Question # 1

Male, age  24
Occupation: Surveyor
I do a lot of reading and I am not religious by any sense of the word. I have been working for this past year in a new job. I get to spend lots of time alone, often days on end in the wild. The company I work for pays me well and when I return to civilization I reward my hours of hard work with partying, gadgets, and dumb pursuits. My heart feels empty and when I look at life and see all the lies and corruption, it feels shitty.  I couldn’t believe the last bailout and the rich powerful banks that created the whole thing, with lies after lies. I thought Obama would be different but he is like all the rest it seems. He operated in the interest of big business and now the citizens, the taxpayers, get ripped off. It seems all the religions have failed. The Catholic Church is full of the sexual abuse, yet they claim they are close to God! The Muslims and all the violence, the field of psychiatry filled with doctors who have no idea about helping people, just drug pushers for drug companies and inventing diseases so they sound smart. The world is what it is and I feel maybe it has always been this way. But here I am, almost 25 and what I see of humans, including myself, is just so pathetic.  We may do great things in medicine, space the final frontier and all that, but really for what? So we can destroy that planet too?  I read your web site sometimes and I feel a bit better.  Then again it may offer me a place to hide. What is life about Coach Bri? Because apart from getting laid, partying, and buying what I want when I want it, it all seems so pointless. Yet I play, waiting for some experience to jolt my life into something true or real. My apology for all the words but for some reason I think you care.

Answer:

Humankind has lived this way since the dawn of time. We are so deeply conditioned to live from a very small part of our brain. We think we are educated because we get degrees, which is just another from of corruption sanctified by the establishment of the ego. We have inherited all the knowledge of the experts and professors who are caught in the same egocentric game as the beggar on the street. Both have a conditioned point of view, created by thinking. We are a melting pot of so many things which are the creation of the thinking process and through that process we make life mean something and cling to it like a starving dog, looking for its next meal.

What matters in this life is not what you become but what you refuse to become, as all becoming is the conditioned point of view, and the common way of living. What matters is not what I think or what anyone else thinks of your life because, that too is the conditioning of authority passed down from man’s deep confusion.  No one can set a human being free; one has to do it for oneself because one has to come to terms with this ugly petty existence.

Most people out of their confusion cultivate faith. The very movement of faith is the heart of our darkness.  The story of humankind over the ages is the pursuit of some state of being where there is perfect security.  This leads a person, through their beliefs, given or self-invented, to kill another in the name of faith. To be secure we have made our minds into accumulating commercial machines. We have made meditation, the practice of sitting down, listening to music, breathing deeply and using our imagination to find a few moments of peace. Any peace that is self-induced soon becomes the source of our attachment and another movement of seeking security. Anything thought creates from spiritual methods, rituals, traditions and faiths can never lead to freedom but are the source of all bondage and lead to fear.

Most human beings, when they deal with death, cling to the conditioned cultural images and beliefs as a means of running from the fear of the unknown.  Running from the unknown we cling to things and know we are caught in our own superficiality. This drives us to drink, drug, or gamble, or some other excitement that promises us relief from our own pettiness.

Most human beings are full of anxiety and we don’t see we create this anxiety because we are a slave to thought. Thought has developed the process of intellect and is refining it every generation. We think that the more letters we have after our name the more secure we are. Security is what thought creates, however brilliant or simple it may be, is the source of anxiety. A person who is willing to step out of this madness, not as a reaction (because all reaction is anxiety and superficiality) must at seeing the disorder in themselves step out of the known into the unknown. In doing so everything is organized against you. Yes, your wife, your friends, your workplace, everything. Only then in the emptying process is there a shift from an external psychology to an internal one. That movement is the source of everything. It is like the dark matter of the universe that is holding everything together.

Coach Bri

It was a great warm day for October. The leaves performed a ballet in the gentle wind. The beauty of the colors in such high contrast took one out of oneself for some time. I felt the woods and how it spoke to me. The cords of my heart were strung so softly, reminding me of the beauty of death and the release of love.

Everything in nature reaches its potential. As they die the leaves change color and beautify the landscape.  Even the evergreens look more majestic intermixed with all the maples and oaks and shrubbery.  As the seasons change the intelligence of the earth is tireless and without any self-concern. It takes what we throw at it and will cleanse itself of all our abuses. This truly is love. Love is never about acquiring someone or something, it simply is.  It is never full of duty or expectation. It is an overused word and underplayed in action and will always be so when love is the result of the thinking process. One can’t think oneself to love and the jealous, the greedy, and the powerful can never know her.

Love is a radical state of being that cannot be found in anyone’s vision of will or practice. As a person seeks to practice mindfulness (the propaganda of the present day) it can never bring about the state of love. Mindfulness can bring about a more orderly society, which is much needed. But that state of mindfulness is but a shadow of the thing that is love and therefore mindfulness is limited.

Once the leaf is cut from the source, the tree, it falls to the ground and dries up.  One can’t come to love through any practice, for the entity that takes up the practice is the same entity that creates all the disorder in oneself and the world.  The death of the ego self is the only thing that brings about order, and that order is death itself. Only in death is there true transformation and renewal. That renewal is the leaf that falls to the forest floor without any drama or self-assertion. The leaves and their death are food for the next generation born out of decay and the ashes of time. Death is everywhere, in any moment we can not only die a physical death, but that is the natural state of things.

Psychological death is what is behind all the spiritual movements but they have tied themselves to the chain of rituals, traditions, and ceremonies in order to bring about a sense of security. Love is the living movement of wisdom and the glue of truth. That movement is venerable and completely insecure and never do the two ever meet. To sit in the forest and watch the life of it and see that I am the intruder, opens the mind to something beyond the petty little self the I is. Like the tree that drops its leaves in the fall, we need to drop all that self is, not looking for an outcome of something better. For the vain pursuit of self is always to become something more powerful, more aware, more loving, or more enlightened.

As one moves out of the stillness and benediction of the forest, self seeks to claw its way back up from the cavern of my brain.  Self’s job is to kill attention through being inattentive. A human being is the only thing on the planet that takes thought and gives it qualities that it doesn’t possess. When we are inattentive to thought all disorder begins and sustains itself. If each thought is cut from the source, thought loses all its importance and the brain is silent with itself because it is empty. That emptiness is a renewal and in the ashes of that death something new is and happy are those who find it.

Coachbri

Everything has potential but there is one potential that human beings have that is not the product of thinking or thought. You can’t come to it with the practice of yoga or rituals or sacraments. It is not found through any buzz or chemical intake. This potential is straight potential, without direction or influence. It can’t be practiced or cultivated. It is not found in a book unless it wants to be. It can leave a mark in a painting, sculpture, or poem if examined by simplicity and free from the cultivated intellect of the art critic. It is without cause and can affect anything it wants to yet no one or no thing can go to it. It moves all yet can’t be moved. These simple words are not it. It says write yet hides in what is written. This potential has love and compassion as its children. It holds when all else breaks, it is also full and deeply empty. From this potential we sprang and to it we fall. It beats life and death in the same stroke. It cannot be used, or corrupted.

Coach bri