Question # 1

Male, age  24
Occupation: Surveyor
I do a lot of reading and I am not religious by any sense of the word. I have been working for this past year in a new job. I get to spend lots of time alone, often days on end in the wild. The company I work for pays me well and when I return to civilization I reward my hours of hard work with partying, gadgets, and dumb pursuits. My heart feels empty and when I look at life and see all the lies and corruption, it feels shitty.  I couldn’t believe the last bailout and the rich powerful banks that created the whole thing, with lies after lies. I thought Obama would be different but he is like all the rest it seems. He operated in the interest of big business and now the citizens, the taxpayers, get ripped off. It seems all the religions have failed. The Catholic Church is full of the sexual abuse, yet they claim they are close to God! The Muslims and all the violence, the field of psychiatry filled with doctors who have no idea about helping people, just drug pushers for drug companies and inventing diseases so they sound smart. The world is what it is and I feel maybe it has always been this way. But here I am, almost 25 and what I see of humans, including myself, is just so pathetic.  We may do great things in medicine, space the final frontier and all that, but really for what? So we can destroy that planet too?  I read your web site sometimes and I feel a bit better.  Then again it may offer me a place to hide. What is life about Coach Bri? Because apart from getting laid, partying, and buying what I want when I want it, it all seems so pointless. Yet I play, waiting for some experience to jolt my life into something true or real. My apology for all the words but for some reason I think you care.

Answer:

Humankind has lived this way since the dawn of time. We are so deeply conditioned to live from a very small part of our brain. We think we are educated because we get degrees, which is just another from of corruption sanctified by the establishment of the ego. We have inherited all the knowledge of the experts and professors who are caught in the same egocentric game as the beggar on the street. Both have a conditioned point of view, created by thinking. We are a melting pot of so many things which are the creation of the thinking process and through that process we make life mean something and cling to it like a starving dog, looking for its next meal.

What matters in this life is not what you become but what you refuse to become, as all becoming is the conditioned point of view, and the common way of living. What matters is not what I think or what anyone else thinks of your life because, that too is the conditioning of authority passed down from man’s deep confusion.  No one can set a human being free; one has to do it for oneself because one has to come to terms with this ugly petty existence.

Most people out of their confusion cultivate faith. The very movement of faith is the heart of our darkness.  The story of humankind over the ages is the pursuit of some state of being where there is perfect security.  This leads a person, through their beliefs, given or self-invented, to kill another in the name of faith. To be secure we have made our minds into accumulating commercial machines. We have made meditation, the practice of sitting down, listening to music, breathing deeply and using our imagination to find a few moments of peace. Any peace that is self-induced soon becomes the source of our attachment and another movement of seeking security. Anything thought creates from spiritual methods, rituals, traditions and faiths can never lead to freedom but are the source of all bondage and lead to fear.

Most human beings, when they deal with death, cling to the conditioned cultural images and beliefs as a means of running from the fear of the unknown.  Running from the unknown we cling to things and know we are caught in our own superficiality. This drives us to drink, drug, or gamble, or some other excitement that promises us relief from our own pettiness.

Most human beings are full of anxiety and we don’t see we create this anxiety because we are a slave to thought. Thought has developed the process of intellect and is refining it every generation. We think that the more letters we have after our name the more secure we are. Security is what thought creates, however brilliant or simple it may be, is the source of anxiety. A person who is willing to step out of this madness, not as a reaction (because all reaction is anxiety and superficiality) must at seeing the disorder in themselves step out of the known into the unknown. In doing so everything is organized against you. Yes, your wife, your friends, your workplace, everything. Only then in the emptying process is there a shift from an external psychology to an internal one. That movement is the source of everything. It is like the dark matter of the universe that is holding everything together.

Coach Bri

There were about ten or eleven of them in a large gymnasium, pushing each other around on these little carts. One or two of them would get behind the other and push. Every time the driver would turn, three would go tumbling over the other and loud shrieking laughter would echo throughout the gym. To look and feel this gem of activity brought deep tears to my eyes and a large smile on my face. These children didn’t see color, race, sex or disability. They were enraptured in enjoyment.  One very little boy on the cart stopped all of a sudden and with the greatest attention became aware that the laughter had an echo and he gave out a loud yell. Soon all the others caught on and soon they were all yelling and listening. Then each gave the other a turn and the others listened and laughed.  The first boy on the cart became bored with it and again was off on his cart, soon being chased in tow by the others.

Innocent is how we all start out. Regardless of how bad our lives as children were, innocence finds a way to play and laugh. Even in the poorest conditions children will find a way to play, and find happiness. This is our natural state and we lose touch with it because the outside world moves in and we are brainwashed to believe the human experience is not enough, that we are incomplete in ourselves, and creation has left something out of the package.  Children who are genuinely happy don’t need anything external to be happy – they are too busy playing in the space of happiness.

Because we are pressured to become something, we grow up with the feeling we are not enough or something is wrong with us. The only option left is to conform to the wishes of our parents who, by the way, are already terribly unhappy because of the impositions of their parental and cultural conditioning.  They feel unhappy, and feel this huge void within themselves. Therefore they fill it with their parents conditioning then modify it a little and make it their own.

How do you know this is true? Because today we are a society of addicts we have to have a drink, smoke, sex, gamble, or become workaholics, sport-aholics, shopaholics, etc. People don’t see that the heart of addiction is to cover up the feel of the void within us. This void is created by our drug of choice. We all want to be happy, as we were as children, which is our natural state. But we use various addictions to cover up the fact we feel deprived.

Linked to the feeling of depravity is the feeling of inadequacy. This feeling is so deep in human beings and it is our greatest fear, the fear of being a nothing.  You smoke, drink, over sex, gamble, overeat, overwork, because you think doing these things will make you feel better. Well it does for that feeling of being deprived – a smoke, eating, or drinking something takes that feeling away. However, when the chemical has left the system, one must use again. Using is the closest thing to being in a natural of happiness. However, it is drug dependent and there is an illusion of happiness.  People who are not chemically addicted don’t walk around feeling deprived.   They don’t feel this huge void that addicts feel almost all the time.  As soon as the drug is out of their system, this feeling of void comes up.  So really the drug creates the void.

Religion, politics, and beliefs of any kind also cover up the deeper void created by our brainwashing.  The brainwashing that we are born inadequate is rooted in the fact that we try to fill a hole in ourselves with the product of thought and all the things that thinking has created. The universe was not created by our thinking process. Nor is love or nature created by thinking.  They are all realities independent of thinking. In order for us to develop and be whole human beings and reach our potential, we must have contact with a reality that is beyond thought. Then the next thing thought does is try to build a bridge to that other reality, which it can never do. Thus all human beings, when they are lonely, feel this deep sense of a void or insufficiency in themselves.

Our education creates children of the void.  Education in our culture is about stuffing in the things of thought, and the word education actually means to draw out. It is in the drawing out the illusions of self that there is really play and laughter, which is our natural state. To be innocent is to be free of all images about oneness and the other. In that innocence there is really joy. Watching these children was a deep blessing, and at the same time I wept for all those children who have to face the misery of this rotten society with its preoccupation with money and all its addictions.

Coach Bri

The gust of wind could be heard in the distance through the sound of the trees. The tall evergreens, full with their green needles, made a soft hiss. The maples without their leaves made a harder sound, more of a whipping sound. The cars passing by on the road seemed to be moving a lot slower as if the drivers were taking their time in the hot spring evening. Behind me the cat was in a full prowl looking for anything – a moving leaf, a small twig or a mouse. The sky was full of stars and these heavenly bodies were surrounded by vast space that seemed so empty.

Everything that is made of substance in nature seems to reach it potential and die. Mankind is the only thing in nature that creates psychological substances such as beliefs, opinions and attitudes that prevent relationship, which is a hindrance to compassion and love.

Space is holding everything together. When we have too much mass physically it takes huge amounts of energy to fuel our mass. Psychologically we have a huge amount of content pertaining to our self or ego and we become so tired and worn out from maintaining our beliefs and identifications. Everything needs space to exist. Mass is energy, and yet emptiness contains more energy than mass. Everything in the universe is held together by emptiness. If man could only empty his person or subjective mind he would be a new creature, capable of love and compassion that would feed the hungry and care for the disadvantaged. When thought is put in its place, the brain is quiet, attentive and rich. That richness is the ending of all his psychological problems. One is out of the confines of the subjective mind. To be free from this mind you must understand how you are caught. To see how you are caught is to see your violence to another, your interaction with your spouse, child, family member or neighbor. It is also to be able to see the importance you place on material things such as the house you want or have, the car you drive, your money, property and how it is still superficial. To see your identifications of the ego in the violence of accumulation of beliefs, opinions, ideas, and ideals is to cut the very root of the ego itself. Very few people want to go beyond thinking because they must let go of the known. That known, which creates self or the subjective mind, is fear itself, trapped in time.

Coach bri