. Substack is a kind of social media, but it's so much more than that. And it's so much less than that. It's not like Facebook. I enjoy Substack because it's filled with authors who are writing about things that I care about. And if you're listening to this podcast, I think you might care about that same kind of stuff too. So I do have an account on Facebook on Substack, and uh I'm writing pretty regularly on there, and uh I'm not only getting lots of subscribers, but I'm getting lots of paid subscribers, which I can't tell you how good that feels. Here's the deal with that. I write almost every day. When I'm not actively writing, I'm thinking about what I'm going to write. I watch for topics as I move through my day. If you speak to me, there might be something come up in our conversation that I might use for a topic, either for an article or for a podcast episode. I'm a writer now, that's what I do. I've got three books out. And yeah, I chose this. I love it. And it's nice to be supported for it. Those paid subscriptions help with the expenses involved in writing. The computer and the iPad and the internet service, which isn't working so well right now, and um the purchase of books that I use for all my research and subscriptions to the software that allows me to actually write, like Word. Um, they all help. All the offerings help. And then, of course, there's the time it takes to write and publish these things. The support feels so good. It feels so good to know that there's people out there who are willing to who get enough benefit from what I have to say that they're willing to support it. And it just it just does my heart so much good. So thank you for those of you who are already supporting me. Thank you if you're thinking about supporting me. Thank you if you're just doing a free subscription on Substack and you're listening to the podcast without supporting. Thank you, thank you, all of you, and the ones that are supporting in other ways. I love you and again, thank you very much. So let's transition from news of fearlessly feral to the topic of our podcast today. And I'm gonna do that with a tagline. I got this from ChatGPT too. Oh my god, I just love this. Listen to this, guys. Fearlessly feral means you live wild enough to be authentic and brave enough to be free. Isn't that cool? Oh my god, soon you're gonna see some of this material all over the place. Wild enough to be authentic and brave enough to be free. So let's dive in, shall we? To principle is not bound by precedent. And how did I get from news to principle not by precedent, not being bound by precedent? Well, if you're living in principle, you're wild enough to be authentic and you're brave enough to be free. It's as simple as that. Of course, you know I have so much more to say. So this is one of my all-time earnest favorite Ernest Holmes quotes. There's an entire section on principle and precedent in living the science of mine. He says the quote at least a couple of times in the textbook. I'll have some more quotes for you in a bit, but in the meantime, I want to share something in the name of ministerial transparency. So, you know, I talk about spiritual principles and practices all the time. I talk about how I do a process every single day. Well, I miss a day once in a while, but mostly it's every single day. And yet, living this kind of a life, living in principle, it's not always as easy as I make it sound. In fact, sometimes I just flat out forget about it. Sometimes I really slip up living that way. Sometimes I forget to live in principle, and I start living in precedent. So here's what happened. So I have three prayer partners. One of them I was speaking to a while back, and um we were on our weekly call, and the way the weekly calls work is we we say hi, we check in, what's going on with me today? What am I feeling today? What do I want to feel instead? What do I want to have happen? That kind of stuff. And then we settle in for the treatment, which is the five-step form of prayer. We do the prayer, and then that's it. We're done with the conversation. So we get on the call, and um she says, What's going on with you? And I said, Well, I'm grumpy, I'm just grumpy. I wake up grumpy every morning, I'm just grumpy. I'm not a morning person, and I'm grumpy. And my primary question is, I don't want to be grumpy. Now, I actually said it like that. I said grumpy over and over and over again, and I affirmed it over and over and over again, and I affirmed that I wake up grumpy. And the the truth is that yeah, I do wake up grumpy a lot. But that's precedent. You see where I'm going with this? That's precedent. The truth is that I'm here speaking to you as an ordained minister with Centers for Spiritual Living because I woke up grumpy and I recognized it, and I realized I didn't want to live like that anymore. And I didn't have to. And yet I still kind of affirm waking up grumpy. There's there's a part of me that's like, I can overcome this. I wake up grumpy and I overcome it. So I asked her to uh treat for me, to do an affirmative prayer for me, for me to be um joyous and enthusiastic instead, I think, instead of grumpiness. So she proceeded to tell me what was going on with her, and we started our prayer. Well, she started, she did the first two steps and went into the third step, which is the the speaker word step, the affirmation step. And she was so gentle and she was so kind and she was so loving and she was so compassionate, and she was so firm in reminding me that I would was living in principle and no longer waking up grumpy in the morning because of it. And as she got into this prayer, I started laughing and laughing and laughing because just the week before I had reminded her of living in principle rather than precedent. And she came back the week later. I'm getting chills just telling you this story. She came back the week later and went, well, now it's my turn to remind Karen to live in principle rather than precedent. And we had a good laugh at that. We finished our prayer and we moved on, and I went, Oh my goodness. Yeah. It was it was incredibly amazing, and that's how this stuff works. And I tell you this story to tell you that I know I am not perfect at this stuff. I do forget. I'll probably I might work it, wake up grumpy tomorrow morning. Who knows? I'm not affirming that. I'm affirming that I wake up and I look out my window at my beautiful, wide open spaces and say, Oh, it's so beautiful this morning, which I actually do most mornings. So these spiritual practices are incredible. They're absolutely incredible, and they're what allow us to live fearlessly feral. There's they are without a doubt, what the they're they're the way, the they're the way to live fearlessly feral. So I'm gonna talk about more of those in a minute, but this principle not being bound by precedent stuff. With that one statement, principle is not bound by precedent. We have both permission and confirmation that it is not necessary nor even conducive sometimes to good health to allow our past to affect our present. We do not have to live our current lives based on what happened to us in the past. That's what that statement means in a nutshell. That's what that statement means in a nutshell. And when we realize that, you know, it might be getting a little old to affirm that I wake up grumpy every single morning. When we realize that, then we can begin to change it. When I read the principle is not bound by precedent, I'm reminded of my belief that it is not only possible but probable for us to change at deep, profound, and powerful levels. Now, there's a name for this in the world of recovery, they call it a psychic change or a spiritual awakening. It's a personality change. And change at this level is very, very cool. Now, we don't get that change automatically. There's some work we have to do to get there. And in this world, in in the new thought world, in the science of mind world, yeah, you don't get it automatically. There's some work you have to do to get there. So I'm gonna tell you about the work we're gonna do to get there in a minute, but I just want to talk a little bit about the folks who might be doubting this, the folks who might be saying, oh no, change is not only possible, but I don't want to change. There's a world full of people who don't believe that that change at that level is possible. There are some folks who are not even willing to try and believe that that kind of change is possible. There's some folks who say, Oh yeah, I'm willing, and then they claim not to be able to do it. They claim not to understand the steps that Ernest Holmes has very clearly laid out to do this changing thing. All of this stuff makes me really sad because when you know I shouldn't be here living the way that I live today. I just shouldn't. I should either be dead or in a nut house somewhere or heavily medicated, and none of those things is true in my life today. And I live fearlessly feral, not in spite of, but because of what happened in my life before, but the precedent of my life got me to where I'm at today, and it got me to where I'm at today because I had an unshakable belief that change at deep fundamental levels was possible because I experienced it. And I have another little story I want to share with you, and this is a rather dramatic illustration of what can happen when we refuse to believe that we can live in principle instead of live lives based on the precedents of our past. This is way, way back in 1988 or thereabouts. I was walking on the beach with the man who would become my first husband. I was about two years sober at the time. And actually, I was only about a year sober, so this would have been in 1987. Yeah, I was only about a year sober, and um he would he had less than that, let's just put it that way. We were talking about though that thing called the psychic change. We were talking about whether it was possible to change at that kind of a deep level, and that if so for me it was a given because I'd already experienced that. I had already experienced that change, I'd already had the experience of walking in the grocery store and running into someone that I hadn't seen in a full year, and them telling me, You're changed. There's something different about you. What's going on in your life? And you look good besides. So I had already experienced this change. He didn't believe it was possible. So we went on. Um, I don't think he ever, ever believed it was possible. He did do the process, he did go through the process, but at some point I watched him descend into something that um I knew wasn't fun for him. I was madly and passionately in love with this man and helpless to do anything about what was going on with him because, see, he never believed that that kind of change was possible. He did do those steps, but eventually, I think the disbelief in that change, I think he retained all the shame and the guilt and the uh feelings of unworthiness and all the other stuff that goes along with the ways that we live when we're out there and not in recovery. I think he hung on to all of that. And eventually he divorced me and moved away and started drinking and using drugs again, and he died. That is how powerful beliefs are in our life. If we do not believe that we can change at those fundamental levels, then guess what? We're not, and it will take us down. That's the power of our beliefs. We can allow the past to shape us or not. We're in charge of that. We determine whether or not we allow the past to limit us or to free us. Remember, we live fearlessly, feral, not in spite of the fear, but because of it. We take those precedents of our lives and we use them and we learn from them and we become grateful for them and we forgive them and we move on to live lives better than we ever could have imagined. Again, because of those precedents. Those precedents are part of who and what we are. We don't deny them, we don't shame them, we don't try to forget about them, we don't regret them, we don't do anything of that sort with them. We acknowledge them and we use them and we learn from them. And then we move on and we live in principle and we create something new in our lives. This thing, this quote, principle is not bound by precedent. Sometimes I just want to shout it from the rooftops. I want to jump up on my roof and go, hey guys, listen, listen, listen. Well, in a way, I'm doing that here with this podcast. It's about as high as I don't climb roofs anymore. I used to, but I don't anymore. Um, it's about as roof-like as I'm going to get with this podcast. So here I'm here to share with you that if you have a past that is causing you some tissue issues, if it's affecting you in limiting ways, don't despair. Whatever's happened in your past, whether it's something that happened way back in childhood or something that happened yesterday, it has absolutely no power to affect how you live today. Unless you give it that power. So there you have that. So I'm encouraging you, don't claim victimhood. Don't say, oh, well, I live this way because this happened in my past. That's victimhood. Don't claim triggers. Don't get me started on triggers. Oh my god. No. Don't claim those triggers. Don't claim any of the other stuff. Claim your good instead. Acknowledge your past, learn from it, and then move on. Claim your good. Claim the beautiful and the worthy and the abundant and the joyous being of light that you are. So, how do we do that? Well, I'm gonna go into a little bit of process here. Ernest Holmes lays it all out for us. In that chapter in the Living the Science of Mind book that I told you about is a chapter called Principle and Precedent. I mean, he's got a whole chapter based on this one quote. Principle is not bound by precedent. He speaks quite a bit to it. Not only is there that whole chapter in Living the Science of Mind, but there's other quotes too. Here's a really juicy one from the Science of Mind textbook. He says, Because we fail to realize that principle is not bound by precedent, we limit our faith to that which has already been accomplished. And few miracles result. When, through intuition, faith finds its proper place under divine law, there are no limitations. And what are called miraculous results follow. Isn't that a yummy quote? I mean, it's a mouthful, yeah. Um, I don't know about you, but when I hear this stuff, I've got to go and read it. I suggest you read it in the Science of Mind textbook. And so I'm gonna ask you, here's another belief I want you to explore. Do you believe in miracles? Well, I do, and I don't. I do because yeah, good stuff happens, miraculous stuff happens. But I don't really believe in miracles because guess what? What others call miracles, I call results. Now you can call them miracles if you want. Living successfully in spite of our precedence, that's not a miracle. That's a result. We work hard to get to this place. That is a result. Even if all you do is meditate and pray to move beyond your precedence, that's a result. Here's a couple more quotes. In the book called Love and Law, Ernest Holmes says, Learn to distinguish between personality and principle. In a daily reader called 365 Science of Mind in the Introduction, which was written by a lady named Kathy Julene. She was at the time editor of the Science of Mind magazine. She wrote this in 2001. She said, endeavor to clear your mind of a set of preconceived beliefs. Holmes, who did not view the past as precedent, taught the promise of eternal renewal. That eternal renewal, that is what living fearlessly feral is all about. That's what this teaching called Science of Mind is all about. It's about eternal renewal. Here's another quote in this creative mind trilogy within a chapter called Expanding Our Thought. And I'm like, oh, I love that title, Expanding Our Thought. I just love that. Overcome all precedence and set yourself in the new order of things. So here we're starting to get some real clues about what we're supposed to do here to move beyond precedent and into principle. We learn in the transcriptions of Ernest Holmes' lectures that he gave it as Silomar that Thomas Troward was the guy who first said principle is not bound by precedent. Ernest Holmes also mentions this quote in a bunch of other books. It's up to you, the Ernest Holmes Papers, a new design for living. I'm sure there's other books he mentions it in, but I don't own those books. I only own about 30 of Ernest Holmes books, so there's a lot more. And I'd like to just put in a little plug here for um uh owning books on Kindle. When you own a book on Kindle, you can type in a word such as precedent. Pure E-C-E-D-E-N-T precedent. Type it in to the search function of any given book, and you'll get all the places in the book where that word is mentioned. This is great for research. The nerd in me just loves that search function. I am, I just love it, love it, love it. I also love that I can open a book I've previously read and go through and review everything I've highlighted, which means so if I read a book last year, I'm not gonna remember everything I read. But if I want to go back to the book to find something to use as research in something I'm currently working on, I can go in and click a little button and everything I've highlighted shows up. I just love, love, love that. So I'm gonna get a little snarky here with principle is not bound by precedent. Those of you who are stubbornly clinging to reading paper books because you like the way they smell and you like the way they feel when you hold them in your hands. I'll just say, well, that's really nice. But remember, principle is not bound by precedent. Yeah, I'm a bit snarky. Uh, you know, principle is not bound by precedent. This thing is so, this quote is so valuable to me, valuable, and I get so frustrated when people refuse to move beyond the past. When that when I can see them very clearly basing all of their current decisions on the past, all of their current beliefs on the past. I get frustrated when I see folks who dance around all this spiritual stuff and they go from tradition to tradition to teaching to teaching, and they don't ever really do any work. And so they never get the benefits of any of it. They keep living in limitation. If I had a I do have a dream, if my dream came true, everybody on this planet would be living fearlessly, feral. Of course, then it might be a little bit boring, so maybe not. I don't know. But we have this creative process that Holmes so kindly laid out for us. Now that creative process is guaranteed to push us right into something that is unknown, which scares a lot of people off. You know, people who counsel folks who are in abusive relationships get frustrated because um very frequently what happens is the abusee refuses to leave the relationship. Even though it hurts, even though they're harmed, even though it's dangerous for them, the known is more acceptable to them than the unknown. The known is familiar, the unknown is very, very, very scary, and so they don't leave. Worst case scenario in that is that they end up dead. But sometimes, um I was gonna say a miracle, sometimes a miracle happens and they leave, and then they wonder what took them so long to get out of the relationship. They live in freedom instead of limitation. So I'm gonna end this little section on quotes with one more quote. This one is from my dad, the Reverend Dr. Gil Lindsley. He passed away in um uh, oh my goodness, I'm drawing a total blank. Let's see, we're in 2026 here, right? Uh, 2019. He passed away in 2019. And he said this about this quote: principle is not bound by president. He said, Karen, old beliefs are like old newspapers, they're good for one thing only, to line the bottom of the birdcage. So I'll leave you with that quote. While I return to this process that Ernest Holmes, finally, finally, I'm going to give you the process that Ernest Holmes talks about in Living the Science of Mine. In a nutshell, because I know I've been talking a long time. He says, change your thinking and keep it changed. And you keep it changed by replacing your old way of thinking with a new way of thinking. He puts it like this: he says, we should break down the hypnotic suggestions that bind us and create new avenues in the mind for a fresh approach and a new outlook to the spirit. Oh, and while I'm here, I'm gonna put in a plug for introspection as a spiritual practice. Because how on earth are you gonna know what thinking you need to change if you're not aware of your thoughts? So I'll just leave it at that. Next step in this process to live in principle rather than precedent. Acknowledge and connect with spirit, whatever that is for you. I call it oneness. This is also, by the way, the first and second steps of treatment or affirmative prayer. So I've got podcast episodes on treatment you can listen to. I also talk about treatment in my book, How to Live Fearlessly Feral. I also talk about oneness in my book, Fearlessly Feral, How to Live Fearlessly Feral. And I also talk about introspection and various ways to do introspection in the book called How to Live Fearlessly Feral. I highly recommend you buy the book. Go to bookbaby.com, go to the store. There's a little link there that says store, click on store, type in either my name, Karen Lindsley. Remember, there's no D in Lindsley, or type in the name of the book, How to Live Fearlessly Feral. And right then and there, you'll get two choices to buy it in print version or to download an e-version. Back to Ernest Holmes. Basically, he says we need to treat to change our thinking. And he closes this section with a wonderful sentence that always uplifts me. Sometimes he gets so poetic and so beautiful. And I read these things and I'm like, yeah, there it is. He says the mind should be kept in a buoyant, expectant, enthusiastic attitude. All weightiness and confusion must be eliminated, and we must think back to that which is boundless and free. So that's the deal. On principle is not bound by precedent. I hope that you've heard something here. I hope that you are willing to do that process that Ernest Holmes talked about. I'm just going to do a quick review here. Change your thinking, keep it changed. Know what your thinking is by introspection. Change it if it's not serving you and keep it changed. Connect with spirit to help you with that. Do a treatment for what you want to keep your thinking changed to. And be open at the top. Be curious and willing. Be curious and willing. Another Ernest Holmes quote right here, a certain amount of adventure of imagination must be brought into play to create a feeling of acceptance, which will break down the old thought patterns. So, yeah, you're changing a thought pattern. So you're going to have to repeat this to yourself many times for a period of time. Won't take long, though. Won't take long. So being principle, being able to live in principle and instead of precedent, it's absolutely a beautiful, rewarding way to live. It's a way to live in eternal renewal. Until next time, remember, you don't have to live without fear to live a powerful life. You simply have to stop letting fear be the one holding the reins. Because it's impossible to live without fear. If Fearlessly Feral speaks to you, if it speaks to your wild and authentic spirit, you can support this ministry through a tax-deductible donation, either through a membership on this podcast or by subscribing to my Substack. Supporting What Feeds Your Soul helps it grow stronger in your life and keeps this message moving forward. In the meantime, I encourage you to stay wild, stay awake, stay free, and keep living fearlessly feral. Remember that fear is not your enemy, it's untamed energy waiting for direction. Harness it, trust your spiritual nature, and go live fearlessly feral. And I thank you very much for listening or watching. And I hope to hear from you.