Dave Brisbin 11.17.24
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

Eliot’s iconic line reminds that time is not a line, but a circle. Beginning and end one and the same. That any authentic journey is a journey of awareness, bringing us back to ourselves expanded. And knowing…what?

Step 11 tells us it’s God’s will we seek through the prayer and meditation that makes conscious contact with God possible. Without that conscious part, what have we got? But what have we got when we’ve got God’s will? We crave what we imagine as God’s “what:” what he wants us to do, the perfect life he wills us complete to the last detail. Mistake-proof. But God’s will, sebyana in Aramaic, is deepest desire, pleasure, delight, purpose—the essence that paints God’s presence in the only colors we will ever see.

How do we come to know that? See those colors? 

In circles. Circles within circles of growing intimacy. Knowing, yida, is not cataloging data points, but becoming intimately familiar, a process that takes time and for which our soil must be prepared. In the first circle journey of prayer we develop awareness by establishing the structure and framework of formal, word-based prayer. Without structure, we can’t practice awareness into the muscle memory that takes us to the second circle, the process of knowing as mindful, wordless meditation, the silence of God’s native language. Until we can get out of the way, become fluent in silence, we can’t know God’s essence, which we can then carry third circle into our lives with the practice of presence. A homecoming of realization that we don’t need to do anything other than whatever we do all day long to know God’s will—as the how of our doing, not the what. That with the how of God’s deepest purpose and delight, any what becomes the exact center of God’s will.

There is no substitute for traveling these circles within circles. Knowing as intimate familiarity can’t be transferred or bestowed. It can only be experienced, circle after circle, coming back to an expanded home…knowing ourselves and the place again and again for the first time.

Circles Within Circles

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.