theeffect Podcasts David Brisbin

Dave Brisbin 5.26.24
Carl Jung said that the first half of life is dedicated to forming a healthy ego; second half is going inward and letting go of it. We spend our first half looking for meaning, purpose, identity through accomplishment and acquisition—outward performances that mean less and less over time. We enter our second half when we realize that true meaning comes from a completely different direction. Jesus said that kingdom, his shorthand for second half spirituality, will never be found out there somewhere. It’s already within us.

Authentic spirituality isn’t acquired. It’s relinquished.

All the meaning and purpose we can stand is already within us, along with our true identities. It’s like ground water, deep and inexhaustible, always there, but not at the surface. You dig your well through layers of accrued illusions and patterns of thought and behavior. When Jesus says no one can follow him who doesn’t give up all they have; when he tells of men who find treasure in a field or at the market and run off to sell all they own to buy it, he is saying the same. Until we become willing to relinquish all we have gathered and count as our egoic identity, we’ll never find who we are not, so we can begin to know who we really are.

It’s an inside-out gospel that’s easy to miss because we want to miss it. Most churches are more concerned with finding power in God that will vanquish enemies, fix circumstances, right wrongs, armor against vulnerability, create prosperity... Jesus’ descent, letting go, powerlessness, vulnerability, invisibility of servanthood is not attractive.

Fifty years ago, Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message, meaning that the means we use to communicate affects us more than the content itself. Jesus poured his message into the medium of a personal experience of perfect oneness—truth that would make us free once all illusion of separation was removed. The effect of that experience was recorded in the gospels, which we read and claim is true. But ink on paper is not truth, it’s a different medium. It becomes true once poured back into its original medium—the experience of our own lives.

Dave Brisbin 5.19.24
So easy to lose the forest in the trees. Especially with scripture. We dig deep into the weeds of each verse, pull it apart, imagine meaning that may not have anything to do with the larger passage or chapter, let alone the whole book.

A famous writer says unless you can describe the whole of your book in one sentence, you won’t write convincingly. You’ll meander, each part not contributing to the whole. The bible is actually sixty-six books, an anthology. Even harder to pull back enough to see a single line capturing its meaning—each verse revealing more of the whole. I’ve heard said that the bible is a love letter from God. A bit overly simplistic and sentimental for me, but on the right track. Maybe this: the bible traces the nature, development, and realization of our relationship with God. And if God is love, and love is identification with the beloved, then what we’re realizing is the oneness at the core of all our relationships.

The gospels are all about this oneness. Jesus is one with the Father and the Way to the Father. He calls his Way kingdom, the quality of a life lived in full presence and connection…oneness. Everything he teaches relates back to kingdom and kingdom to the oneness at the heart of relationship. He tells us not to worry—focusing on the future destroys presence. He tells us not to judge—objectifying others destroys connection.

When he tells us not to give what is holy to dogs or pearls of wisdom teaching to pigs because they will trample it or turn and tear us to pieces, it sounds condescending and has been used to exclude those not of our “faith.” But is that an interpretation consistent with the whole of Matthew’s gospel, with Jesus, the whole book? If we know the whole, we can reverse engineer the part, fine tune our interpretation of any part by never losing sight of the whole.

Jesus is one with the whole, never excludes, accepts everyone where they are, never judging where they should be. Takes the time presence requires to first establish connection before healing or instruction. If we seek kingdom first—presence and connection—the whole will always be in the part.

Dave Brisbin 5.12.24
It’s heartbreaking that many women in the second halves of their lives would be expressing remorse, but after dedicating their first halves to child and home, they find no concrete way to calculate the value of their life’s work. No degrees or trophies, certainly no pensions or even social security payouts.

Our society doesn’t reward the most important contributions we make to our children and each other, those made from the traditionally feminine traits of acceptance, compassion, vulnerability. We’re all over the traditionally masculine ones—performance, accomplishment, acquisition—and though our churches may praise vulnerability and acceptance, they still reward the performers, male or female. All institutions do. Performers make the material world go round.

Church is where we should be balancing the material and spiritual, masculine and feminine…especially when it comes to our notion of God. Yet God is almost exclusively portrayed as Father, with the implication of maleness, emphasis on roles of judge, jury, executioner. Though God is called Father in Judeo-Christian scripture, there is much more going on under the hood. Spirit and kingdom are feminine words in Hebrew, making spirit, “she” and kingdom, queendom. Wisdom is personified as female, and God anthropomorphized as a loving mother over and over. Jews understood God as the perfect balance, the perfect parent—knowledge balanced with wisdom, accomplishment with relationship. Jesus did too, calling Father God abba, underscoring intimate relationship, and always leading with mother before father at every human encounter.

We can only be healthy and balanced in Jesus’ order: mother before father, compassion before justice, acceptance before performance. Our minds are the repository for all the loss and fear that makes us believe we’re not worthy, so as long as God remains in our minds alone, he remains “he”—a distant father. Experiencing God as mother folds her into our embrace.

Until we experience God from both sides, we are loved and lost at the same time—never knowing how we’re loved and never valuing what hasn’t earned degree or pension.

Dave Brisbin 5.5.24
Do we ever change another person? Save them?

Sometimes people thank me or our community for saving them, placing them on a lifesaving path. It’s wonderful to be recognized as part of their journey, and I thank them, but if the conversation goes on long enough, I’ll remind that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That if they changed directions, it was because they were ready to change, and I was the millionth guy over their bridge, winning the prize of being present when the miracle occurred. They were a change waiting to happen, and if I hadn’t shown up, someone else would have.

This is not an attempt at false humility, but the realization that being saved is not the passive waiting for a savior, but the willingness to participate in the saving change our lives require. Important distinction for both saviors and save-ees. Must be careful about developing savior complexes. We can help people, help change circumstances, but all we can provide is support and information—no change until acted upon. The most important things in life can’t be transferred; they must be experienced.

You’re thinking we can give love? In those five love languages, we can give loving words, service, gifts, time, and touch…more support and information until we experience them as coming from love over time. Even Jesus never said he changed or saved anyone. He was careful, “Your faith has made you whole.” We pray for God to save us, but if God changed us unilaterally, violated free will, love would no longer be real—not God’s, not ours. Love is not love if not freely chosen, and God’s perfect love makes us perfectly free or it’s not perfect. God cannot make us love him and be love at the same time.

We can help create an environment for change, but we are no one’s savior. And no one is our savior, passively understood. If we’re waiting for a savior, we’re not ready to be saved, for the teacher to appear. Salvation is not God’s decision about us…that choice has always been made in our favor. Salvation is our decision about God. Whether to trust enough, risk the steps needed to experience the love that is already ours.

Dave Brisbin 4.28.24
When Jesus says do not judge so you won’t be judged, that your way of judging will be used on you, we modern Westerners hear that in predictable ways. First, we think of judging in the sense of condemning or criticizing others, and we think of it punitively—that if we do wrong (judge), someone (God) will wrong us back as punishment. We also imagine our punishment happening sometime in the future, most likely after death. But thinking like this misses the essential point Jesus is making.

The reality we believe is the reality we endure.

Understanding that we live in a thought-world of our own creation is key to a life of meaning, purpose, and sense of identity. Unconscious beliefs programmed into us from earliest childhood form the way we think, our “judgment” of reality. As Jesus says, if our “eye” (way of seeing in Aramaic) is clear (not coloring reality) then we are full of light (harmony and clarity) but if not, we are “judged” by our own way of seeing. It all happens simultaneously. The limitations set by the whole of our belief system are already imposed on us before we ever try to impose them on anyone/thing else.

God isn’t judging us at some point in the future as retribution for our judgments now. We are doing it to ourselves unawares. Our judgments define our reality, which if our eye is not clear, can be a personal hell. Jesus is doing some cognitive behavioral therapy with us, helping us become aware of our judgments—thoughts and behavior—how they affect our experience and relationships, and how to begin clearing our eyes to see what is true.

When Jesus says do not worry or judge, he is pointing us to the symptoms of our belief systems. The judgments we make on others, conditions, and moments, are the consequence of unresolved fears that are really judging us, creating a world separated from the only place we’ll ever know the truth…that love, not fear, is the basis of life. Fear causes us to chase the horizons of past and future as substitute for meaning, but this moment right herenow is the only place we’ll ever meet the truth of God’s presence.

If we’re judging it, we’re not here. Not now.

Dave Brisbin 4.21.24
When Thomas Merton gave a final address to his monastic community before retiring to a hermitage in 1965, he was famous worldwide for his spiritual writings. His speech was recorded on audio tape, and I ran across a short clip in which he was talking about the fact that we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, that God is always shining through. God is in everything and everyone, every event, and it’s impossible to be without God. Ever.

We don’t see this fact because we make the world opaque by becoming attached to, preoccupied with things we regard as individual objects—analyzing them as if unwrapping packages, layers of opaque paper, all while missing the larger transparent world. We get to bottom of the pile of paper, only to find nothing there; we were only unwrapping our own thoughts about something, not the thing itself. It’s not until we loosen our grip and lose ourselves in the experience of something that we can stop thinking of it as a thing in isolation and see it as part of the whole of creation, and all of creation, God, shining through its transparency.

Our attachments keep us from seeing the whole in all the parts. Constantly taking thought keeps our world opaque and hides the truth…no coincidence that taking thought is the literal meaning of the word translated as worry in a series of Jesus’ sayings. He tells us not to take thought, to worry about our lives, what we will eat, drink, or wear. He points to birds who work constantly but don’t store in barns, staying rooted in the present moment without taking thought.

To worry is to live in fear. Fear creates the obsessive need to acquire. In telling us that if we want life that is eternally alive we need to sell everything we own, Jesus is telling us we need to sever our attachments to individual objects in order to see the whole transparent world at once. No matter how essential a thing may seem, if we’re unwrapping it, the world is opaque. An ancient elder said that he sold the book—his treasured bible—that told him to sell everything and give to the poor.

When we can do that, God can shine through our transparent world.