Living Love: The Divine Reunion of Man and Woman

By Barry Long

A book about the purpose of love and how sexuality and relationships are transformed when human love is suffused with the love of God.

With such a powerful sexual attraction between us, how is it that we make each other unhappy? Barry Long explains why sex corrupts love and how we cripple loving relationships.

What's the solution? In characteristically forthright manner, the author proposes a new way of romantic love and shows how it can be brought into our lives and partnerships with honesty and courage.

• Why do relationships so often go wrong?
• Is it really possible to be honest with your partner?
• What ever happened to romance?
• How is sex transformed into love?
• What's the connection between sex and spirituality?

The love between man and woman is at the heart of Barry Long's teachings. He is well known for his influential bestseller 'Making Love; Sexual Love the Divine Way'. This new book is the sequel.

— A master-class in living and loving.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Long Books
• Release date: Mar 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781899324514

Book preview

LOVE’S PURPOSE

First I would like to tell you the myth behind my teaching of man and woman. It’s not unlike the Greek myth of Pygmalion. You’ll remember that he was a sculptor and his object was to carve the woman of his heart’s desire. He set about doing it and worked day and night. Sometimes, as the figure emerged, he’d gaze upon its emerging beauty without moving. He so loved this woman. When he slept, it was beside the statue and when he woke up it was always before his eyes, for he did nothing else but chip away and sculpt the figure. He used to rub his hands over the statue with loving and beautiful caring. He felt the wonderful lines of the figure and sometimes he would run his lips over the shoulders, the forehead and the arms. He couldn’t help it. He just loved this emerging figure of his heart’s desire, the woman of his dreams, his love within him. One day he kissed it on the lips so lovingly … And to his great surprise, the statue moved. The arms came around him and embraced him.

In the myth behind my teaching, woman is delivered to man with something like the hardness of (let’s say) a beautiful piece of marble. It has hardened her beauty. She is all love, but as she grows through pubescence she starts to get a fear of love in her. Her first experience of love is very seldom like her inner knowledge of it; and eventually never is. Her teenage experience is of the awkwardness of a young man’s love, as ardent as it may be. And because of the indoctrination of society with its attention to sexual excitement, the fear of love grows – although she enjoys the excitement, and the love, when it’s there. All her subsequent experience, as she goes into her twenties, brings this certain hardness into her. It’s the hard disappointment that she cannot find love as she knows it to be in her deepest being. Every time she surrenders herself to a man, to be reached, to be reached in love, the love is not there. It ends in disappointment or heartbreak, or worst of all, indifference.

All that disappointment and compromise is what puts the hardness into woman. She is like the block of beautiful marble delivered to the sculptor’s studio. The man has before him a beautiful woman encased in the past of her disappointment. She is therefore not really a woman. As much as she is a woman filled with love and beauty, the ability to express it is denied her.

Unless woman is loved rightly by man, she cannot come to life. Of course she has life and love within her, but I am talking about life coming up into her senses so she can be the love she is; so she can be that beautiful woman, no more encased in her past experience, in her disappointment, unhappiness and moods – all put into her by lack of love. The only thing that can remove all of that hardness from woman is man, the sculptor. Man’s sole task is to free woman. In freeing her, he frees himself. In bringing her to life, he brings himself to life. That is the truth, or the myth, behind my teaching of man and woman.

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So, like the sculptor, man has to address the block of marble and start bringing it to life. But he can’t do it if there is any sexual excitement in him. Pygmalion would not have been excited as he caressed the statue’s lines of beauty. Every woman’s body has them. The hair, the cheeks, the shoulders, the face, the breasts, every part of her is so beautifully created by God. The potential to be this beauty, this glorious, wonderful figure of love, is inside every woman’s body. If a man can only bring himself to see what is there! The sculptor sees with his inner eye the potential, the beauty, within the block of marble; and so he works with love and intuition, not according to an idea, but spontaneously from the genius of love, which is in all of us; it is not personal. So every man has it within him. He is made by God – by life – and so has been given the power to bring this beautiful woman to life.

Man’s love is the only thing that can bring woman to life. No woman can do it for herself. I am talking mythically, so don’t get disturbed please! And yet I am telling you the truth.

It begins by seeing her beauty. Not just noticing it. And not by wanting to possess her. It begins by seeing her beauty and loving her. With his hands, with his lips, loving her with his body, so that she receives the sweet beauty and passion of love. But in this society of sex and excitement, what she feels is his sexual excitement. Instead of bringing her to life, he brings her hardness. So she gets a defensive exterior or personality, which is most convincing. But it is not her. It hides the soft and beautiful woman inside, waiting to be loved. Man has encased God’s creation in a sexual cocoon for his own pleasure and excitement.

The real pleasure for man is to actually bring a woman to life. But for that, he can’t go hopping into bed with every woman, here and there, and prancing along with a great momentum, pleasing himself and satisfying his surface desire. Woman, being love, is inclined to accept any offer … (I’m not belittling your intelligence, woman. I want you to hear me from the depths.) … Woman is so starved for love that if someone comes along and starts to show it to her, she tends to open herself to it. There is the eternal knowledge in her that ‘love is’. She is vulnerable throughout her life to men who come to her with loving words or some behaviour or manner of love. Finally she will give herself to that – but not always with the best results, because when man is sexual he is very cunning and can present himself as love when he is not. If he does that, he denies his own life. I tell you, man, there is nothing equal to the love of woman. Everything else is a substitute. Your yachts, your businesses, your great skills and all the things you can do, are just substitutes for the love of woman.

Life on earth begins with man and woman. The male/female principle is all there is, and it travels up through all the animal kingdoms to the male and female principles expressed and embodied as man and woman, the two polarities of love. The only way love can ever be found in existence, on the surface of this earth, is through the union of man and woman. And the love that is enduring and revealing of the consciousness of God or life itself is the love by which they bring each other to life.

But now woman has got the fear of love in her. And man also is afraid. He sees with his inner eye the block of hardened woman and the task that is given him – to love her back to life. It daunts him and he doubts himself. His consciousness has been conditioned by sex and excitement and because he knows himself, he is aware that there is a part of him that just wants to satisfy itself. There is that sexual part of him; and yet there’s also the part that is noble and made by God for the task.

We are so many thousands of years into existence. Twenty or thirty thousand years? How can we know how long our existence as man and woman has been going on? But all that time the whole of existence has been getting harder and harder. We are cocooned in (say) thirty thousand years of gathering hardness, like being turned to stone. We