CoachBri’s Blog

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

It was a warm October afternoon and the trees were at the pinnacle of their color. The contrast between the evergreens and the orange, red and yellow trees was so gentle on the eyes. Every once in a while, a gust of wind would pass through the trees and send the leaves falling of the earth. Each leaf had a dance of their own but they fell with such grace and dignity. At the end of their life they fell from the thing that gave them life to the ground, to become a source of life for the Earth. Everything in nature seems to have its own intelligence and psyche. Everything seems to fulfill its potential with such grace and beauty. In the sunroom there were hundreds of ladybugs making their journey up and down the window in an endless cycle. Every so often they would meet a fly and then they would move around each other as not to interfere. Even here, in the life of insects, there seemed to be an intelligence or understanding that allowed each to exist together and share the same window.

Human beings tend to make everything into enormous affair. We are so cluttered with all the things of thinking it is almost impossible for us to understand or have compassion for anyone or anything. Over the last six weeks mankind’s greed has come to a pinnacle. The mortgage fiasco in the United States and the billion-dollar bailouts paid by governments will again only operate in the interests of the rich. The division between rich and the poor is forever widening and now both the Canadian and American elections, full of hypocrisy, move away from the central question of how the government will lead people out of poverty. We all have heard that the source of good government is its ability to take care of its weakest member. In today’s politics and economic greed, the external psychology of human beings keeps the poor from finding bridges out of poverty.

I have received a ton of e-mails lately from people asking me to comment on the mortgage fiasco and the election. I am really intrigued why people want to know what I think. What really matters is what they think. What is at the root of their thoughts and actions? I don’t see myself as a very political person. But I have answered these questions as best as I can. Politics, religion, sports and fashion are just distractions. If we are not involved heavily in any one of these four, we are probably involved in other entertainments. Why is it that we need to be so entertained! Is it because through these entertainments we are kept away from the central question? Are we as human beings reaching our potential? Very few people are really interested in their own transformation.

Coach bri

The park was small and quiet. A large river flowed on both sides of the park. After the downpour of rain, the smell of sewage was strong whenever the wind blew through a few tall solitary spaced trees. An old man, walking bent over with a cane, slowly made himself over to the small bench made for one person to sit in the serenity of the green space. As he sat, his hands and movements seemed to be well practised and his long nimble fingers placed the cane comfortably beside him and then he took a deep unencumbered breath. As his chest began to rise and fall he appeared to be somewhat more relaxed and the stress of his weathered face seemed to be removed and lost its hardness. He seemed to sit there for quite some time oblivious to everything around. He seemed very comfortable where he sat and even his feet were placed in a certain position that was known him. The city of Osaka was full of bustle and noise yet in this small quiet green space there seemed to be a break from the known, as well as the noise.

How important it is for us as human beings to be unoccupied and have a mind that is free of all external and internal pressure. Most human beings are occupied all the time with trying to achieve goals, accumulate ideas, money, power, sex or even trying to find the love that they want. We never take the time to look at the fact that we are always so busy inwardly and occupied with so many things that our brain becomes tired, monotonous, and caught in a rut. This rut that human beings are in has become our mediocrity, our prison and our false need of security. We think that through a routine, rituals, traditions, we are safe and protected, protected from hurt, fear and loneliness and all our psychological self-centered problems.

Humankind has been unable to solve many of our external problems such as war, poverty and destroying the environment. These problems themselves are created because inwardly in each of our daily lives conflict, greed, and convenience rule. Each human being has a self and that self is of the greatest importance. We spend most of our time satisfying the self and all its egocentric pursuits. This self is always pursuing pleasure and running away from pain.

Human beings have the greatest difficulty coming to terms with the fact that self is the dominant thing in our lives. When self is the dominant thing in life we lose all sense of relationship. Therefore we are unable to see ourselves as we are because the you that is is defined by your relationship with people and things. We are unable to solve the external problems because we cannot face our internal problems and in this is the revolution that interests me the most. To gather great wealth, have a good position in society, to be well respected for the letters that one has after their name – these are the pursuits of most people. These pursuits are in fact the pursuits of our ancestors and yet they continue in modern world today and are the central cause of the direction we’re headed. We will start looking more and more to other planets in the solar system and spread our poison rather than face ourselves and solve the noise within us.

Everything in life needs the space in order to grow. Even the most beautiful music in the world can be defined by the space between the notes. Inwardly human beings need space. This space means that the noise of thought is not the main occupation of the brain. And then it follows that most human beings would be terrified of such a movement because inwardly their self would not be a priority. Most religions unfortunately have caught onto this and have used methods and systems to get out of thinking, but they cannot see that the methods and systems that they’re imposing are also put together by thinking. Therefore the state of silence that they are trying to achieve is in fact imposed by the noise of thinking. People are happiest when they are doing something they love, mainly being creative. When we are creative, that creativity is in fact a thoughtless action.

As I sat and watched the old man leave and watched another person come and take his place, I began to feel the mechanical mess of ritual. A ritual is something you do over and over that is void of all creativity. In order to be creative, all thinking must come to an end and action flows out of the deep awareness and silence that is not the cultivation of thinking. That action is whole, healthy and responsible. That action is not the action of accumulation or gathering and not part of any premeditated result. In that action there is no regret or flaw because it is void of self. That I believe is the action necessary for change. That action cannot be brought into being through any type of effort, system or method.

I watched the sun slowly move behind the clouds and could feel the coming of another rain. As the sun slowly moved behind the clouds the buildings on the horizon took on different shades of red and gray. There in the beauty of the earth and in this buildings have their place. Several large swans were making their way slowly up the river. Every once in a while they began to honk loudly and then scatter about. On the other side of the river standing between two metal beams was a large beautiful heron. It stood on one of its spindly legs and was absolutely still. In that stillness was its precision. Every so often at lightning speed it would snatch a small fish from the river and then remained perfectly still again. It was a benediction in the current which was full of music and love.

Coach bri