CoachBri’s Blog

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

Human beings are like pudding stones. We are filled with a large range of behaviors, attitudes, intentions that are maintaining us as self-serving. We want to be famous, respected and revered. We are addicted to our own sense of importance; therefore in all things we are indifferent to the needs of others and this leads to the practice of external control or the need to control others. To have control over another is a sign of our own shallow intoxication with our self. The need to exert that control creates every form of conformity and violence and the egoism of oppression. Removing all external psychology is the greatest challenge in our life. This is very difficult to do because all of society is organized with external psychology. We are taught to identify with the things created by thinking, therefore we think we know what is best for others, how they should change, and we spend our life reacting and therefore keep ourselves in conflict with someone or something. We don’t want to realize that we are in a prison of our own desire, and desire and its pursuit keep external control in operation.

Desire for anything is a process of thinking and what desire promises never lives up to its promise. The more one develops an appetite for anything and feeds it, the more one can never find satisfaction. There is no internal desire put together by thought. Internal desire is a movement of how we feel in the moment that indicates to us if the behavior we are choosing in this moment is good and helpful to us or painful and detrimental to us. Internal psychology is a process that holds thinking in its place. Thinking out of its place has created all this conflict and the disconnection that happens in it. We can always practice.

Coach Bri

I was thinking about what you have said at Friday night group, and I had a flash of what I think may be that order you were talking about. What I saw was that I have been raised in a so-called religious home. But when I think of all the external control applied by my parents I feel that the level of criticism that I received and now practice on my family is what you say is my disorder. I think I see this. My son acts out of his disorder and I add to it. Do I have this correct?

What is the disorder you practice on your son?

Well, it is the same as I practiced on my husband! That anger and frustration!

Yes but are you not the anger and frustration, which is the fact of your disorder?

Yes, so what do I do now? Practice internal psychology, right?

So what do you do in your anger and frustration?

As you have said a thousand times, I choose a behavior that kills the relationships so I am caught in the thinking mode and I have to act it out on someone.

Can you see that choosing a predisposed position is one action that again reinforces the thinking process and external psychology?

I don’t follow that! Do you mean that practicing an internal psychology is also part of disorder?

No, I don’t think you can willfully practice an internal psychology.

I don’t understand. Can you make it clearer?

One must come to terms with something!

And that something is?

Your brain, my brain, is caught in a web called consciousness. It is made up of a self and every person has a self. Self is a product of memory, which is caught in time because self is a product of experience.

Ok I get that! Self is a group of experiences that I gather in the brain as memory. But I have a sense that I have aged and am wiser now than I was 10 years ago!

Yes but you’re not!

How do you know that?

You just have more knowledge about your self but you are still caught in your animal instincts and sustain them by using thought.

Okay I am more sustaining now than I was when I was 20.

Yes, true, but that is proof your not wiser!

I don’t get this then!!

Yes I know! Look at it! Or don’t look – the choice is yours.

No I want to look at it! It is just you piss me off so much.

Yes I know!

See! So you’re doing it on purpose!

No! You are angry now with me, right? Or your son or husband right?

Yes! Yes!

Who is it that is angry?

My self at your self!

So is your self different from your anger?

Yes, there is anger then there is me, my self acting out the anger!

What if you is anger!

Me is anger? I don’t get that.

You see, external control psychology has built the self out of memory. Self is a bundle of memory stored in the brain called self.

Okay, I see that and I guess it sounds right!

This sense of self is formed from the outside!
If I asked you, who you are, you would say what?

That I am me!

And who is you!

I would say I am a Canadian, a mother, a wife!

Yes and where did you learn that?

I guess from my parents!

Yes, but partly from your environment or society.

Okay!

And that is external from you!

What do you mean by that, “external from you”?

Well, you were conditioned to think you are Canadian.

I am a Canadian!

Yes, when you accept who you are governed by the external thinking. If you were born in the same place 500 years ago, would you still be a Canadian?

Of course I would!

Canada didn’t exist as Canada 500 years ago. The land did but not the conditioning called Canada.

Yes, I see what you’re driving at! How about my beliefs?

They are all put in you then you modify them to suit your experience.

Yes, but I have a belief about the universal energy and reincarnation! That is real!

Real yes, but untrue.

What do you mean? It is true to me. I live by it!

Yes each person lives according to his own belief! But why? Why is believing so important to us? To you or any human being?

Because it gives life meaning?

Okay, how? It only gives you a sense of false security!

Look I believe what I believe and I have the … damn…

Right to! And that right gives one a sense of security, no?

And what is wrong with feeling secure?

Well isn’t the demand for security a sign of insecurity!

Okay I think I see that?

Think you see that? Isn’t every problem you have with your husband and son you looking for security and if they only did what you said, lived how you want them to, there would be no conflict?

Yes okay, I see it! I see it! I get it!

What is it you get?

When I have problems with them we are in conflict and I see I’m the source of that conflict. I get that when my belief is there for them my self is there. The feeling of anger and frustration is the self, which is me in action.

Yes, now what can you do about that?

I don’t know? My life is this!

Yes it is! Now can I see that trying to change in any way is to avoid my inner ugliness and the fact that me, anger, frustration is all one clump of self or ego. So if I try to do anything to self, to change, is the wrong approach. This is self judging self, trying to get out of self, which strengthens self!

You know I think I do that! Strange as it is! That is my life.

Okay, so see the fact and remain with the fact that the self-centered movement is one movement. Fear is self, hurt is self etc. You can’t do anything about it. If you do you are creating more conflict. If you are willing to end all conflict, self and its beliefs no longer fuel external psychology and one comes upon a deep movement not the product of the self. That movement brings order and that order is a new beginning.

I have lots to think about! Thank you!!!

You’re welcome.

Coach bri