theeffect Podcasts

Dave Brisbin 3.20.22

I’ve been going on about Jesus as a poet. A great poet. And if that sounds strange and unfamiliar, how about considering that Jesus was a great psychologist too? Jesus deeply understands the human condition and human psychological development, and in the poetic language of his day and choosing, articulates a Way to psychological health and balance for which we all crave and pay big money these days.

Jesus’ three temptations in the wilderness beautifully symbolize the three “energy centers” of Thomas Keating or Maslow’s deficiency needs—security and survival, esteem and affection, power and control. In earliest childhood, we develop unconscious, emotional programs to meet these needs that then emerge into consciousness as our attachments and aversions: things we like and don’t like, cling to for happiness or cling to not clinging to. Compulsive thought and behavior patterns are driven by these attachments and aversions, which create triggering events when frustrated in any way.

Jesus’ time in the wilderness was his drilling down to identify and meet the basic needs that were driving his compulsions in truly transcendent Way. If you think Jesus was above such compulsions, consider why the gospels would preserve such a story with Jesus pushed to exhaustion and starvation by the effort. Jesus’ Way is not theology. It’s braving the difficult passage to truth that makes us free of the compulsions that enslave us and keep us apart from each other and God.

When Jesus says no parent, or God by extension, will give their child a stone if asked for a loaf of bread or a snake if asked for a fish, he is giving us first steps along the Way. Distinguishing between objects that may look similar from a distance—seeing which give live and which take it away—is how we build the awareness to see which of our cherished attachments and aversions are really meeting our most basic needs. No one gives up what they’ve clung to entire lives until they can see past compulsive snakes and stones to the freedom of sustained life that loaves and fish represent.

Dave Brisbin 3.13.22

Jesus is a very good poet. Like all good poets, he never tries to tell us what can’t be rationally told, but helps us sneak up on the feel of the experience. In short word-bursts full of image and metaphor, he shows us the effect of life lived as one with everyone and everything, while evoking the radical difference of the experience of getting there. He says, “the kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field,” and we’re lost in a sea of literalism. The man already had the treasure. Why hide it again? Why sell everything to buy the field?

Sometimes another tradition can come to our rescue, say the same thing in words unfamiliar enough to cut through centuries of assumptions and show us the truth in our own. Ancient Chinese tradition tells the story of a young disciple despairing that he’ll ever understand his teachers’ meaning. Old master tells him: “If you persist in trying to attain what is never attained (it is life’s gift); if you persist in making effort to obtain what effort cannot get; if you persist in reasoning about what cannot be understood, you will be destroyed by the very thing you seek. To know when to stop, to know when you can get no further by your own action. This is the right beginning.”

The journey to spiritual awakening is unlike any other journey we take. It won’t feel familiar. If it does, we’re on a different path. If we approach spiritual awakening as a task, something to find and acquire, we have forgotten that we already know where the treasure is. Not out there somewhere, but in this field, within ourselves, hiding in plain sight. The journey is not about acquiring. It’s about selling.

Poet Jesus knows that through mental effort and study we can find the treasure’s location. But it won’t matter. Concepts are easy. Until we stop acquiring and begin the painful process of selling everything that is inconsistent with the treasure, we’ll never own the field. The treasure is nothing without the field. The field is where we live.

Dave Brisbin 3.6.22

One of the world’s top psychiatry journals published a study on the source of emotional disorders, and the takeaway was that “depression and anxiety are linked to an intolerance of uncertainty.” Intolerance of uncertainty. Says it all. Don’t know if we needed a study for that, but good to know the science validates common sense. We can’t even know tomorrow’s weather with certainty: uncertainty creates fear, and inability to accept fear as part of life causes us either to seek more and more information to answer endless questions or just pretend the questions are already answered—both of which create emotional disorder.

Irony is, as we’re working to eradicate uncertainty from life, it is uncertainty that is the engine of spiritual and psychological growth. It is only at the end of logic, the precipice of rational thought when one more step takes us into complete unknown that a quantum leap, spiritual awakening, radical change is possible. Buddhists call this the “great doubt,” the point of complete surrender to something entirely new, the breakthrough to “beginner’s mind,” seeing everything as if for the first time.

To come to doubt everything we think we know, the very assumptions we accept as reality, is what Jesus calls his Way, the only way to Father/Truth. Jesus is cultivating great doubt when he tells us to sell everything, pick up our cross daily and deny ourselves, hate father and mother and all familiar conventions of life, let the dead bury the dead—all images of that one step beyond the precipice, the surrender to something old wineskins could never contain.

Every person of faith described in scripture takes this same necessary step into uncertainty: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Paul, Peter, Elijah. Only after Elijah runs from the spectacular certainty of Mt. Carmel into the great doubt of the wilderness of Mt. Sinai, does he recognize God in a still, small voice. Beyond the certainty of wind, fire, and earthquake, there is an utter difference only utter silence can describe. Only those reborn as utterly unknowing and uncertain as they were the first time, will hear.

Dave Brisbin 2.27.22

A pastor came with us to Mexico to deliver food and supplies to one of the poorest areas along the US border. Our organization supplied five dining rooms that served before-school breakfasts, and the women who served the children every morning insisted on serving us lunch, because that was who they were. After lunch the pastor sat the women down and through an interpreter, led them through the “sinner’s prayer,” the ritual he believed brought them into the Christian fold and made them acceptable to God. The women dutifully did as he asked, but came to me later highly insulted. What went wrong?

With every good intention but without knowing them, the pastor judged what they needed according to his standard of faith. He didn’t know they were all devout Catholics or Protestants who rose in the dark every morning to hours of work preparing food, cleaning for the next day, loving those kids as their own expression of gospel. Without taking time to find out whether they wanted or needed his help, he went home feeling he did well, leaving me to repair relationships as best I could.

When Jesus tells us not to give what is holy to dogs or throw our pearls before pigs, what sounds so condescending and exclusionary is really just addressing what went wrong in Mexico. In Jesus’ culture, what was holy was the “ring,” the symbol for Torah and Law: since Israel was the bride of Yahweh, Torah was the ring that bound them to God. Pearls were the symbol of the wisdom gleaned from the study of Torah. Don’t push the law on someone who is opposed or antagonistic, or they will turn and tear you to pieces. Don’t teach wisdom to someone who is unprepared, or they will trample it, unrecognized and unassimilated.

Judging always keeps us at least arm’s length from each other. Discernment requires a dive into the experience of relationship to see what love requires. In Mexico, the women far exceeded our poor understanding of gospel. They needed our food and supplies, but not our pearls and rings.

We needed to know the difference.

Dave Brisbin 2.20.22

Does anyone ever really change another person? Fix them? Lord knows we try. And though we can persuade, manipulate, even force people to do what we think they should, that’s compliance or obedience, but not change. We can help people: support them, talk to them, change circumstances, create the best environment for change, but any one of us changes only at the moment we’re ready. And no one can make us ready.

All we can really give each other is support and information. Support can be material or emotional; information is conceptual. As good as those can be, the most important things in life are non-transferable because they are experiential. No one can give us the ability to play guitar, speak a language, ride a bike, trust, love, change, because no one can give us the experience of hours of immersion and relationship. We don’t change or fix others, and Jesus never said he did either. Instead of I heal you or I forgive you, he says your faith has made you whole, your sins are forgiven. Jesus recognizes when change has taken place, but knows he can only show the door, open the door, lead the horse to water. The rest is up to each of us.

When Jesus tells us not to judge, that the way we judge is the way we will be judged ourselves, is his poetic way of saying we need to grow our awareness past the sum of information that has been transferred to us—what we think we know that limits our perception of reality. To practice discernment instead, judgment based on lived experience, is to immerse in relationship with people and life that changes the way we see and judge. To take the beam out of our own eye before trying to take the speck out of another’s eye, is to turn the process of discernment inward and change the only person on earth we can possibly change. Ourselves.

When we take the beam out of our own eye, live the change we want to see in others, we create the best chance for others to change…just as God “changes” us. Not directly, but with the absolute acceptance of perfect love that silently draws us—the moment we’re ready to be drawn.

Dave Brisbin 2.13.22

The reality we believe is the reality we endure. What we believe about reality becomes our experience of it and shapes our lives so profoundly that we don’t see reality as it is—only what survives the filter of our worldview. Because this is true, every responsible philosophy and religion on earth teaches some form of non-attachment, stepping aside from entrenched beliefs to make us free enough to see and accept what really is. There is no peace until we do.

Jesus said, don’t judge or you will be judged, and the way you judge, your standard of measure, will be measured to you. Don’t judge, narrowly understood as condemning or at least condescending others, is deeply embedded in our cultural psyche, and yet, on more levels than we’re even aware, our entire world is built on judgment. But isn’t that necessary? Don’t we have to make judgments about people and situations in order to know who we can trust, how to choose alternatives?

We need to make a distinction here between judging and discerning. Judgment is a conclusion we reach based on internalized standards—the reality we believe. Discernment is a conclusion we reach based on real-time experience—recognizing reality as it is. We can judge long-distance; don’t need to be close to see what is acceptable to our belief system. But discernment requires a dive into relationship to experience a person as trustworthy or a situation acceptable.

Jesus’ saying sounds punitive: if we do wrong by judging, then someone, ultimately God, will wrong us back. Nothing could be farther from reality. Judgment separates; discernment connects. Judging breaks life into small pieces in conflict with each other, making love conditional and bringing into existence the world we must endure. No one does this to us. Nor God. We do it to ourselves. If the way we judge is not tempered with willingness to risk the intimacy of discernment, we will always live in the broken pieces of the reality we believe…and never see the oneness of what really is.

Dave Brisbin 2.6.22

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it…from Frank Herbert’s Dune. But we won’t see the truth of this until we first see the process. Ancient Hebrews called God’s spirit ruach: breath, wind, and spirit all at once. Defined by motion. A process. Ancient Christians called God trinity, which they best defined as a blur of constant interaction, a relational process within God.

A belief about God is a mental snapshot that stops the process. This is where we miss the bus: thinking about God as something that can be thought about—God’s action as events completed in time. Living things are defined by motion, so God and life are in constant motion; they will never be understood by thinking about them. If we want to see them as they are, we need to change everything we think we know about seeing. Only by letting go of our thoughts, thought itself, accepting the flow, can we know what it means to be alive in God’s presence.

Jesus’ mega-metaphor for the Way to God is the Kingdom of Heaven. It’s not too much of a stretch to say he spent his entire life defining kingdom, so knowing what he meant is the first step to changing everything. Jesus says it’s not out there somewhere, but unseen within and among us. Not a thing bound in space and time but a quality of life to be lived. He says it’s like being born again, like a small child or a seed growing in a garden, like selling everything to buy a field with a treasure. Kingdom is the process of diminishing before growing, being vulnerable to be connectable, shedding everything that stops the process so we can experience the flow as we did before we learned to be ashamed.

If kingdom is a quality of life now, not a reward later—that changes everything.

If what makes us vulnerable makes us beautiful—that changes everything.

If we can live as we did before shame made us feel unworthy,

no longer striving for what we already possess—that changes everything.

Unstops the process, kingdom, the flow of God’s presence herenow.

Dave Brisbin 1.30.22

What is the goal of the spiritual life? After all, if you’re going to spend the time and energy to engage spiritual formation, don’t you want to be really clear on the goal? After counting off peace, love, joy, salvation, redemption—all of which would be really good to have, it’s clarifying to see how Jesus answers: if we follow his Way of living and loving life, we will know the truth and the truth will make us free. Freedom. Surprising? Not when you consider that freedom is both the cause and effect of perfect love.

How do you know something is free, that you are free from it? Unless you’re a scuba diver, air is still free. And until I called your attention to it, you were as unaware of your breathing as of your hair growing. Contrast that with food, of which we think about constantly. Something is free when we don’t have to think about it, plan, work, save, pay, fight, or worry over it. The things from which we are most free are the things we worry about the least. But even if something is free, does that mean we’ll automatically stop worrying?

Jesus tells us God’s perfect love is free as an objective fact. We don’t need to worry. But how many of us are still trying to perform for it, earn it, worrying over whether it really does extend to us? We must be free enough from feelings of unworthiness to be able to take first steps toward an experience of perfect acceptance. Cause. Then once experienced, perfect love casts out fear, makes us more and more free from the fear of unworthiness as the truth of our acceptance sets in. Effect.

For Jesus, truth is not information, but a person—a God who is life and love…freedom itself. Experiencing God is the experience of freedom. Freedom is the experience of worrylessness, which is why Jesus is always telling us not to worry as the first step to freedom. Look at the birds and the flowers. Worry over what you eat and wear just as much as they do. If we can worry less over small things, we can experience the worrylessness of ultimate things. And if we seek the worrylessness of kingdom first, all else is added. What’s left for worry?

Dave Brisbin 1.23.22

Jesus is relentless. Never lets us rest in old ideas. Or even new ones that have become set and quickly growing old. Like a personal trainer always spurring us on to one more rep, he systematically deconstructs any thought or behavior pattern that, regardless of original value, has now become a limitation.

Whenever we feel we’ve arrived: at right action, right thinking, or right belief that is paying off in material wealth or social or religious standing, Jesus is there to say we have our reward in full, which means we’ve only found treasures here on earth. Wonderful, as far as they go, but treasures on earth are temporary, fleeting, ultimately unsatisfying, and if they represent the extent of our heart’s desire, then we are bound to them here on earth. Jesus is all about treasures in heaven, an Aramaic idiom for God’s presence, always here and now. Treasures found in God’s presence are forever beyond what moths and rust can destroy or thieves steal, and are what give fulfilment and balance to our necessary pursuit of earthly treasures.

Jesus is not relentlessly challenging our thoughts and behaviors to make us incrementally more lawful or moral or intellectually accurate. He is trying to break us through to a difference of quality, not quantity. You can’t be a little bit pregnant—you’re all in or out. And you can’t be little bit kingdom, a little bit in God’s presence. It’s a complete immersion, inward transformation, an earth shattering shift in perception and values that allows us to see what was invisible before.

Jesus’ metaphor of the clear eye that illuminates every part of ourselves is another expression of this relentless pursuit of a different quality of seeing and perceiving rooted in first matching our deepest desire to God’s. When we desire most what God desires eternally, what God is—connection, oneness, forgiveness, love—everything we think and do, even the pursuit of treasures on earth, is firmly planted on Jesus’ Way: not the way to heaven, but the experience of heaven itself.

Dave Brisbin 1.16.22

We call people passive-aggressive so casually these days, it’s likely we’re no longer sure what it means. Just as guerrilla warfare is an indirect way of opposing a much greater force, passive-aggression is an indirect way of getting what we want or expressing anger and frustration without directly confronting another person. But where guerrilla warfare is a conscious tactic to turn weakness into strength, passive-aggression is usually an unconscious expression of a person’s perceived powerlessness.

People who don’t believe they can make significant choices in life are naturally passive-aggressive in their interactions with others. From chronic lateness, forgetfulness, or losing things to constant complaining, blaming, keeping relationships chaotic and ambiguous, a person who feels victimized finds passive ways forward. Belief systems feed the passive-victim narrative: the belief in an all-powerful God, can make us feel like cosmic victims of fate or destiny, that God is the only actor with a real choice. A belief in original sin—that we are born hopelessly flawed and separate from God—makes us theological victims with Jesus as the only actor who can save us.

But Jesus is showing us a way of life that is the opposite of passive: a partnership with God in which God has already acted on our behalf, given everything there is to receive, leaving only the action of our own hearts to accept and live the reality of such connection and abundance. The opposite of victimhood.

A victim is never present, always reliving the past or imagining salvation in the future. A victim lives in unforgiveness, seeing no choice in the present to create change in circumstance or attitude. A victim is always waiting, never arrives. Jesus is all about arrival: the waiting is over, the abundance of kingdom is here and now, immediate and intimate. There is no possible place for passivity or victimhood in such a reality. Take a look around. Are you waiting for something? Then your heart is not yet acting along Jesus’ Way.