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 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