Dave Brisbin 4.13.25
Very few of us live in the real world. 

Like avatars in a gamescape, we live in a world created by our own thought patterns, which are in turn created by our core beliefs—deeply held, fundamental assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world. Hiding in our unconscious, core beliefs are as unquestioned as the air we breathe, acting as filters through which everything in life is perceived, without our knowing they even exist. 

Initial reactions to earliest experiences, core beliefs remain in place, shaping not just how we interpret life, but how we behave. When positive, core beliefs can be advantageous, but when negative, they stoke fears that create dysfunctional behavior that creates consequences that reinforce the core beliefs themselves—I am unlovable, worthless; people can’t be trusted, will always let me down; the world is dangerous, I will never be happy—self-fulfilling prophecies in an endless feedback loop.

Jesus said the eye is the lamp of the body, so if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. In his metaphoric way, Jesus is giving us the purpose of his entire teaching. In his language, eye/aina expands to include everything we believe and the way we see reality. If our way of seeing, our filter, is clear and true, our whole being will be full of order and clarity (light/nuhra) as opposed to chaos and dysfunction (darkness/heshuka).

Jesus riding into Jerusalem is an object lesson in only seeing what we are programmed to see. Four distinct groups all see Jesus filtered through the desires and attachments of their core beliefs. The Jewish people and Jesus’ followers see him as a savior coming to fix their problems. To the Jewish and Roman authorities, he’s a threat to their powerbases. Whether Jesus is savior or threat depends on our core beliefs.

We say Jesus is savior, but he’s not here to fix our problems. That’s our job. He’s here to clear our eyes. That’s how he saves. Our way of seeing, our core beliefs, are our powerbases. Until we let Jesus threaten our powerbases, he will never be our savior.

Threat of Clarity

Dave Brisbin 4.20.25
Cross and resurrection form the crux of Christian tradition, but whatever these events were historically, if we merely revere them from a distance of two millennia, we are missing the point of the gospels. These events realigned every detail of the lives of Jesus’ closest friends and followers, but as long as they remain historical events and theological concepts, they won’t realign ours. If the resurrection is to have the power now that it had then, we need to know where to look for meaning.

We naturally focus on the supernatural event, fighting and debating, but have you noticed that the gospels don’t show us the event at all? Makes us crazy looking for literal details, for certainty, but in the gospels, the resurrection happens offstage, in the blink of a hard cut. The story picks up afterward, following those Jesus left behind and their all-too-natural, human reactions. The gospels show us exactly where to look for meaning—not in the miracle itself, but in how the miracle affects our lives.

The question isn’t whether you believe…it’s what difference it makes that you believe.

It’s fascinating that none of Jesus’ closest friends recognize him face to face after he rises. We wonder how that could be possible. Did Jesus look different, disguise himself somehow, for some reason? That line of thinking misses the gospels’ focus entirely, which is not on the Jesus incident, but our ability to see it…that seeing the risen Jesus is a process of becoming ready to redefine impossible, a process that is always based in intimacy. Mary recognizes him after he calls her name, Clopas after Jesus breaks bread for supper. Tiny, intimate moments they had to re-experience to break the spell of their expectations.

Whatever the resurrection literally was two thousand years ago, if we don’t re-experience intimacy with Jesus now, in prayer and every face and embrace, every detail of our lives, we may say we believe, but re-animation, rebirth, will elude. The meaning of resurrection, like kingdom, is not out there somewhere to be observed, but within us to be tasted and seen as life that is always new and always alive.

Meaning of Resurrection

Dave Brisbin 5.4.25
The most damaging attitude toward life and spirituality is…wait for it…passivity. 

Passive people feel their actions are insufficient or that they have no real choice at all, which makes them victims—defined by choicelessness. Victims are always waiting, never in the present, looking toward some other moment when circumstances may change or someone, God, saves them from their circumstances. People with victim mentalities are passive-aggressive in their interactions with others, finding indirect ways of meeting needs and expressing anger or frustration without ever directly confronting core issues.

As damaging all this is to human relationships, it’s catastrophic to spiritual ones. And yet, a passive, victim mentality is seductive, as comforting as a warm blanket, often nurtured for lifetimes. Having no choice also means no blame, no responsibility or need to act. Innocent of all charges. An innocent is not responsible either—kind of the flip side of a victim, and it’s comforting to imagine ourselves as innocent.

But we were not created to be innocent. Certainly not to stay innocent.

The garden of Eden was never meant to be our finished state any more than is our childhood. We are innocent as children because we have no choice to be any other way, but a child is innocent only until the age of reason. The part of us that is created in God’s image is the part that can freely choose, because love is only love if it is freely chosen. We don’t reflect God’s image until after we eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Only then can we choose, fully responsible for our choices and actions, no longer innocent, no longer victim. Capable of love.

It’s scary to be responsible. Overwhelming at times. 

We all become victims when personal choice is removed, and as much as that hurts, the relief it can offer in ongoing passivity, the luxury of not having to choose or act, can bewitch us. If we’re waiting for God to save us, he’s not coming…because he is already here. All poured out. If we’re waiting, we’ll never see the truth. That we’re already free to choose what has already and always been freely given.

Already Free

Dave Brisbin 5.18.25
Two events converged in my mind last week. 

My wife and I picked up the ashes of a friend we’d been helping take care of for the past few years…and our faith community turned eighteen years old. Nothing like an anniversary to open the memory faucet, and maybe because of our friend’s death, the serious illnesses of many others, and my own advancing age, my memories were not focused on timelines, but the long parade of people who have meant so much. Those who have stayed, moved on, and especially those who have passed on. 

They have been reminding me of the brevity of life, to make my time count. Not morbidly in a pressured way, but gratefully, aware of the gifts they gave me in our short spans together. Each of four men who helped found and lead our community had a particular gift he exuded, lived out most likely unintentionally, and of which I was unaware at the time. It’s perversely true that it’s harder to see the gifts others are giving while they live. Maybe because while ongoing they’re taken for granted, or because always mixed with inevitable faults and annoyances, the prophet is not honored if too familiar.

We don’t know what we got til it’s gone.

When a person is gone, we can reflect on their life in its entirety, stretch out, really see what that short time together gave us. Each of these four men had their faults, in some cases, mortal faults. Their gifts were packaged with their faults, but now, softened with time and reflection, only the gifts remain: one gave me his presence, the next showed me passion, the third how life was unlivable without humor, and the fourth, a constant devotion.

To live with presence, passion, humor, devotion is to immerse so fully in life, we step outside the container we will leave at death, realize that all our fear exists only in our minds. Not in life. Or in death. Fear is a mental construct that we can take off like a dirty shirt. We will always fear the unknown at first, but our teachers, living and dead, are showing us in their most unguarded moments, that we can loosen the bonds that hold us inside our fears and experience the life that exists even in death.

The Life in Death

Dave Brisbin 5.25.25
If I asked you who you are, how would you answer?

Almost everyone I’ve asked, including myself, has answered with a mix of the roles they fill, the accomplishments they’ve accumulated, and the attributes they exhibit. Roles, accomplishments, and attributes describe the human container we inhabit in this life, the whole with which our egoic consciousness identifies. We think we are our roles, accomplishments, and attributes until we step out of our containers to find a deeper identity underneath. We’ve all stepped out at moments of peak experience, but we don’t shift identity that fast or easily.

We fear the loss of our container to death, illness, age, trauma as much as we identify with it. And we identify with it exclusively until we intentionally practice the experience of stepping out.

Entering kingdom is a metaphor. A physical image for a spiritual realignment. There is no place or space to kingdom. We don’t enter it. We become it. Kingdom is a shift in identity. Or better, kingdom is the realization of our true identity, the recapturing of who we really are—were at the beginning and still are underneath. The children running at our feet are kingdom because they haven’t yet learned to believe they are not. But it won’t be long before their minds take hold, telling them they must think about who they are, to hold that thought and defend it as they work to make it so. Whatever we think we are nothing without, lost without, is what we identify with. But anything we can lose is not who we are, and everything we think, will eventually be lost.

The freedom of the truth Jesus offers is that who we really are can never be lost. Ever. Not even in death. Any identity imagined as separate from any other identity, from God’s identity, is illusion, so to strip the illusion is to see that we and the Father are one: true identity. 

Jesus’ Way is relinquishing everything that can be relinquished until only that which can’t be relinquished remains. The point of any spiritual journey is to arrive at the ground of this irreducible presence, an identity that can’t be lost, but costs us everything to which we cling.

Identity Shift

Hello! M u S e D is a contemplative journey into pure, old-school electro. Built around deep pads, crisp analog drums, and nostalgic arpeggios, this track invites you to pause, breathe, and drift into your thoughts. Whether you’re looking inward or simply zoning out, M u S e D is meant to be sat with—felt rather than explained. Enjoy!

M u S e D

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.

Hello and welcome!

I’ve been creating music for the past six years, learning and evolving with each track.
My instrumentals are deeply personal—each one shaped by emotion and often named after the feeling that inspired it.

I try to sculpt sounds and melodies in a way that expresses what words sometimes can’t—like trying to describe a color with language. Everyone hears and feels differently, and that’s part of the beauty.

What you hear here on SoundCloud is just a glimpse—there’s a much broader journey waiting on my YouTube channel, where you’ll find many more tracks and visual experiences.

Thanks for listening.
Enjoy the journey.

New tracks tagged #contemplation,