Most human beings today are bored to tears with their lives. They are sick and tired of all the crises on so many levels. We are fed a bill of goods from the very beginning and as we age we seem to assimilate every possible egocentric position in every stage of our development. Humankind has lived with so many psychological problems in every generation. At the root of these problems humankind has tried, since the dawn of time, to find some psychological security in something that he has created out of his fixation with matter and energy. We impose on our children the psychology that has been practiced on us by our parents called external control, or stimulus response, or cause and effect. Whatever name you give it, humankind, able to solve technological problems, has not solved any of his inner psychological problems. Resolving these problems is the only key to the kingdom of happiness.

Throughout the ages human beings have created, out of their internal problems, the society in which they live. The within always becomes the without. To put it another way: What you are inside becomes the environment you create on the outside. This has and will always be a truth or fact for all of humankind. We are all a collection of fear, greed, hatred, violence, prejudice, resentment, loneliness, and contradiction, with moments of compassion, love, and understanding, which are found scattered in each individual’s life.

We live as individuals in our presentation to others but actually we are not individuals at all. The word individual means all one, whole, and we are far from that and that is why history is always repeating itself. Yet every generation thinks it is going through this life as if these problems are unique and authentic. What a shock it is to find out that your ego-self is thousands of years old. (By this I don’t mean reincarnation, as that is just the Eastern world’s way of coping with the unknown, as heaven is to Christians.  This psychological need for security has been humankind’s main occupation.) Therefore we really have no authentic experience or self at all. Psychologically we are carbon copies of our ancestors, with different technology – that is all.

So the problems your great ancestors had are your problems and very few people are interested in psychological change. Just see the fact that whenever you are disturbed emotionally you practice external psychology on yourself or others because you refuse to put away your conflict with yourself or the other. Man has made conflict and struggle the purpose of living and most people never question it. If you want to have an amazing life, one must begin where one is. That is hard to face because everyone around you, from your parents and teachers, to your minister and shrinks, are telling you that you must become something, you must progress, struggle, and fight to find happiness. That definition of happiness is according to their and your conditioning, which you modify out of your own brutality and confusion. To find your way and be seen as successful in a world that is violent, competitive, and corrupt is not success at all.

Have you ever noticed that when you really want something and you get it, you eventually lose interest in that thing? If it is a person, you eventually will destroy them and they you, and you exist only through the images that thought creates in order to find your self-centered insecurity. Then all of the energy, passion, and compassion between you is gone. Sex runs your relationship in middle age and in the later years you will lead a life of frustration.  Where there is frustration in any relationship there is resentment and control.  Then we chase the next thing to distract us from own pain caused by our own disconnected state.  This growing dissatisfaction as you age is the state that most people are in and that is why as they grow old they lose all passion and vitality for life.

To have a great life is to be inspired and to learn about what is inside you and outside of you and your relationship to them. To study your own behaviour and see how your own egocentric activity will get in the way of relationship is the flowering of love and compassion. That is why in these matters of inner revolution, the journey of humankind, a person must have no authority of any kind. One cannot trust a psychiatrist, guru, minister, or priest. They are all products of conditioning.  They study some old knowledge of what others have said and choose what they agree with and then analyze you. Never has the world been in greater psychological danger than in this present age.

To find yourself in all of this madness and to lead an inspired life is to question the whole structure of one’s psyche and one’s place in society. A person must be willing to live a different kind of life that is free from all intentions of external control psychology and carve one’s own path. This means, however, that the person must be willing to stand alone. That aloneness is not loneliness.  Loneliness comes out of one’s own sense of being isolated. The process of isolation is created by the very separate nature of thought that created your ego-self and all its demands to be entertained. Just look around you and see how many people have to be drunk or stoned in order to cope with their painful lives of isolation. For most people the weekend is time to cut lose, get hammered, and get numb to the pain of life. How can such a person ever find inspiration through drink or drugs?

To wake up to this is to see that you are acting as the generation before you acted. This generation just starts all the vices at a younger age and because of that they think that is freedom. If one has children one wants to end all war for ever. One wants them to grow up and live a sober life with inspiration and love. A person who is crawling from pub to pub is not taking their life seriously.  To be serious means that one is meditating all the time. True meditation is not sitting quietly and becoming some fictional character of one’s own self making, or to get away from the world to get in touch with oneself. You don’t have to go away or practice anything, be it silence or chanting, which is a spirituality imposed by the self.

In front of you daily is the demand to be in relationship with people and material things. It is here and the external psychology that we practice must be set aside to end all conflict. We must question and hold these questions so that one is in a state of learning all the time. Not learning about how to earn a better living but how to live without any conflict within and without. This is the greatest crisis and challenge facing humankind.  This journey we share is at the root of our consciousness. To remove all external control is to come to a movement inside one’s self that is truly an internal movement. We have forgotten how to see and instead attach our self to a country, flag, religion, family, or club, which is identification with external psychology. This seems internal but it is not because it is imposed from the outside, as all images are.

To care about all this is to set aside all images of oneself and others and face what one is at all times without any judgment. The entity that judges one’s self or another is the heart of the deepest core of conflict. When one is greedy or hurt one is greed or hurt. Self tries to create the illusion that you, the self, is a different entity from the greed or the hurt but you are not.  To observe this movement of greed or hurt as it is happening and watch how it creates the division between the two is the act of meditation. Only then can the machinery of thought that started external psychology that is self is put to death. In the ashes of external psychology a new movement is born.  A truly internal movement is. The whole of nature is in that movement and to be touched by it brings meaning and purpose to one’s life and then one is inspiration itself.  Thought, with all its cunning movement, is put to death. That inspiration is love, intelligence, and compassion, and happy are those that it comes to.

Coachbri

The morning was dull and cloudy but far across the lake the sun was breaking through the clouds in spotlight beams that gave the forest an enchantment. I took a path and walked deep into the woods for several hours, just taking it all in. As one walked, one forgot everything – time, distance, and comparing or naming anything. The brain seemed to be quiet and only for being startled by a noise of an animal or the call of the crow, I didn’t register anything.

The small uninhabited lake was clear, soft, and inviting. I removed my clothes and went in for a dip after sitting in the sun that I guess had been out for some time. The water was cool and delicious; I felt my body float on the top and drank in the afternoon sky. Small fish began to nibble on the hairs of my legs and arms and after a time I swam back to the shore as the body felt a chill. I sat for some time on a large log that someone had used to build a fire pit area that had gone without use for a long time.

The benediction of this day was felt all through the walk back to camp and into the evening. One could feel the order of things and one was in tune with it. This was not because one wanted to be or practiced something to get there.  The order felt was like music where the silence between notes is clear, full, and still. The brain and all its activity had come to an end. One stood and felt completely alone by not lonely; on the contrary, one felt rich and whole and yet active, like the point where the archer’s bow is pulled and ready for release but held suspended in quality. One wanted nothing, was nothing, and felt that nothingness was holding everything together.

I know these words are all wrong to but to put that benediction into words is like trying to put fire into a package and mail it to a friend – everything would just be burned away until nothing was left.  What is it that is true, unmovable, and that human beings can’t go to? All our religions, systems, and methods have become the most evil thing. This nothingness is full of love and compassion and strength. It dies and is born in the same moment. It is living and I am dead except for these brief periods that come unannounced and leave without a farewell.  It can’t be corrupted or invited for any invitation is arrogance and self- aggrandizement. These words are so feeble yet one must express it as a blessing.
Coachbri

Before we have the power to affect the universe, we must have the compassion to serve Her.  Life on earth is a template  for the universe.

Coach bri.

In our last session we discussed how thought plays such a large roll in creating and maintaining our problems.   You were very clear about this regarding fear of death. I can’t seem to remember what it was you said but it did scare the crap out of me! Now things keep coming back to me that we discussed.

Thinking is always on the move, looking to keep itself alive through activity. Thinking about something is thought’s occupation. It is always moving and when one watches or pays attention to thought it slows down. When one gives one’s whole attention to thought it ceases. It is like when you are in a car crash and things seem to happen in slow motion. Most of us only know the release from thought through some activity, competition, or adrenaline rush. If one uses concentration to quiet thought, it is freedom from and therefore a process of exclusion. Thought doesn’t want to end, and its primary directive is to find in some religious, political, or personal belief a place where it is permanent and secure. Thought creates all kinds of beliefs and material processes because it is itself a material process.

The chemical nature of thought is moving in an irrational pattern when it is used beyond the technical boundaries of its intended function. Where human relationship is concerned thinking is a mess. It creates groups of people and the illusion that we are separate beings in separate lands. Thought has created all the psychological problems of disconnection, fear, jealousy, hatred, greed, loneliness etc. Thought also creates the external psychology that most people practice to deal with there disconnected state only inflicting more damage and disconnection.  Thought creates the problem of disconnection and then tries to be the remedy to change it. You can’t use cancer to kill a cancer without creating the same result.

Our greatest challenge as human beings is to question everything that thought creates to make us better people, more loving etc. Thought is a movement that is caught in time.  Fear, jealousy, greed, and hatred are products of time because they are things we learn. Love and compassion are not the rooted in thought. They are another movement that is truly internal. Self is fear, jealousy, greed, hatred and is put into you by others. Where these are, love and compassion are not. To love another and reject someone else is not love.
Death is the ending of self and self is terrified of it own ending.  In the ending of thought one is no longer seeing through the eyes of time and one’s own limits. Then one is free and what is free is not held in the confines of death.

Coach bri

I heard you at the conference and was impressed by your conversation; you seemed to hold the whole group’s interest. Since then I wish I didn’t attend it. For some reason I was upset about others being verbal about their struggle and how they struggled with the truth of what you were saying. I saw myself becoming annoyed by these people and I wonder why.

So I impressed you. That was not my intention!

Wait. I’m not finished – there’s more! After being so upset with these people I saw that I was angry with them because their struggle was my struggle and I had separated myself from them. And, as you say, what you dislike in anyone is the self which is you. This has been the most difficult time in my life. You have turned me inside out and now I have no clue on how I should live my life.

So what you are saying, if I have understood you correctly, is you are at a place inside yourself where you feel unrest. You have got the spirit of discontent. This came to you because the conference you chose to attend had an impact on you and now you are questioning the very nature of that impact. Do I have it correctly?

Yes that is it! Exactly!

So you have come to see me because you’re upset with me?

I think so!

No, that is not good enough!

Maybe I thought that I needed to see you! Can I tell you how I feel now? When I look at you and the way you are, I feel different. I just want to cry, I feel that you love me or something because you see through me! I couldn’t hold your eyes at the conference. I felt you were emitting some kind of energy.

I am sorry but that is just your thinking brain trying to avoid the truth of the matter, and it wants to make it about me, and that is a lie! I am a human being full of flaws and so are you! We are just meeting halfway and talking openly about the facts of our lives. We are self-centered sir, both of us. This is where the change must happen. We must both be willing to talk about the facts of our self-centered, egotistical lives and see the problem in the world is us, face the challenge of change, in a way that is whole, and not another egoism.

Well that seems impossible!

This is what awakened in you after the conference, did it not? This state of the impossible task we human beings must face, if there is going to be a human race. You saw the center of your own misery and you don’t want to change, right? You love your habits, the pleasure they bring and in the same breath you hate them.

I hate what I keep doing to myself. You know some weekends I try to be alone with myself and I can’t. Last weekend I went to a pub and brought a book and read there because I just can’t take being alone. I, as you put it, poisoned myself with booze every day or smoke a joint; it is all the same – I am running.

I know! I know! This is what we have reduced life to. Acquiring things, titles, money, sex, drugs, whatever, because we can’t handle the poverty of our own condition.

And that condition is?

We are slaves to thought. Thinking is the dominant factor of our life, it rules us and it has conquered us and divided us, inside and outside!

I don’t get all that. Can you tell me more?

Only if you are really listening! Not agreeing or disagreeing – that anyone can do!

Yes I understood that at the conference! It was a shock at first, but I never listen to anyone really, just my own thinking because, as you said, I am arming my comeback. I learned that at the conference that I really don’t listen at all, not even to myself. I always want, as you said, something to strengthen my point of view. And if I disagree, my point of view is strengthened.

Yes and therefore divided from the other with their point of view. Very few people talk it out to explore, open it up and find out. All of our problems are common. We all are poisoned by the things of thought.

And they are?

You know them – you suffer as all human being do who have an egotistical self.

Well at the conference when you talked about how we are all looking for security in and about self, that rang true for me.

Much more, much much more!

Okay, what?

Are we all not suffering with greed, jealously, over indulgence in one thing or another, loneliness, fear in one form or another, demanding, power tripping, and mistreating the ones closest to us? You know all this, right?

Well that about sums it up!

So now you are lost, right? What does one do when they’re lost?

Well I guess the first thing is to find out where you are.

Yes and we know that! A flawed, contradicting, self-centered human being. Who wants to run away from the fact that their thinking has created and conditioned who they are by what they have or don’t have? Shallow, petty, demanding pleasure, intellectual or otherwise. Right? Do you see it?

Yes that is me! But I have periods of happiness, few and far between.

Happiness, or amusing yourself with pleasure?

Okay if I’m honest, pleasure, and joy once in a while.

Sorry, how do you know it is joy?

Well the best example was in the conference when you said beauty is anything, anytime where self isn’t. I have had that happen to me! Where I wasn’t all about myself and just let whatever was there be there. I wasn’t thinking a lot.

Yes in perception thought has no place! It may have a place after but not as one perceives.

I think I get that!

So you are lost and the world says don’t be! Do something, solve a problem, create a problem to solve

Yes that is me!

No, it is the condition of all of mankind – to create problems and solve them. It gives us a feeling we are progressing. Towards what?

I have no idea! I have being doing that to keep my shitty fearful life working but… I have no wisdom!

And so you are chasing after wisdom?

Well I guess I know that the last thing I am is wise!

What tells you that?

Well how can I be! Most of my discussion with you points out that I am basically irrational.

Yes and seeing that is the beginning of wisdom!

What is?

Do you see that human beings think they are rational? They are addicted to drink, smoke, sex, work, acquiring things, money, power, ambition, wanting to be envied, or rich, or famous. And the things they will do to achieve – they hurt, kill over for a flag, which is nothing but a piece of cloth that is colored! They live in fear yet they think they are rational. To see that one is irrational is the beginning of rationality. That is wise! Do you see it?

Yes I think so but language seems to be wrong or misleading.

Yes thought is never the thing it is describing. So one is lost! Be lost fully and you know where you are lost. Then from being lost, question the very direction you want to move it since it may be another irrational direction. Just be still, open, and perceive it all without choice! In that awareness there is feeling and movement, not as a causation of thought. In that movement compassion is action and its own direction, apart from the process of thinking.

Thank you so much for your time!

You must come again!

I will. Thank you!

Coach bri

I have come to see you because of something you said at a Friday Night Group.
One of the members of this group was there and he was causing a lot of problems, judging people and trying to get a fight going. He seems so unable to, as you call it, evaluate himself. He was very good at evaluating them but there came a point in that meeting where you locked eyes with him and told him to leave himself alone. Now there are two things that I noticed in him: One, was he was very afraid of you and secondly, the more important one, was how you seem to be aware of things that I am not. So my question is this: What is this awareness all about?

Okay, so you wish to understand this thing called awareness. Can I ask why?

Well, if I was more aware I think I would get more out of things, I guess?

So your inquiry is to get something out of this awareness. Is that not a self-centered approach to the problem?

Okay, yes it is. So what?

Is awareness a self-centered movement? Or is awareness stopped and non-existent when one is self-centered?

I kinda see what you mean but not fully.

In order to find out what awareness is, must we not find out what awareness is not? Then from there discover how unaware we are.

I am not sure! I feel aware sometimes. But then it doesn’t seem to last long.

Of course!

Why do you say ‘of course’?

Anything willful, planned, by effort, by imagining or by drugs cannot make one aware.

So you are saying it can’t be forced.

Yes but much more than that! Awareness has no cause, being unaware has a cause.

Which is what? What is the cause of unawareness then?

To be preoccupied sir. That is simple then isn’t it?

When you put it that way yes! So then why are we so unaware?

The brain is always active, thinking sir, it is on override. Thinking enters places where it has little value or meaning.

Those places are?

Thinking has very little value in the area of human relationship. It gives one the illusion of relationship because you think like someone else or like a group of people. This has been our downfall sir. Surely you see that!

I think I do but it seems too deep for me.

Yes that is another thing that thinking does to avoid the issue.

What issue? And I think you have just called me lazy.

No sir, the fact is we are lazy! You are only not lazy when there is some pleasure in it for you, when you find the motivation, no sir?

Yes I see that. But relationship?

Sir, relationship through thinking is only association. People who are united through thinking are united through beliefs, be they religious, political, philosophical, or economic, it is all so superficial. Relationship implies being connected, contacting, being in movement with.

So can you say I am connected through my faith or religion?

No sir, that is not true!

Why not?

That is simple to see! Because being connected through anything that thinking creates like religion, philosophy, etc, is going to separate you from some other group which then leads to conflict and war. That has been our history of life on this planet – lot of things put together by thinking and the denial of relationship because of those things.

That is amazing!

Yes! If you see it and remain with it! Relationship in life is the most important thing. Not the job you have or the car you drive. But a deep connection first sir with your being. You are not the things thinking says you are. You are far deeper and richer than that. To see the fact of that one must refuse to enter any relationship or give importance to any relationship that is based on what thinking has put together.

Then how do I live Bri?

Sir, most people are struggling for human connection, socially we have great difficulty finding love and security.

No doubt about that!

See why sir? Because the things that are supposed to bring us security, like money, a job, religion, my family, bring conflict and conformity. When I don’t conform to the demands of another, I am left out! Thrown out! Relationship and connection come about when thinking is quiet, when I have no judgment, no preconceived idea about myself and or another. This is the movement of compassion; it arises in the ashes of all my self-centered thinking. So many people are unaware sir of what is happening, how quickly life comes and goes and at the end of our years most people’s brains are worn out. They are dazed and confused by their conflictual lives. Conflict breeds its own energy, rising out of the mechanical process of thought which fuels the war machine and has been doing that for one hundred thousand years. Relationship, connection is a more subtle movement which blooms in awareness. That awareness is not something that has any relationship to thinking – one cannot think oneself aware. When you are in discord or conflict, hurt, jealously, fear, greed, we poison everything we touch. To be aware of these movements as they are happening in you without trying to get rid of them is meditation. In that meditation awareness is the cornerstone of all relationship, thinking is perceived and torn out. In that we are free and that freedom is the movement of love, compassion and intelligence.

You strike a hard bargain.

No sir, bargaining is another form of trying to get what we want. I want nothing from you! Just see the truth of what is being said. It has nothing to do with me really. I’m not trying to convince you of anything.

Well you’re doing a damn good job!

Maybe you just see the truth of what is being said.

Yes maybe! Thanks. May I come again?

Of course!

Coach bri

When raising your children it is always best not to expect them to deal with their internal problem by addicting to some external drug or substance. You can only request this when you aren’t hiding from your own pain through prescription drugs or self-medicating.

The worst parents are those who, when young, party their brains out, drive under the influence, and get caught up in all kinds of mischief. Then, when they have teens, they insist their children don’t do as they did, or worse, they try to hide it from them, or tell them they have been through all that and now know better so they better listen. This is an indication of the lack of relationship and our self-centered view of life.

In all situations dealing with children, compassion is the only movement that brings into view the leadership and guidance needed to grow character.

Children are taught to be bullies as a reaction to their forced conformity. This sets in motion the process of entitlement and leads to their reluctance and mediocrity, where video games, drugs and booze are the only place where they find refuge.

Kids need more relationship in the form of human contact, where they direct the process and learning, as caregivers determine the outcome.

Our schools must be a place where kids learn about relationship before anything else. Without relationship whatever they learn will act as a poison that builds their self-interest and will not nurture their talents. Education is the process of drawing out our gifts and sharing them with the world, while not oppressing anyone else’s gifts.

Coach bri

The problem facing humanity is that we refuse to be aware of the fact that emotionally we are in our infancy and intellectually we are toddlers. Therefore, we can’t embrace our true spirituality. We see ourselves as having God-like qualities and psychic gifts, which reveals our adolescence. Old time religions, or the new cults of Tolle, The Secret, Osho, and many others, erect in us hope. This hope is something we are told to be thankful for. Hope is needed when someone has cancer and you want them to recover. But hope springs eternal, which prevents us from radical change or transformation. We have hoped for the alcoholic to stop drinking or the addict to stop using.

We have waited thousands of centuries for human beings to finish with war and have hoped that the poor will be fed and will know the delight of clean clothes and a good meal. What most human beings want is to read someone else’s book and get their answers so they can put meaning to their pitiful, meaningless lives. We don’t want to face the fact that in one moment we can be completely irrational and in the next moment be kind. We truly don’t want to do our own work, to find resolve and solve our own lives as they unfold, with our own evaluation. Whatever the popular pop-spiritual movement is that Oprah peddles, it only adds to the central confusion of creating an authority to bring about change. Change on the personal level is never a matter of looking through the eyes of knowledge of another. It comes about by revelation and insight that is in no way the product of thought or thinking. It is not the expression of one’s talents or convictions, or self-centered beliefs. Real change is without intention. It is not heading in one direction and then choosing another. Change comes because one perceives the fact of one’s own disorder without any resistance. One breaks the pattern of looking at knowledge as a factor of change by seeing that knowledge is the factor of conformity and the historical pattern of society based in our own deception. Real change is discovery that flows out of innocence toward innocence itself.

No one can change anyone else and when one sets aside the need for change and brings one’s attention to discover what is really going on, that discovery is the factor of change, which is liberation from knowledge. We cannot examine our own heart by using the tools of the brain, or someone else’s knowledge. Education is to draw out that which is within and limits us from the central fact of human existence. We are not who we as defined by knowledge. We have no country or religion, or political association; they are all forces of disorder creating the greatest organized disorder, war.

Peace on earth is our ability to be in relationship with each other by emptying the content that we so greedily cling too. Peace is to create a life out of nothingness. Peace is to be and live into your talent and reach your human potential, which, my good friends, is the flowering of LOVE AND COMPASSION in whatever you do.

Coach bri

Bill Maher is an intelligent man. However, all of his arguments are still put together by a fragmented view of the world. He says some very powerful things that point to America’s deception. Yet the real deception in the world is the external conditioning that creates the fragmenting and deception of our own psychological sickness. Patriotism to any flag creates chaos that robs people of their brotherhood and connectedness. To think from any religious point of view is to put limitations on the power of human possibility for insight. The things of thinking can never in themselves bring about fundamental change! Thought cannot perceive or reach anything deeper than itself. So any movement, be it political, economic, or religious, will never go to the core of the problem that creates all this human disorder. Unless we stop being poisoned by the cultures we live in, or start to raise our children to be citizens of the earth, who don’t have to spend their life conforming to the culture we live in, we will remain self-centered, egocentric and violent. The picture the world has of mental health is of a person able to conform to a pattern of society and succeed in it by making a their fortune, whatever that may be. They forgot that actual success in this society is truly an indication of sickness. Less than 1% of the richest people in the world have 85% of the world’s wealth. This past bailout will end up, when it is all over, costing America trillions of dollars. Once we see we are stimulating the economy for the rich, by the rich, we will also see that we are costing coming generations hardship.

The world economy is based on war and the machine of war. This is nothing more than a reflection of our own consciousness, which is always setting up conflict, or the inability to get along. Bill Maher is a comedian who does a great job of pointing out fragmentation and holding it up for us all to look at. By doing this well he casts the idea into our minds that because we see the fragmentation or sickness of this world is it does something. BUT IT DOES NOT.

The only thing that will change the human experience is to remove from our hearts the things of the mind. That is the journey we are all on. To empty is to have no religion or political identification and to not let conflict become the dictator of thought itself. The pattern set out by thought is the wrong pattern. Any pattern thought projects itself into is a place where it doesn’t belong. Compassion, insight, and love can use thought and then thought has a purpose. Without compassion conflict will never end.

Coach bri