CoachBri’s Blog

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

If we could look at the world and see what it means to live in this world and reach our potential, I don’t think many people would say they are reaching it. Humankind seems to be willing to change technology at a colossal rate. However, we still live with the psychology of self and all its domination that keeps us behaving with animal instincts in the ways we parent, manage people in the work place, teach in our schools, coach athletes and keep a hold over our spouses. This self psychology is made by the process called thinking and our brain, being dominated by this self psychology, is the brainwashing that is the source of time. Humankind fails to see that the brain, being rooted in time, is the cause of all our problems inside and outside, by the endless need to become something better that we are.

But what are the facts? We have taken somewhere around 14 billion years to evolve to the state we are now, called humans. This is a measurement created by humans based on their need to put meaning to their existence. At some point in our evolution it was important to become more skilled at survival or one would die. Sometimes improving your position outside in society is natural. Unfortunately human beings extended this principal inwardly and concluded that “I too must become better”. There we formed a manmade self and the whole psychology of its function.

“Every generation blames the one before, all of their suffering comes beating at your door” (Mike and the Mechanics, “The Living Years”). This is a profound statement that encapsulates why human beings are caught in a prison of their own making called the psychology of self. The study of psychology is the so-called science of human behavior. But we have forgotten that this self we have created is a product of thought. Thinking is its mother. Self is born out of thought because thinking is a movement from experience, which gives us knowledge, which then creates memories.  Thinking, and words, are the past, knowledge is the past, memories are the past. Therefore thinking is rooted in the past and rooted in time. Self is a movement of time.

We run from the fact that self, being a movement of the past thinking it’s a movement in the present, is the source of all our anxiety. As self begins to see it is not real but a product of instincts being sustained by the thinking process, a transformation happens. That transformation is the dismantling of the self and all its beliefs, conclusions and images. These are all the children of thinking, which is a movement from the past, which poisons the present. A poisoned present is the psychology of self in action. The action is a process that creates conflict because it has formed all the religions, the political parties, philosophies, countries, etc. This for centuries is our madness leading to self’s biggest organized accomplishment: organized mass murder called war.

Therefore we are at war everyday because self and its psychology is that thing that dominates our life.  Few people are interested in getting at the core of the problem because they refuse to cease all movement or the so called spiritual movement rooted in knowledge. Knowledge, practiced in any direction is the most destructive force of a religious or spiritual life as it creates tradition and all tradition binds humankind to a movement in time. Love, compassion, and insight are movements not created by thought or bound by time. That is the movement lacking in and around our lives and the world at large. We, as separate individuals, are responsible for this!

Declan Brian O’Reilly