True North with Dave Brisbin

Dave Brisbin
  • 5.0 (7)
  • RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

  1. The All of God

    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
  2. Mercy and Justice

    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
  3. Seeing Kingdom

    APR 26

    Seeing Kingdom

    Dave Brisbin 4.26.26 What’s worse than not knowing something really important, the trauma of uncertainty? Not knowing that you don’t know is worse. Complete unawareness of a really important thing is a step back from, a block to the ability to even begin seeking. And what’s worse than that? Thinking that you do know when you don’t. Thinking you already know closes your mind, creates resistance when presented with anything new. This is how it is with Kingdom—the most important thing Jesus is trying to convey. His entire message hangs on the experience of what he calls the Kingdom of God, and arguably, his entire ministry is an extended definition of what he means by that phrase. His friends thought they knew Kingdom. For centuries they’d been taught it was a physical kingdom to be created by a warrior messiah who would reestablish a sovereign Israel, fulfilling God’s promise to Abraham. We think we know kingdom too. That it’s heaven, a reward after death we await if we’ve kept the contract implied by Law and church doctrine. After all, Matthew calls it the Kingdom of Heaven, but we don’t know that heaven/shemaya, was a euphemism Jews used to avoid saying the name of God. The irony is, technically we’re right…but we think we know heaven too. And even though Kingdom, heaven, God are equivalent in Jewish thought, we don’t know what we don’t know. Without understanding what Jesus means by heaven or Kingdom, we’ll never understand how he’s leading us to God. Kingdom/malkutha is not a place or territory, but the experience of king and people in symbiosis, resonating together. The people don’t obey, they share the king’s vision and values. What are those? God/Alaha means unity, oneness, identification with all. Heaven/shemaya is immersion in that unity right herenow. If we’re waiting for heaven, we’re not in kingdom. Or God. Kingdom-heaven-God, is herenow, embedded in the field through which we walk. If we’re waiting for something, we won’t see it. Jesus is trying to show us it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you think at all. Until you let go of everything you think you know, you can’t see what is already here.

    51 min
  4. Beyond Obedience

    APR 19

    Beyond Obedience

    Dave Brisbin 4.19.26 When we beg Jesus to save us, we’re missing the point of salvation. Salvation is not given to us. Can’t be. Salvation is experiencing, remembering, the primal truth that we already have everything there is from a God who is love, withholds nothing. And what is that everything? Heaven? Understood as God’s acceptance, identification with us, yes, heaven. Right now? Here? Doesn’t look like heaven… And it won’t until we’ve experienced that heaven isn’t a place we’re sent, it’s remembering who we are in God’s presence. Which raises another question. What if heaven is not the end of our journey, but the beginning? We think of heaven as the reward for a life of obedience, the ultimate paycheck. But at every turn, Jesus pounds against obedience as the basis of relationship with God. Obedience is motivated by fear of punishment, and fear can only breed more fear, never love. Jesus’ Way is the process of casting out the need for fear by experiencing a perfect love we already possess. And truth is, we can’t begin a process that requires stripping off everything to which we’ve clung for security our entire lives, until we’re convinced we’re already accepted—at least enough to overcome the fear of the first step. This is the Good News. That there is no bad news. Jesus leads with it, with acceptance. Always. Touches lepers before healing, reconciles with the unlawful before instructing, serves anyone in his path, whether woman, child, wealthy, poor, gentile, Roman. Acceptance first. Heaven first. It has to be. We can never obey our way to heaven. Reinforcing fear of punishment blocks the experience of love. But if the acceptance of heaven is experienced, and for even a moment we remember we are God’s beloved, obedience transforms into an expression of love, the joy of our identification with God-as-love. It has the same effect as obedience, but we have graduated far beyond it. The means we use must match the ends we seek. We’ll never end with heaven if we don’t start with it first. It’s all herenow: all God has to give and all we are to receive. This is the Good News. It costs us everything to comprehend. Good trade.

    41 min
  5. Back in Count

    APR 12

    Back in Count

    In baseball, you count absolutely everything. Gets pretty obsessive, but if you love baseball, you learn to love counting too. Who knew it’s the same with religion? The “people of the book,” the ancient Hebrews who wrote the scriptures Christians cherish as well, counted everything. But their numbers didn’t have to be accurate to be true. Literal accuracy was not the point. Hebrew numbers, like their letters, carried meaning, and Hebrew letters were also numbered, so words had numbers that had meaning, and counts of time, people, things, had meaning too. It was a complex system for conveying meaning encoded into our scripture, and if we are to understand original intent, we need to pay attention to the counting. We just finished counting the forty days of Lent—meaning a time of trial and testing into rebirth. Now with Easter passed, Jesus risen, seems we should be done counting. But Easter Sunday started a new count, one built on the Hebrew counting between their ancient barley and wheat harvests, Passover and Shavu’ot, Exodus and giving of the Law—meaning a gradual graduation from physical liberation to spiritual freedom. Meaning built into the Christian counting between Easter and Pentecost. Both traditions count seven weeks of seven, 49 plus one day, 50. The Christian tradition breaks this down to forty plus ten: forty days with the risen Jesus on earth, ten more to integrate Jesus’ unseen spirit before Pentecost. Symbolic, not literal. We think of salvation as an event, a moment when God bestows acceptance, but scriptures show the experience of Jesus’ followers as gradually becoming ready to see that salvation is not given at all. It is experienced, realized, remembered... No one recognizes the risen Jesus until intimacy is re-experienced in a period of adjustment to altered states of awareness, from physical presence to unseen spirit—until we can remember the Pentecost moment, full awareness, is possible. All God has is already here, within. The shape of our journey is a counting until we’re ready to see. The counting gives structure, symbolic meaning, and the reminder that we’re all in the count.

    52 min
  6. Where to Look

    APR 5

    Where to Look

    Dave Brisbin 4.5.26 There’s not a single tenet of Christian doctrine that’s not contested. Even within Christianity. The Resurrection is no exception. Christians agree that Jesus lives, but not how…physically, spiritually, collectively, some way we can’t imagine? Ultimately, it’s a matter of faith shaped by how literally we read scripture, but where can we go for guidance to meaning? Of course, the gospels show us just where to look. We focus on the supernatural miracle, debating veracity and mechanics, but the gospels focus on the effect of the miracle, not the event itself. The Resurrection happens offstage, no details, the story picking up afterward. The question the gospels are implying is not whether we believe the Resurrection, but what difference it makes that we believe. And that difference is not realized in mental assent to an offstage event, but a process that stretches from Easter Sunday to Pentecost. A fascinating detail the gospels do preserve is that no one recognizes the risen Jesus. We wonder whether he looked different, but that misses the gospels’ point: that seeing the risen Jesus is a process of becoming ready to see the impossible, a process grounded in intimacy. Mary hears her name called in tones she’d heard a thousand times; Clopas sees Jesus break bread as he had a thousand more; for Peter, he’s cooking breakfast. The gospels show the process of re-experiencing intimacy—always the proof of identity for any human. The meaning of Resurrection is not out there in history or doctrine, but within us, in every intimate detail of our lives. Gospels ask: Why do you look for the living among the dead? Life is motion. No motion, no life. Set beliefs are static, dead. If we look for the risen Jesus in books and beliefs, he is not there, any more than he was in the tomb. The gospels are showing us where to look—in the heart of every day life. If we can’t find Jesus in the moving miracle of life herenow, we’ve missed the meaning of Resurrection. Jesus saw his Father in every intimate detail of his life. His friends couldn’t see he had risen until they saw him in every detail of theirs. And neither will we.

    24 min
  7. Disguised as Life

    MAR 29

    Disguised as Life

    Dave Brisbin 3.29.26 Gospels show Jesus riding into Jerusalem not on a horse, as would a conquering king, not on a donkey, which would have meant peace, but on the colt of a donkey…even more unassuming. The people cheer, beg him to save them, lay their cloaks along his path, wave palm branches—greetings for a savior king—while Roman and Jewish authorities see threat of sedition and plan accordingly. No one is paying attention, seeing reflections of their own agendas, not the person and scene playing out in the streets. What the church has called a triumphal entry, Jesus called a tragedy. He wept over the city saying the people had no idea of the things that make for peace, that they missed the hour of their visitation. The writers of the gospels, who had come to see where Jesus was pointing, wanted us not to miss our own opportunity to see something radically different, to crack the first stronghold blocking our way to the truth behind Jesus’ message. This is the significance of Palm Sunday. Seeing around our own egoic identity, past the desires, expectations, and compulsions such identity creates, seeing through our ego-filter to the truth of things as they really are, the truth of ourselves, who we really are is the first step, without which we can go no further along Jesus’ Way. Jesus is showing who he really is in action, word, symbol, every tool at hand, revealing an unassuming presence, the stance of a servant, the opposite of a powerful savior come to fix our circumstances by force. Begging Jesus to save us misses the whole point of salvation. Salvation isn’t passive, isn’t given or bestowed. It is experienced…or not. Jesus’ person and message is an invitation to follow the Way of experiencing the truth, the liberation that salvation is. Mother Teresa put it this way: I have an opportunity to be with Jesus 24 hours a day. Seeking the face of God in everything, everyone, all the time, his hand in every happening…especially in the lowly appearance of the poor. Each of them is Jesus in disguise. Jesus is always riding into our lives. Every moment is Palm Sunday. Everything we need is all around us disguised as life.

    48 min
  8. Waking Up

    MAR 22

    Waking Up

    Dave Brisbin 3.22.26 I’ve been on the whole of Lent about how the holy grail of all spiritual work, of Jesus’ teaching, even our most ancient liturgical rites is…awareness. Waking up inside waking life. Until we can poke our heads above the waterline of our egoic selves, we’re only ever seeing the inside of our eyelids, nothing of the real that is not only all around us, but within as well. We can’t see the air; fish can’t see the water. Hopefully our odds are better than theirs. But what happens when we do wake up? Blissful sweetness and light? Jesus sounds an alarm. He didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword that would cut within our own families first. To help decode, the word for peace Jesus uses here is not shalom—he’s the prince of that—but shayna, calm, tranquility. The immediate context is the rift that inevitably stresses our closest relationships after radical transformation, but more deeply, there is an interior rift that opens when we’re no longer experiencing life the way we once did. Some authors put it this way: There's a peculiar suffering that comes with awareness. A kind of exile that happens not when you leave the world, but when you begin to truly see it. Conversations that once felt normal feel empty. Environments that once felt safe start to feel small. Awakening stretches your awareness until the old version of your life no longer fits the same way. This creates a profound loneliness—not of being physically alone, but of being awake in a world that's sleeping. If this is true, why would we ever take the red pill and wake up? Pulling off a blindfold in sunlight is painful, but as eyes adjust, would we ever opt for blindness? Becoming aware is transitionally painful, and if the awareness is merely conceptual, cognitive, it can harden into a jaded sense of separation, even condescension with life. But if we carry our awareness into momentary experience, we fall back in love with life, now with the deeper knowing we’re not above anything. We’re part of that whole. Awareness is waking up to remember who we are. Insignificant parts of an infinite whole that considers each part the center of its universe.

    49 min
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About

True North with Dave Brisbin is a podcast about the things that can bring you back to center, whether God, spirituality, community or family or all of them. Never esoteric or abstract for its own sake; always practical and full of common sense, we’re interested in exploring the effect of what we believe on our lives and questioning what we believe in light of the deep connection we’re meant to live. Dave Brisbin is an author, speaker, coach, and songwriter. He is the teaching pastor of theeffect, a faith community and recovery ministry in San Clemente, CA and executive director of Encompass Recovery, an addiction treatment center in San Juan Capistrano. For more on finding deeper spiritual expression free from limiting beliefs and behavior, go to davebrisbin.com.

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