Dave Brisbin 1.19.25
From someone going through a perfect storm of difficulties: I see no evidence of God, but plenty of evidence of the devil. Despite years as a devout Christian, she’s hit the point we all do, over and over in life, the point Karl Jaspers called a limit situation. The moment we realize we’re gonna need a bigger boat. Hitting the limit of our ability to cope, make sense, make meaning—everything that ordered our universe lying in a heap.

Why does God seem silent when evil is so loud?

We can walk into a dilapidated house and say we see no evidence of an architect, but the fact of the house, the space in which we could care for and maintain a home, is the architect’s fingerprint. If the consequences of human action or natural processes like extreme weather or viruses frustrate our agendas, security, and certainty, we label them evil. They overwhelm us, obscuring the order beneath. God is everywhere and everything, the foundation and bones of the house, the floor on which we act. But no matter how badly we neglect the floor, it still exists, if we’re still acting. We can say the news is always bad, but that’s good. Though loud, bad news is still the aberration against the backdrop of good.

Someone asked me how we know when God is speaking—looking for words, specificity, certainty. But God’s native language is silence, a non-specific, non-rational background radiation, the fabric of life vibrating in every person and landscape. God’s silence never overwhelms the noise we create, but when we allow ourselves to sink beneath the noise, we can reaffirm a wordless message that is always the same, like an audio loop we can enter at any moment: I am here. All I have is yours. All is well and will be well.

Such a non-specific message is not what we want, but all that we need. 

The suffering always present in a limit situation is the only experience powerful enough to pull back the curtain of our certainties du jour and show us the next larger reality we may be ready to engage…a spiritual awakening. But as long as we equate our suffering with evil, let it blot out the possibility of good, it can’t show us anything.

More Big Words

You opened my eyes to whispers. You waited for brilliance. You drowned in it. You aren't going to be soon. You opened the moon's eye. You rolled the rival river in on itself. You told the joke at the revival service. You call it a funeral. You know what it was. You walk alone, but not without the One. 

You bathed in the rows of flowers. You lost yourself and found. You didn't ask what, you just wrote it down. You just slapped yourself with a shadow. You started it back up again. You heard his bells announce his coming. You stretched backward and forward and laid back down again. 

You bathed in the rows of flowers. 
You bathed in the rows of flowers. 
You bathed in the rows of flowers. 

You opened my eyes to whispers. 

You opened the moon's eye.
You opened the moon's eye.
You opened the moon's eye. 

You bathed in the rows of flowers. You didn't ask what, you just wrote it down. You just slapped yourself with a shadow. You stretched backward and forward and laid back down again... and laid back down again... and laid back down again... and laid back down again... and laid back down again... and laid back down again. 

You walk alone, but not without the One. 

Abyssalwareness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbs5azVjPVg
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DJ SHYM: 
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0:00 - 1:44 — RAIN THUNDER
1:45 - 4:07 — I WAS BLESSED
4:08 - 6:15 — THE SUN IS LEAKING
6:16 - 8:32 — NONE CHARACTER
8:33 - 10:42 — THE X-FILES
10:43 - 13:06 — FORTY SEVEN REASONS

MYSTICISM (FULL TAPE)

Dream:

She is giving me nettlebane tea
She hands me a clay mug with a cross-shaped stalk of celery
Shows me how to hold it without getting stung
Just 
Like
This
Dip and crunch
Eating it while around us crash thundering suns
Casting everything orange—
A whisper—
The smallest salvation—
We—

The Smallest Salvation

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Monthly Contemplations ~ 28 January 2025

Saint Onuphrius became frightened and decided to go back, but the voice of his Guardian Angel told him to go into the desert to serve the Lord. The Elder visited him once a year, until he fell asleep in the Lord.

Until He Fell Asleep In The Lord

Impeccable Deities

Inspired by the current planetary alignment with hope for the future ❤️ॐ

Planetary Alignment

Dave Brisbin 1.26.25
One of the best-known stories from the gospels, one that has seeped into collective consciousness, is the story of Jesus walking on water. This and turning water to wine has become shorthand for divine power. It’s natural for us to focus on the literal, but all Jesus’ miracles have spiritual meaning as well, and since most of us will live full lives never walking on water, the spiritual meaning is more relevant. Especially when Peter asks Jesus to bring him out on the water, and we can suddenly see ourselves as participants in miracle making. 

But Peter gets out a few steps, sees the waves from his new perspective, and starts sinking, screaming for help. Jesus puts him back in the boat saying, you of little faith, why did you doubt? How many times have Jesus’ words been aimed at us when we’ve expressed the least bit of existential uncertainty? But is doubt as uncertainty really what Jesus is rebuking? The word translated as doubt comes from a root that means twice or again, so we can understand it as second guessing ourselves, wavering in resolve as we ruminate.

The boat is our little island of rational thought floating on a chaotic sea of unconscious mystery. We take a breathlessly non-rational step out of the boat, a leap of faith, then immediately start thinking rationally again, fearing again. It’s our human cycle of surrender and refortification to embedded thought that limits our ability to follow Jesus to truth that liberates. 

We don’t have little faith when we stop thinking we mentally believe. We have little faith when we start thinking again and stop acting. Faith is not thought. It’s acting as if what we say we believe is true enough to carry us on the surface tension of uncertainty. The nonrational ability to act in the presence of doubt, step out of the boat of all our very good reasons why not.

Little faith is not much doubt. It’s the need for much certainty. Keeping the faith is not steely-eyed adherence to mental concept. It’s the embrace of uncertainty, accepting we will never have enough information to step out of our boats. We just do. Over and over. Until trust replaces certainty.

Keeping The Faith

Composer; Sometimes Writer; Occasional Filmmaker ॐ
I write music mainly for Films, TV & Theatre, and also web/social media. 
 ❤️ ॐ

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.

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.

ambient devotional experiments 
synth + shortwave
theology + hauntology

New tracks tagged #Mysticism