theeffect Podcasts

David Brisbin

5.0 (8)
Religion & Spirituality
Updated Biweekly

Audio podcasts delivered at theeffect church in San Clemente, CA. theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way. See more at theeffect.org.

Jun 21

Holy Probability

Dave Brisbin 6.21.26 At the extremes, physical reality is utterly different than the world we perceive each day. Unlike our solar system with distinct planets neatly orbiting the sun, inside an atom, an electron doesn’t orbit a nucleus, but has a form that can only be described as a cloud of probability. It doesn’t orbit. It surrounds the nucleus like a fog. Quantumly speaking, electrons are in superposition. In this state, subatomic particles don’t exist in any one place. There is only a certain probability of being here as opposed to there…until we interact with them, measure them. Then superposition collapses, and from our point of view, the particle is forced to “choose” a position. Before we interact, all positions and energy states are possible. Within the atom, the particle is everywhere and nowhere and yet always right herenow. Ancient Hebrews described God hovering over the moment of creation, a conscious interaction that collapsed the void into the positions of space, time, and matter—a version of reality we can observe and measure. They imagined God’s presence as a pillar of cloud, right herenow among them, but without form that could be pinpointed or represented. And they were forbidden to try. They knew God is always in the cloud. We could add, in superposition, the probability of everywhere and nowhere. When we interact with an electron, force it out of the cloud, we imagine we can measure and understand it. But we are not seeing the electron in its natural state, as it is when no one is looking. When we interact with God, force God out of the cloud, we imagine a version of God we can measure, but it’s no longer God we see, just a representation we can imagine. The extremes of the physical universe sit closer to eternity, showing us if we want to experience ultimate reality, God, as they really are, we can’t force them out of the cloud. We enter the cloud ourselves. Raise our frequency till we inhabit the everywhere and nowhere of unwatched electrons. This is prayer as Jesus prayed—his only Way to the Father that we can also travel once we accept there is no form to measure, only the cloud to breathe.

41 min
Jun 14

A Field of Forgiveness

Dave Brisbin 6.14.26 God is love. That’s not just a statement, it’s a principle. Attributes we experience as the infinite Source of everything go far beyond qualities we use to describe. They point at essence, a table of indivisible elements, commodities that comprise the whole. If God is love, then God is also everything else that supports the oneness that love is: restoration, reconciliation, salvation, forgiveness. God doesn’t perform them as verbs. God is them as nouns. Even grammar can’t keep up. If God is forgiveness, then God doesn’t forgive. Forgiveness is the essence of the field of God’s presence. Enter the field, enter forgiveness. There is no prerequisite for forgiveness. No contrition, confession, penance required. No precondition beyond what it takes any of us to enter the field. Entering the field, being fully present, means being fully aware, vulnerable, humble, willing to submit to something greater than self. Which happen to be the same qualities that forgive—free us from guilt or victimhood. Jesus never says, I forgive you. He says, your sins are forgiven or your faith has made you whole. Not an action, a recognition of having entered the field. This is not a distinction without a difference. It makes all the difference in how we understand our relationship with God. Jesus tells the story of laborers who go to the field to work early in the morning and all through the day, some only working an hour before quitting time. They are all paid the same. The early workers are outraged. So are we. But the point is, the pay is entering the field, not a reward for time served. They were paid the moment they entered the experience. To believe God does or doesn’t forgive based on performance is to fear God may withhold the love and acceptance of forgiveness. But God can’t withhold what God is. God is one, oneness is love, love is forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t absolution bestowed. It’s the field we inhabit. Forgiveness is the journey we take to become present to the field. Like the stages of grief, the healing is the journey. No one can take it for us or heal apart from it. We’re as forgiven as we want to be.

50 min
Jun 7

Two Boats and a Helicopter

Dave Brisbin 6.7.26 Man on his roof as flood waters rise. A boat paddles by—jump in, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Another boat—jump in, we’ll save you. No, God will save me. A helicopter hovers extending a rope ladder—climb up, and we’ll save you. No, God will save me. Flood comes up, and the man drowns. Face to face with God, he asks, why didn’t you save me? I sent two boats and a helicopter, what more did you want? How much time and angst do we spend asking for things we already possess? That are already here? We’ve been taught a zero-sum model of spirituality that enshrines scarcity over abundance. We’ve been taught a legal model of spiritual relationship that embeds a reward and punishment mindset. We’ve been taught an anthropomorphic God, operating out of human emotion with anger, resentment, retribution much more immediate than love and compassion. We’ve been taught to fear. Fear that God withholds until conditions are met. That contrition, confession, and penance are the legal means to forgiveness—a commodity for acceptance. But in the original language of the gospels, forgiveness and freedom are the same word, and those same scriptures tell us God is love. If God is love, and forgiveness is freedom, then the fear, scarcity, reward and punishment we were taught are wildly off point. If God is love, God doesn’t choose to love or withhold; God exists as the indivisible oneness we call love. When we are hurt or hurt others, all that stands between our alienation and a reclaimed awareness of that love is forgiveness. Which means, God doesn’t forgive; God exists as indivisible restoration to the oneness we call forgiveness. We aren’t forgiven as an act God performs or not, we simply walk into the freedom from victimization that is God’s presence. Or not. We seek forgiveness as a legal transaction, but forgiveness is a person. A person completely free from anything that would stop the flow of forgiveness. To step into the presence of that person is to experience all that person is. God has always and forever sent two boats and a helicopter. All we have to do is climb in. We’re as forgiven as we want to be.

44 min
May 30

Separation Anxiety

Dave Brisbin 5.31.26 Sin is central to Western Christianity. From original sin—understood as a genetic state of depravity, a separation from God unbridgeable by human effort—to our own personal sins—understood as unlawful behavior—all we can do is wait to be saved by an outside power—understood as an event, a granting of approval triggered by ritual practice or mental assent to doctrinal beliefs. I know…putting it that way is a bit hyperbolic. But only a bit. Especially in contrast to Eastern Christianity, which understands salvation as a process of theosis—a life of becoming more and more God-like in awareness, intent, daily presence and practice. By default, we’re all legalists, believing we must earn everything we get. That’s the physical reality of life around us, and human authority always uses reward/punishment to control behavior through fear. By the third century, the church had codified Jesus’ message into more law, ironically missing the fact that Jesus constantly battled the religious legal system of his day that kept the people from their theosis, from direct experience of God. Sin is not behavior at all. Sin is the state of being separated. John sees Jesus as the one who takes away the sin of the world. Sin singular. Not endless acts of unlawful behavior, but the human condition, the egoic perception of separateness. Sin, hataha, is missing the mark of the fullness and oneness of God. The “sin” of becoming aware of self as a separate entity, represented in the Garden by eating of the tree, creates the fear that drives unlawful behavior. We say sin leads to separation, but sin is separation itself. Any act that leads to separation is sinful, but to focus on behavior, on symptom, is to lose sight of the cause—our separation anxiety. The Good News is that God’s love is not legal, conditional, but the bedrock reality that any sense of separation is illusion. Pure egoic projection. To wake us from our illusion of separation, take away our sin, is Jesus’ mission. For if we believe everything must be earned, nothing is freely received. We’re either guilty or entitled. Never grateful. Never free to pursue our theosis.

47 min
May 24

It's Appointed Time

Dave Brisbin 5.24.26 When Jesus says, do not judge, for in the way that you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you, he is saying something immense. But we don’t get it. Squeezed through our default perspective, which is always legal, we see life through a performance-based, reward and punishment paradigm that peels off just one of the possible meanings of Jesus’ saying: that if we consciously judge/condemn others, we will be judged back. And through our legal lens, God is the one doing the retaliatory judging in some karma-like way. But the Aramaic language itself and Jesus as a Jewish mystic point to much more. Our minds are judging machines. That’s all they do. Compare, contrast, calculate odds for advantage and survival, dualistically judging each moment and everything in it as good or bad for our needs and agenda. Good and evil appear mutually exclusive and morally opposed against the standards we have absorbed since childhood. And those standards objectify all of life around us, create heroes and villains, preferences and aversions, and a sense of separation from everything we encounter. Like an exhausting game of chess, every move we make is calculated toward a never-ending series of outcomes always present in our minds but never the moment. In Aramaic, taba and bisha, good and evil, are not legal terms, they are relational. Literally meaning ripe and unripe, the highest good and evil for an ancient, agrarian society, they form a continuum from immaturity to maturity—the ability to nourish, preserve life and relationship. To begin to see good and evil as a continuum of functionality is a first step into the flow of life and away from constant judging, objectifying, separating. The full reach of Jesus’ statement is to master the automatic, unconscious working of our minds that takes us out of the flow of every moment, out of connection with everything we encounter. Until we can use our minds as the tools they are, tempered with the ability to stop judging, seeing life as pairs of opposites, we remain stalled along our Way from bisha to taba…and our own sweet ripeness.

48 min
May 16

Reclaim Awareness

Dave Brisbin 5.17.26 Jesus never told his friends to worship him. He told them to follow him…not conceptually or theologically or even physically, but to follow his Way of living and seeing. To worship Jesus as savior is a passive waiting for transformation to be gifted from outside in, a static bestowal for which we conform, not transform. But Jesus insists that the awakening that is Kingdom is not out there somewhere to be entered from outside in. To follow Jesus is to actively emulate his Way of becoming attuned to an experience of God’s presence directly, from inside out. Following Jesus’ Way develops the one skill that changes everything, or better, opens the door to everything: awareness—the ability to notice thought itself. To be able to step back from the torrent of our minds’ activity, to observe it without identifying with it any longer. To realize that our thoughts aren’t us, just the by-product of what minds do. Without this one skill nothing else along Jesus’ Way is available because, carried along by thoughts and their attendant emotions, we can’t be present, see what is really sharing the moment with us, give what love requires. Cognitively fused with unconscious beliefs and fears, we’re trapped inside a bubble that extends only as far as the inside of our eyelids. When Jesus says from the cross, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing, he is speaking to this unaware state. When he urges to sell all we possess, he’s showing us how to strip down to naked awareness of a truth that makes us free. He starts with the law. As long as unquestioned thoughts believe blind obedience is enough, will contractually gain God’s favor, we’re not free, not aware that passive conformance doesn’t even scratch the active surface of transformation. Yet Jesus isn’t abolishing. He deconstructs only what is necessary to reclaim awareness. That’s the lesson. Not deconstruction for its own sake, but to graduate from blind obedience to thoughts that rule like law, to develop that one skill…to notice our thoughts, not as mandates to obey, but a threshold to cross on the Way to reclaim our awareness and remember who we are.

50 min
May 10

The All of God

Dave Brisbin 5.10.26 God is love. What does that even mean? If we define love as nondual presence, consummate oneness, then the scriptures are trying to tell us that God is fully identified with each and every speck of creation. That God, us, everything are ultimately of one and the same substance. Love is the experience of that oneness, awareness of that identity. To be in love is to be relieved of any sense of self, the generator and container of the illusion of separateness. Judeo-Christian tradition demands this oneness of God, but God as one creates no end of conceptual problems for us living in a dualistic world of endless paradox. To explain the existence of evil, we split God into many gods, some good, some bad, or we post Satan to oppose God’s goodness. We split God into three to explain God experienced also in human form and unseen spirit. We split God in two by calling him Father, implying a glaring feminine space left unoccupied. Does scripture imply any such unbalanced rift in God? Though God is always referred to linguistically as masculine, God is not always portrayed that way. God’s wisdom, hockhmah, is a feminine word, and wisdom is portrayed as female throughout Hebrew scripture. Ruach, God’s spirit, shekinah, presence, and malkutha, kingdom are also feminine words…making spirit, she, and kingdom, queendom. God is often anthropomorphized as female, both human and animal, offering nurturing affection in contrast to the impartial justice of the king. The Hebrew mind couldn’t conceive of father without mother. Hebrew words for father and mother mean one who brings strength to the house and the glue that holds the family together—the blending of accomplishment, performance, structure with relationship, compassion, affection. Both necessary, complementary, a paradox that must never be resolved. God is the eternal oscillation between father and mother, and only in the oscillation do we find the perfect parent. Resolution is a return to duality, separation. God is nondual presence, the blurring of all attributes into one. To experience that oneness, the loss of all sense of separateness is to bathe in all of God.

46 min
May 3

Mercy and Justice

Dave Brisbin 5.3.26 We think we understand the scriptures because we can read them in plain English. But just as we never want to see our sausage being made, we have no idea the interpretive choices being made to translate ancient Eastern texts for modern Western minds. A word for word translation between any two languages is not possible. We’re not just translating words, but an Agreement of meaning between cultures and worldviews. Until we understand the Agreement, we won’t understand the words. When literally translated into English, Jesus’ sayings make no sense, create wrong impressions, even seem immoral. We either pretend we understand or file them on a back shelf until we’re ready to dig deeper. Jesus says that just an angry thought makes us guilty before the court, that we should not resist an evil person—if slapped on the right cheek, offer the other as well; if sued for our coat, give our shirt as well; if forced to go one mile, go two. He says we will always have the poor with us—uncompassionate, to accept oppressive taxation—unjust, tells a man to sell everything he has earned and to give whatever anyone asks of you—irresponsible. What’s going on? Part of the Agreement is context, the context of a saying. We live in two contexts simultaneously: the micro and macro. Our daily interactions are micro—one on one—but always couched in the larger macro context of the group. In the macro, love looks like justice, because without equality, the integrity of the group is lost. But in the micro, love looks like mercy and compassion. Without that, there is no relationship. Jesus always points to perfect love. His mission is to convey that love. So Jesus’ sayings are always code switching between micro and macro, mercy and justice, bringing what love requires to each moment in whatever context. Confusion arises when we are reading through the wrong context. We’re geared toward justice, the macro law we’ve learned to obey, but God loves us always in the micro, mercifully spirit to spirit. God’s love is not just. Its mercy unbalances the scales of justice in favor of each of us. Seems irresponsible…the price of perfection.

50 min

5

out of 5

8 Ratings

Audio podcasts delivered at theeffect church in San Clemente, CA. theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way. See more at theeffect.org.

Creator

David Brisbin
Years Active

2018 - 2026
Episodes

500
Rating

Clean
Copyright

© All rights reserved
Show Website

theeffect Podcasts