Dave Brisbin 11.23.25
When I’d tell people the title of my book, The Fifth Way, first question was: what are the first four? That made perfect sense, because you can’t understand the fifth way of Jesus until you understand how the first four operate in our lives.

There are several systems that try to explain human behavior in terms of personality types, unconscious ways we process experience and approach challenges in life: Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Kiersey…the four ways operate similarly.

In Jesus time, four sects dominated Jewish life, and each had a specific way of dealing with threats to their powerbases—specifically the Roman occupation. The Sadducees, yielded to Roman power; the Pharisees tried to influence or manipulate; the Essenes exited to build their own communities; and the Zealots tried to destroy Roman presence through rebellion.

To yield, manipulate, exit, and destroy, are the north, south, east, and west of ways we can deal with challenges in life. From dysfunctional marriages to nations and armies, these four ways, with all the combinations in between, are what we have to work with, and each of us has learned to favor one as primary in our personal lives. They aren’t bad or evil; they’re necessary for navigating life. Only when we apply them to spiritual growth do they become limiting, destructive, never taking us where we need to go.

The four ways answer physical needs we all have as humans, but until we become aware of them, they strip free will, reducing us to predictable, type-based behavior. When Jesus comes out of the wilderness, having overcome three temptations symbolic of all human need, he begins teaching a fifth way, turning the other four on their heads.

Everything Jesus teaches and models is a refutation of our normal, ingrained ways of meeting our needs. Starting within and working outward, from an awareness of inexhaustible presence rather than scarcity, we realize that all we really need is not gained through acquisition but in giving away all we have. In the giving, we learn what we really possess is inexhaustible, restoring free will—our ability to choose in love, not just in need.

A Different Way

Dave Brisbin 9.20.20
Still talking about presence as the foundation of Jesus’ Way and the contemplative prayer that will take us there. When Moses came down off the mountain with God, his face was shining, and when contemplatives and mystics come back from their experience of presence, they say strange things to try to express themselves: “Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.” (Rumi) What are we to make of such words? When Jesus says unless we hate our fathers and mothers, children and even our own lives, we can’t follow him, what are we to make of that? Truth is, trying to understand the words of those who come back from the experience of presence is like trying to understand the equations on Einstein’s blackboard—a dense wall of numbers and symbols that stops you in your tracks with its sheer incomprehensibility. It’s not until there’s enough of a change in our minds to allow the beginning of a change of habit, habitual action in the direction of the practice of presence, that we’ll get our first inklings of what Jesus, the contemplatives and mystics, and perhaps even Einstein are trying to express.

Einstein's Blackboard

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.

A Different Way

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