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

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