Barry Long's Journal Two: Enlightenment and the battle with ignorance

By Barry Long

The record of a spiritual master's teachings and observations as he introduces his audience to the reality of cosmic consciousness. This volume of Barry Long's Journal covers topics as diverse as sexual love, theoretical physics, Eastern Masters, UFOs and common obstacles in the spiritual life. It follows him on his travels in 1991 and includes his commentary on the First Iraq War which shook the world that year.

The Journal was produced at the time for people coming to his talks and as a record of the current themes in his teaching. It's a collection of his writings and sayings, along with extracts from his extensive correspondence and edited transcripts of public talks. Three volumes were published serially and together they are a kaleidoscope of spiritual insights and inspirational wisdom. The Journal is easy-to-read and offers a fascinating glimpse into both the global and the cosmic vision of one of the most powerful teachers of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Long Books
• Release date: Feb 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781899324415

Book preview

237

FEBRUARY

74

You have the opportunity to connect again with the energy of the divine life, to tap into that profundity and simplicity in yourself.

I will help you to reconfront the dishonesty that is probably creeping into your life, undermining your authority and power, as the world inevitably puts the pressure on. The energy of being honest to yourself and your life slips away like morning mist. You frequently cannot get hold of it because it’s so new.

We will re-affirm the consciousness of self-honesty – learning to change your life without undue despair, anguish and pain. We will reconfront the dishonesty which seeps into you from the world, dulls your love and joy and stops you from getting your life right.

75

Woman is no fool

Man cannot fool woman but she can fool herself. She fools herself by believing that everything will be all right once she finds a man to love.

A woman who has experienced love, its joy, its pain and heartbreak, knows man. His inconsistency in love is the cause of all her heartbreak and pain. Her eternal error is that she will not face this knowledge of him. In her search for love she wants to believe in him so badly that she ignores her knowledge of him and his ways. She fools herself.

When first in love, she sees the man as the ideal she’s looking for. But he is not that. Her love within is the ideal, not the man outside. He is only the raw material. She has to endeavour to make him with her love. To do this she must face her knowledge of him.

And what is that? Do I really have to tell you, woman?

He does not know love as you do. No matter how much he seems to in the beginning. You will have to teach him. But you can’t while you fool yourself and believe he does know love as you do. Man is the cause of all your disappointment and hurt. Do you know that? He just comes each time in another attractive package, fundamentally the same. That’s why you keep burning yourself on the hot stove or you just give up the whole idea of cooking.

If she would only realise that she cannot believe man because she already knows him, woman would not suffer in love. For love never yet caused any woman to suffer. Her suffering is due to her belief in man, that he is her love, even though he consistently fails her. She fools herself. She must come to know her love within as the only continuity, and the man outside as the phenomenal and ephemeral reflection of that.

The justice of it all is that in striving to make him in the image of her love she will finally discover the living reality of her love, or lord, within. This man, The Man, her love, will never fail her, never leave her and never die.

In this way does she realise immortal or eternal love.

76

Woman has no future – only profundity.

Profundity does not deduce.

77

The Amulet

As he walked along the beach towards me I had the distinct impression of an approaching gladiator. Six foot, broad shouldered, thick set, he had something strapped around his upper arm, like an amulet. And around his forehead was a metal band with protectors down over his ears.

As we got closer it was clear. What had confused me was the amulet on his arm. I hadn’t seen anything like it before. It was a tiny cassette recorder strapped to his considerable muscle. The headband, of course, held in place the earphones that plugged his ears. I mused that, yes, it was customary for the Romans to wear amulets to protect them against evil – and what gladiator would ever leave off such a source of magical protection?

It was a glorious morning. The blue sea, the white surf on one side of us, the clean white sand under our feet, the brilliant coloured but dying jelly fish panting their last in the hot sun, the crabs scurrying down their sand holes soon to be destroyed again by the incoming tide – and the sweetness, the beauty of it all, for the ear that can hear and the eye that can see without distraction.

His modern amulet protected him from all this. He was saved; safe from the simplicity and wonder of life all around him.

Perhaps he was listening to one of my tapes?

Never let my tapes be a substitute for the beauty of life now. Beauty first. If you’re with something beautiful don’t put on a tape. Be with the beauty. Use the tapes at other times.

78

Sir Echo

Conscience is never honest or up front. It always appears after the event.

Conscience is a devilish thing foisted or fostered on the earth by the priests of the Christian religion. Conscience is a priest that has crawled into your brain where he poses as the good – and torments the hell out of you, afterwards.

Even the Walt Disney cartoonists cottoned on to its two-faced nature. You’ll see a demonic looking imp on Donald Duck’s shoulder when he’s thinking of doing something malicious or a haloed Donald Duck after he’s done something good.

Conscience has no integrity of its own. It is the sum total of the expectations of all the people you’ve tried to please or the precepts you’ve tried to live up to in the past. In other words, conscience arises out of you trying to live what other people think is good, instead of living the life of truth which every adult body already knows.

The life of truth, or the living truth, is that I live my life to enjoy it. (To question this is to say I live my life not to enjoy it; and that is absurdity).

Priests don’t live life to enjoy it – particularly the conscience priest that judges you like that dreadful god the Christians invented. God does not judge you. The only precept of God or nature is to enjoy your life as the creatures of the earth show us – they who, by the grace of God, as yet have been protected from Christian missionaries.

Devilish priests, not just Christian ones, hover over us from the moment we are born. They are the beliefs that our parents, teachers and particularly religionists foist upon us. If those beliefs were the truth, everyone – especially their advocates – would be free of unhappiness and joyous every moment. But what we find is a desultory joy and a constant hunger for excitement and entertainment. This is an escape from trying to live life as instructed by the priests and not as posited by guru who sees life and loves life as it is.

The men who have the audacity to tell us to live the Ten Commandments do not live them and never have. Children, like myself, have been tormented and their minds distorted by this scurrilous irresponsibility. Children, like us, only need to be told the truth that can be demonstrated every moment as the way of life. But we are so filled up with priest slogans, advertising slogans, kindness slogans, family-love slogans, that we’ve allowed our conscience to take the place of our consciousness.

Nobody can live any religious precept. All religious precepts are like a can of sardines. They seem good when you can them, but at the end of the day when you tip them out on your plate they are dead. What is dead feeds the body and that’s okay. The body’s doing very well. But the life that I am as the perceiving intelligence of this body lives off consciousness, a moment-to-moment participation in the joy of being alive and of being able every moment to know this as my own responsibility for myself.

How do I rid myself of conscience? By being responsible for every action; what I do every moment. That’s being conscious.

Life is not living it like you or your conscience think it is – after the event. Many times life presents you with a situation and the action you take is contrary to everything you’ve ever been taught or thought to be good. That’s life. Life does not conform to our civilised precepts of good and bad or right and wrong. Nor do we, since we are life.

If life were not like this the loved two-year-old child would not be killed by life. Your home would not burn down when you’d been so diligent in attending church every Sunday. Five thousand innocent people like you would not die in an earthquake.

It’s because you make life personal, because you attach your own ideas of good and bad to the situation, that you get a little Sir Echo of yourself in the form of torturing conscience.

See life as it is and not in your personal terms of good and bad. Be true to life – that is, see what has to be done for the good of the whole and do it even if it kills you. Be untroubled. Then you won’t walk out of the shop and keep the wrong change you were given – or you will walk out and keep it. But in neither case will you look back and think about what you should have done. You will be responsible for what you did and not judge the situation or yourself afterwards.

Because by the age of twenty-eight you are more or less an experienced human being, when you are presented with a situation you see whether you want to be involved in it or not. If it is crooked or something shonky is going on, you should know from your experience that you are likely to get caught, or that those involved will. You must know what you are doing; that’s what experience is for. You know what is likely to happen. If you take a chance then chances are you’ll suffer. Or you might get away with it.

This is the moment of truth. Here is where consciousness operates. Consciousness is responsible. Slow-moving awareness is not quick enough to be responsible. It has to go over what it has done, pretends it did not know what was likely to happen, and then pleads diminished responsibility to get out of it.

Be of good cheer – not of good conscience.

79

Footprints

There is a popular fable – you may have seen it printed on a postcard or poster – which tells of a man who dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life; some joyful, some sad. When he looked back down the beach he saw that sometimes there were two sets of footprints and sometimes only one. And where there was one, the scene in the sky was sad. He couldn’t understand this. ‘Lord’ he said, ‘Why do you leave me when I need you most?’ And the Lord replied: ‘My son, my precious child, I love you and I would never leave you. During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.’ Barry received a postcard bearing this tale. He returned it to sender, having crossed out the Lord’s reply and rewritten it, as follows:–

The Lord replied: ‘You have been misled by the dreamer and the dreams of those who do not know me.

‘There is only ever one set of footprints in your life whether you are joyful or suffering.

‘I never carry Thee. And I am never apart from Thee. For I am Thee.’

80

Self-knowledge and suffering

Self-knowledge is not factual knowledge. A person can travel the world and study various subjects at university and still be unable to see the truth.

Self-knowledge arises from having been through factual experience (actual, not learned experience) and having suffered rightly.

Most people suffer wrongly. Suffering wrongly is believing you’re losing, or being denied, and complaining or blaming others for what is happening. (You’re only ‘losing’ because you don’t need what you had.)

Another example is to ask ‘Why is this happening to me?’ You will frequently hear distraught disaster victims asking this on the Television News. Or, ‘How can there be a God when things like this happen?’

Wrong suffering has no virtue in it, is very painful and perpetuates itself