Dave Brisbin | 4.24.16
Continuing to look at the method and approach to spirituality at theeffect, one of the hallmarks is the contemplative life and contemplative prayer. How to understand contemplation? Simply stated, it’s the letting go of habitual thoughts, feelings, and behavioral patterns, letting of what we think it means to be ourselves, our ego-self in favor of what really is here and now present in the form of God’s spirit. What does that feel like? It feels like waking up inside your dream, to realize you’re dreaming, that the dream isn’t real, and that you can make a different choice than the one your habitual thoughts and triggered feelings have always dictated. How do we do this? Through contemplative prayer and practice, the constant practice of presence, stepping away from all our mental activity to find that Paul called prayer without ceasing, not unceasing words, but the unceasing presence and awareness of someone who has awakened in waking life.

Waking

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.

Waking

theeffect

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