Barry Long's Journal Three: Mastery and the karma of living

By Barry Long

The journal of a spiritual master as he travels through Europe and America in 1991 speaking to audiences about the truth of life and love. Barry Long's engaging comments about the places he visits, his autobiographical stories and witty observations accompany penetrating articles and extracts from his talks. Every item in this Journal illustrates what it was for him to live an ordinary life as a spiritual master in the western world. And at the same time it presents some of the most powerful of his teachings that exist in print. 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: 9781899324422

Book preview

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Changing Karma

From a talk given on the evening of Monday 17 June 1991 during Barry Long’s Teaching Week, ‘Living The Divine Life’, on the Gold Coast, Queensland.

I am going to speak on the Law of Love and the Law of Karma – a talk on the reality of existence and the way to release the burden.

Although the subject of karma is a very intriguing one I don’t want to go too deeply into the intrigue of it. I want what I say to apply to your life.

The important thing is, you don’t have to understand what I’m saying. All you have to do is listen. I am going to be speaking the truth and the myth of life. You are the truth of life. You are existence. It is your mystery, your wonder. You are the great myth. But you have forgotten what you are.

All you ever have to do when you hear the truth or the myth, is listen. Don’t try to work it out. Don’t think about it; it’s going into you anyway. It is an awakening call. It goes deep down through your eyes, through your ears, through your five senses, deep into the body, which is your subconscious mind, and there the subconscious sorts it out for you. All you have to do is be innocent, be open and enjoy being here.

So first, the Law of Karma. Karma is said to be the law of cause and effect, but really there is no cause. There is only the effect of an effect of an effect. Everything is an effect of yesterday or the last moment.

The law of karma is that everything repeats itself. Karma comes energetically in waves, just like the waves of the sea, coming towards you all the time. The waves of yesterday, all the days since you were born, the waves come to you. I am talking about you, the person sitting on the seat; about you and your life, because that’s the most important thing there is. Everything happens to you. If it doesn’t happen to you, it has no meaning in it.

There is a world karma and there is a personal karma. You can’t really handle world karma until you handle your own karma. So let’s start with the personal karma, and all the effects since you were born.

Even your birth had an effect. It affected all the people around you and even your screams, your gurgling, your being in a pram, had effects. All the effects repeated themselves, either next day, next week or next year.

Every moment, I (in your body) am creating an effect, which will have an effect tomorrow or next week or next year. Every moment creates the wave of effects in our lives. We set the waves in motion. It happens just too fast and is too all-encompassing for our superficial frontal consciousness to get around. But you can get the idea can’t you?

I say I am a living master. What does that mean?

It means that I am lord of my karma. Now perhaps you’ve heard talk of ‘the Lords of Karma’, as used by the mystics of the East as well as Madam Blavatsky, the Theosophists, and all their followers. You can get one of their books and for a few days read all about the Lords of Karma in some imagined world, sitting up in the Himalayas, arranging all the karma. But it’s not true. You are the lord of karma, the master of your karma, your life – or you are endeavouring to be.

I am the lord of the earth, the lord of the world of karma. That is what it is to be the living master. You have forgotten this.

Don’t put your I out here on the speaker, will you? Keep it where it belongs. Which is where you speak of ‘I’ – in the body sitting on that chair. For I am man or woman. And the reality of existence is for I in that body to become lord of karma; for you to become the lord of your own karma so that you are not pushed around by the winds of change and by the world of effects.

What happened to you today? Whatever happened to you today also happened to you before, and happened to you before that. Yet not in quite the same way; because karma is an energetic thing. It’s like the agitator in the bottom of a washing machine. You see the washing going around and you see it’s in different places and there’s froth on it. The agitator is always down at the bottom unseen, and is energetic. The effect of the agitator is different all the time. So the energy of karma plays in form, changes the forms. We call that circumstance – people and objects. Karma just keeps moving them around so that you don’t see the agitator … Well, the agitator is in me. (Don’t put your ‘me’ out here. The agitator is in me in that body on that chair.)

My life is the result of yesterday. It was a nice day today, but if today you lost something dear to you, it wasn’t a nice day. The chances are you didn’t even see the blue sky and the sweetness of the day; and who could blame you? You are heavy with the burden of unhappiness or sorrow. That is due to your karma, and we will go into why you are suffering later. But then life gets better. Things change.

So why is that? Why is it that life seems to get better? It doesn’t matter who you are, life does get better, doesn’t it? And by the time you’re my age you’ll look back and say ‘Life’s alright. It hasn’t been too bad’. It’s amazing how people say that isn’t it? It doesn’t matter what’s happened to them. That is because the whole process here is to change your karma.

Everybody is changing their karma to a degree but when you start to enter the spiritual life, or what I call ‘Living the Divine Life’, you become more responsible for yourself and your life, and then you start to start to control your karma.

What is it to be responsible?

Okay, the effect has happened: today has come, and something has happened to me. Am I going to complain about it? If I do, I’m not responsible. I will set in motion an effect. It will have to happen again to me. If I complain, it will have to happen again to me in a different form, through a different person, a different circumstance, tomorrow or next day or next month. If I blame someone for what happened, thinking about how he did that to me, holding on to the emotion of it, seething with it, I will have to face that event again; because I am not being responsible for my life – for I caused it; I did it.

You did it. You did it in the past, and now it chases you. It’s chasing you tonight, tomorrow. Karma is always chasing you. It doesn’t matter how fast you run; it overtakes you. You cannot avoid this existence.

What’s this existence for?

It is to purify yourself Which means to be responsible for yourself If I am responsible for my life I don’t complain about it, I don’t blame anyone; and then I contribute something to life.

Is it not purity of heart, purity of body, to contribute something to the good of the earth, to the good of each other? Isn’t it a contribution to not blame anyone or complain? Is that not so?

So the first way to start to change your karma is to stop blaming and stop complaining. Fair enough? That is living the divine life. It is not very hard you know. All you’ve got to do is bite your tongue when your mouth starts to open.

If I have been true, if I continue to be truer and truer to this law of karma, then my life will get better. When I take responsibility and look into the waves of life, I know what’s coming. Don’t you? Something is coming tomorrow, isn’t it? We trust it will all be good and easy, but some of it won’t be. That’s alright. We are up to it. You never have to face anything you are not up to. As you were the cause of it, you are man or woman enough. So don’t say you can’t stand it, or you’ll never get through; because, I tell you, you will make it. You will get through, even if it kills you.

Our life gets better because we all learn by experience. We learn by facing the fact of life, the reality of life, and then we change the karma of things. That is why children should be taught to face the fact; so that when they reach a certain age they can handle life on their own.

In politics facing the fact of life is called ‘taking a hard decision’. But of course politics is not a way of changing karma for good, because as we all know, politics is the science of compromise; and what everybody does when they compromise is compromise with their karma.

Before we start to live the divine life we get angry, blame, complain, have moods, resentments, and we think all these emotions are okay because, as we all know, everybody has a right to be unhappy out in the ‘ordinary world’ and everybody’s allowed to be dishonest as long as the law doesn’t catch up with them. But where I come from, it is dishonest to be angry, resentful or have a mood. It is dishonest to be unhappy. (You will notice I come from a different world.)

So what does a person in the ordinary world consist of? Fragments of emotion. Anger, resentment, guilt, doubt, fear, and you can name some others – all fragments in one seemingly whole body called the ‘person’; a fragmented psychological complex of various emotions added to the fundamental state of the body which is love or presence. When something happens to the person, it reacts off the fragments. If something troubles it, it gets angry. When someone hurts it, it gets resentful or jealous. These fragments determine the psychological state even when it is a beautiful day. So if the person is angry he can’t see the beautiful day because he’s in that fragment. That is the ordinary state of all persons – a fragmented condition of existence. So they get blown around. They can be controlled; it depends which button you push.

Because under the fragmented condition every body is the fundamental presence of love, sooner or later everybody does face the fact; and in the end says ‘Well I just have to put up with it. That’s how it is’. Everyone does that in some way or other and changes their karma, changes the effect of it so that it does not come again in the same way.

Yet it still comes. But instead of a stone coming through the windscreen of your car, next time it turns into a heavy shower and the windscreen wipers wipe it away.

Do you get the idea? Karma keeps repeating itself – the same buildings are there, the same people may be there – but the capacity to harm and make your life uncomfortable starts to diminish. This comes from facing the fact or the truth of life as it happens to you, and not turning away from it.

Now what happens when you start to live the divine life is that you start to face the fragments. When you get angry or resentful you say ‘This is not good enough. I am angry and resentful. I don’t like being angry. I must get rid of this resentment in some way or other’. You endeavour to dissolve the anger, resentment, jealousy and all the rest of it according to your ability and you do your best to take responsibility for your emotions. Then by the Law of Karma an extraordinary thing happens. The fragments start to come together. And when you are less fragmented, you start to feel more mass, more authority. You say ‘It seems to be working for me. My life does seem to be getting better. I feel I have more control of my life’. And eventually, after you have done this for many years, all those fragmented emotions come down into one.

While the emotions are fragmented and loose, you find entities in different places. Your chest goes tight. Or you find you can hardly speak because the fragment grabs your throat. Or it gets you in the stomach or in the solar plexus. It grabs you here or there. But when eventually the fragments form into one thing, it locates itself in the mid-section between the solar plexus and the lower abdomen. There the entity has its home. It is intelligent and contains all the wilful, restless independent emotions that you’ve been dealing with.

At this point you may start to get tearful and emotional. But you’ll say: ‘I am emotional, and yet I know it is not me’. The demonstration of this is when you’re lying awake at night worrying: ‘If only I could stop this worry, if only I could stop it. I can’t stop it!’ But if it was me I would stop it, wouldn’t I? So you remind yourself of what you know: ‘I know it’s not me’.

The entity is the sum total of all the emotion you have not faced, now gathered in that region. You will feel it down there – as a very grainy or heavy feeling against the background sensation of your presence. You will feel it in the middle of the night and feel it at certain times of the day. You will feel it suddenly come upon you. You will even hear it shrieking sometimes. It will give you a hard time for some years or until you can surround it enough and dissolve it completely.

What do you surround it with? What do you use to dissolve it?

Now we come to the second part of this talk: the Law of Love …

When I talk of love, what am I talking about? Let’s get love straight. We love so many things. That’s human nature. But the human nature is an unhappy nature and all the love it has causes unhappiness. I love my child: if the child has to die, by the way of things, then I am unhappy. I love my house: the house gets burnt down; I am unhappy. It’s the same with loving my car, my job, anything. Because the love that the human nature has is not love at all. It is purely attachment; sentiment, that’s all.

The love I am talking about is the real love that actually changes karma, takes the sting out of it.

I said everybody has a fundamental love or presence inside the body. You know you have love in you, that you have a presence in you. Well, the love I am speaking of is presence. And to know this love you have to be present. And to be present is to be consciously here, now.

You can’t deny that you are here, now. You are here, now, aren’t you? Yes, because you are always here now, wherever you are

Would you leave me?

If I keep quiet for about two minutes, let’s see what you do.

Very soon you will have left the present. You will have left me, here now. You will have started to think. You will be thinking about the past.

What happened?

An alien possessed you. Yes, possessed you. It is only yourself at another time, inasmuch as it is what you have been, but it’s got no body. So it has invaded and is now using your beautiful brain to start thinking about the past.

This entity of emotion, with all its fragments, is an alien invader. You never wanted any of its emotions, although you think they’re okay – when they excite you. If you’re dependent on emotion for your pleasure, then you are a man or a woman that must suffer greatly and you will continue to suffer.

But who wants to go on suffering? Do you not want to be the lord of your karma? You will suffer while you do not know what you’re doing. If you are going to practice being present, being the presence, if you are going to change your karma, then you must stay conscious. If you turn on the radio every time you get in the car, you are probably unconscious and in some way you will suffer. That is the law.

‘Oh no, nothing wrong with listening to the radio. That’s harmless!’

Okay. But know what you are doing and listen to it consciously. If we look into your love-life, your emotional life, we’ll find out that most of the time you think you know what you’re doing; but you don’t know what you are doing and that is why it goes wrong.

The way you stay present in the external world is to always know what you are doing.

When you are present, you’re perceiving; you are not thinking. You are hearing, smelling, tasting. You are being. You are present.

Now look out of your eyes. And look out of your ears. And just be present. Do it.

With this presence you can listen. To listen is the beginning of love.

How often do we say to our partners: ‘But you’re not hearing me. You’re not listening’. Because the partner is listening through the past, he thinks he can hear what you’re saying. But you say, ‘No. You’re not listening. You are not hearing me’.

We’ve all been through this haven’t we? And the partner says: ‘Look you’re being bloody emotional. Of course I can’t hear what you’re saying. You’re irrational!’

The partner hasn’t got enough love to be present and to face the other and say: ‘Fair enough. It’s true that I can’t hear what you’re saying. Would you repeat what you’re endeavouring to tell me, please’.

If you can’t listen you’ve lost touch with your fundamental love, your fundamental presence. Therefore you will have to pay for it – not with the price of guilt; nor as the Christians say, are you going to be judged. It is just that if you haven’t got the loving consciousness to be present and listen to your partner the karma of it will chase you.

And later you will :wonder what’s happened … ‘Why am I so unhappy? Why can’t I get on with my partner anymore? Why does this happen to me time and time again?’

Leave your partner and it will happen again with the next one; time after time, until eventually you give up partners because it’s just too hard. Well, you’ve got to change the karma. You’ve got to take responsibility.

To be responsible you have to be honest. To live the divine life with a partner you have to be honest.

‘Why are you moody?’

– ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong. I don’t know what it is.’

‘Well, that’s irresponsible of you. Because you must know why you are moody. And if you don’t know, then you are unconscious. I can’t live with someone who is unconscious. And I wouldn’t expect you to live with me if I am unconscious. So why are you moody?’

If you are honest together like that, you are serving the cause of consciousness or presence. Whenever you are endeavouring to be honest with each other you’re changing your karma. You are serving the purpose of love.

Instead of covering up, making excuses – ‘Oh everything is fine’ – address each other honestly. And then you will be responsible for your life together. Then you change your karma.

You don’t have to worry about the other person’s karma. Change your own. It follows that as you change your karma and have the power to do it, that power will be used to help other people. That is also the law.

So you must practise honesty. But honesty without responsibility is not honesty.

So, for instance, it is honest but it is not responsible to say ‘Oh I feel guilty about what I’ve done and I feel I’ve got to tell you. And I know it is going to hurt you but that doesn’t matter, because I have to be honest’. So you lay it on your partner. Because you feel bad. You tell her something; after all this time, you tell her.

Bang! Down on the floor. Weeping, crying.

‘Ah, now what’s wrong with you? It’s better now. I feel much better now’.

That’s the sort of half-baked honesty that goes on in us – making another suffer to save ourselves, because we feel guilty. Wouldn’t it be better to just be guilty? How about that! You did it. You are responsible. Why don’t you just be a man or a woman and be guilty. You did it. Now get on with it. Don’t load it on another.

But were you guilty, or just unconscious?

Either way you still have to take responsibility for the past. You’re living the divine life and becoming more conscious, but you still have to pay for all that you’ve done. All that you did as a child, as a teenager, still unwinds and comes towards you in maturity so that you face what you have been.

So the law of love means listening and taking responsibility. But what is this responsibility?

Response ability; the ability to respond.

Respond to what? Well, in the first instance it is to respond to the blessed earth; the beauty of the plants, the birds, the day, the wonder of the air.

I said love begins with listening, looking, perceiving, with being like now. If you are