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Barry Long's revealing introduction to his book
"To
Man in Truth"'
The first
thing an ordinary man has to do
to help him realise his spiritual yearnings for
God, truth or enlightenment, is to examine his everyday life. He has to see
where he is wasting his energies on distractive activities, and start making
changes.
Every man has inside his
body sufficient energy to take him through to the realisation of truth or God -
God realisation, as it’s called.
For
God realisation is the original natural state of man. But over the thousands of
years of increasing interest in the distractions of the mind and the world, man
has in most cases lost the state and the keen spiritual perception that goes
with it.
Identifying Distracting
Habits & Emotions
Within man’s daily life there are various habits he has to identify. He has to
really see for himself that each is a form of distraction. For instance, he may
have made a habit of talking too much, or frequently phoning his friends to see
how they’re going. He does these things because he can’t stand the silence that
is natural in him and because he can’t stand to be alone without a constant
supply of information. The habitual reading of newspapers, the regular listening
to the radio or excessive watching of TV, all fall into this category of wasting
valuable energy.
There are also his emotional reactions which disturb him and others and destroy
his spiritual energies. Anger is one of the most destructive. He has to
gradually withdraw from this emotional habit. He does this by genuinely seeing
that there is no excuse for anger: he is either trying to do the impossible and
getting angry about it; blaming somebody for upsetting his life which means he
is not responsible for his life; or he is stubbornly trying to get his own way
when the situation doesn’t allow it.
Withdrawing Emotional
Dependence
The
man has to look very closely at his relationships. As a beginning, he has to ask
himself, ‘If anyone I love died or left me, would I be in pain?’ If the answer
is ‘yes’ it means he has an emotional attachment to that person; for it is
attachment that causes pain, not love. He is dependent on the person and
therefore they have the power to hurt or manipulate him. Such attachments
destroy the man’s spiritual power; while they exist in him he can never really
be free. So he has to start withdrawing his emotional dependence on people close
to him. If it is his mother for instance, and he is terrified of her dying, he
must stop phoning her every day or week when there is no need.
The Distraction of Work
He
must also examine his work and see whether he’s a workaholic and what that is
doing to his love-life. When he complains, ‘I’m so busy’, is he lying to himself
because he’s really enjoying the momentum and excitement - even the problems? Is
he aware that he’s on an endless continuity wave that closes him off from much
of the rest of his life?
Work is one of man’s main distractions. If he gets too immersed in it he won’t
really be able to be with his partner or children when he gets home. Half of him
- his mind and emotions - will be on the momentum of work. His attachment will
not allow him to leave it behind: for what you are attached to obviously follows
you.
Also, after what he calls a hard day at the office he is likely to need a drink
or a drug to slow him down and relax him. Really he should have already slowed
himself down and been relaxed at work instead of getting emotionally identified
with it.
Mastering Himself
As
he gradually withdraws from these many distractions in his daily life, the man’s
self is going to play up. His and everybody’s self consists of a block of
resistance to any form of spiritual discipline or self denial. It is the
opposite to the pure intelligence and goodness of the man. Faced with such
intelligent action his self will feel restless and threatened. His self loves
him to be distracted and doesn’t want him to have the extra spiritual power that
is available when he learns to contain the energies he’s been wasting.
That power takes the form of a greater authority which the man realises is
coming into him; a greater sense of being what he is. He will not give in to
people’s emotional demands as he used to, either in his love-life or in the
family. He will get a right aloofness from it all. He won’t be dragged into
emotional situations because the people around him will know that’s not his game
any more. For instance, he won’t argue with anyone. He’ll say, ‘I don’t argue. I
just look to see the fact for myself.’ Eventually he will say, ‘I don’t discuss
things. You can ask me a question and I will reply as best I can, but I’m not
into discussions.’ Discussions solve nothing in the spiritual life; what counts
is action.
The man will continue to love the people close to him, not according to their
expectations, but according to the truth in him. As he does that, his inner
authority increases and he has a greater perception of freedom. Living this way
he sees more clearly through the distractions of existence in which he’s been
burying himself, to something indescribable behind it all. He starts to have
intimations of ‘the one’, the one unnameable Being behind everything. That’s
another name for what I call God, life, love or truth. He will then have quieter
moments, stiller moments of communion with that in his own being.
The Process of Containment
What
I have described is a process of containment to develop a spiritual
consciousness. It is the troublesome and distracting self that has to be
contained. The self is a hard lump of emotional cunning that has formed in the
subconscious out of all the disappointments and hurts the person has experienced
since birth, particularly those of a sexual nature. It is terrified of being
seen for what it is and directs most people’s decisions and reactions from the
safety of the dark of their subconscious. Being an unhappy entity, its influence
spoils good relationships and situations and inevitably makes choices that are
soon regretted. Under the light of spiritual scrutiny the self squirms and does
everything it can to deflect the attention.
In any situation of self-denial or withdrawal, the self will be felt as an
uncomfortable disturbance or restlessness in the belly, as everybody has
experienced. It will try to move the man’s body when he is being still; make him
go for a walk, read the paper or turn on the TV. It will pressure him to think
about giving up the process, to feel that he is being hard done by or even
misled. The man must not give in to this. He’s just got to stay with the self
and not try to get rid of it, knowing that by containing it he is gradually
reducing it. The authority he has gained is the intelligence with which he
surrounds his self. But it must be without thought. And any pain is simply his
self dying. He must not look for overnight miracles. He must remember that he
himself made this restless old unhappy self and it is only right that now he
should take responsibility for dissolving it.
Honesty in Partnership
One of the most difficult things for man (and woman) to
grasp is how to withdraw from attachment to the partner. For this he has to
introduce truth into the relationship. Normally people fall in love, make love
and that’s pretty well the end of it - until the misunderstandings and arguments
start. When there is truth in the relationship from the beginning, the chances
of conflict are reduced enormously. It means putting honesty before the love of
the man or woman. The man must see that if he takes his emotions and negative
reactions into a relationship - as everybody does - the partnership is going to
be problematical. To avoid that he has to be prepared, with his woman, to give
up his emotions and find out what causes them, in him and in her.
That requires a pretty intelligent partner, so in this I’m not just talking to
man. Woman has to be honest, too. If he finds that she’s emotional, in order to
introduce truth or God into the situation he has to be able to say, ‘What are
you emotional about?’ And particularly to ask this very rare question, ‘What am
I doing to you, or not doing, to make you emotional? If I’m doing something then
I want to change that. I love you, so I don’t want to make you unhappy. We’re
together to enjoy being together and if there is anything I can remove in myself
that has come between us, I will endeavour to do it.’ Of course the woman will
say and do the same, if she’s a real woman. And neither must react in the old
defensive ways of the past. So the principle is: honesty before love. Otherwise
you will have a dishonest love no matter how hard you try.
Honesty in love is the process of detachment. It brings reality into the
partnership, reducing selfish and irresponsible emotional expressions. Each one
takes responsibility for their own emotions instead of trying to put their
emotions on the other by accusing or blaming them and saying, ‘You’re making me
emotional’. That’s ridiculous. Only my self makes me emotional.
Loving Woman
A man endeavouring to live the spiritual life has to
practise loving woman. For the essence of woman is God or love in existence.
Every man knows that woman is what he thinks about most throughout his life -
from boyhood to the time of his death. He might say he doesn’t want woman but he
will still think about her. He will have thoughts about how he needs or wants to
love her; or what he would like to do with her body - he’s always thinking about
that. This is true of all men. It indicates that the truth of love for man must
be in woman. However, the one major obstacle to his loving her is his sexual
lust for her. Now, how does he get rid of lust?
He gets rid of it by loving her physical body. I said loving her not sexing her.
Love is utterly different from sex, although love is expressed through the
sexual act. To love a woman is to enjoy her. And I don’t mean just to enjoy her
for five minutes in physical lovemaking. First man has to see he loves being in
the presence of woman for the pure sensation of that enjoyment - holding her
hand, walking with her - without any thought process. Any thought process about
woman turns to sex. When the physical woman is in front of him, does he need to
think about her? No, you only think about what’s not immediately present. If he
does think or fantasise about her while she’s there, he is lusting, not loving.
And if he thinks about sex with her when she’s not present, he’s still lusting.
The man has to be able to see the beauty of her. If there wasn’t this
recognition of her beauty somewhere inside him, why would he think about her all
his life? He has to see her intrinsic beauty instead of his own habitual sexual
wanting to possess her. He has to realise that he loves her because she has an
indescribable essence that he, man, does not have. She is his missing love, the
missing expression of God in his existence.
Man’s Sexuality
Man cannot love a woman truly - as woman needs to be loved
- while his sexuality is rampant. That means while he excuses his sexuality;
while he watches pornographic movies, reads pornographic magazines; while he
excites himself with photographs of naked women or parts of her - and any of
that sort of distraction instead of loving a real woman’s body; and while he
masturbates which means having sex with himself. Also, man cannot make love to a
woman while he is fantasising about her or another woman because that’s
introducing a phantom woman into the relationship. Man often does this to keep
his self excited but it means he’s not really there, and he’s not loving. He has
to give it up.
Something man does habitually is to look at women in the street. In doing this
he is subconsciously feeding his sexual self. His sexual self actually turns his
head and looks out of his eyes at a woman, often before his attention has even
noticed her. The sexual self is faster than the mind. There are two ways of
looking at a woman. One is to see her beauty. The other is through the sexual
self which has a phantom affair with her in a glance. He’s got to give up
looking. He’s got to go through a stage where he actually denies himself the
right to look at women in the sense I’m talking about. It may be said that
that’s suppression. But it’s not, because he knows what he’s doing - he’s
practising containment. Suppression is when you feel as though you’re doing
something because somebody has made you do it.
Woman of course often dresses to attract man’s attention because she has a
sexual self too - due to our sexual society. Some women go to excess and exhibit
their breasts more to make them more obvious to man. A man trying to give up his
lust has to turn away and not dwell on such a woman as he would otherwise have
done. If a naked woman walked down the street, all the men would be gaping for
as long as they could see her. But the man practising love would say, ‘I’m not
going to do this habitual thing that most men do in their unconsciousness. I
won’t look any longer and indulge my sexual self.’
Being True to One Woman
I teach that it is important for man, as soon as possible,
to stay true to one woman and take her on. This helps to bring him to his senses
and out of his imaginative sexual mind. The key is that he takes her on and
together they practise honesty first in their relationship (as I have described)
and discover how far they can go together into the mystery of love. If a man
still wants other women, how can he take on one woman? He can’t. He’s not mature
enough yet. Wanting other women, he will be restless and discontented; or he
will dishonestly pretend that all is well and because it is not, emotional
friction will arise between the couple - a common cause of disharmony in
relationships.
It is imperative for a woman, once she is impersonally mature enough, to have
her man’s total focus. But he will not be able to give her this while she is
still distracted by her emotions and the lure of the world of experience. Woman
has been so disappointed, so wounded by man’s itinerant and casual loving of
her, that despite what man and woman think, she cannot yield her love - the
essence of her body - to him completely until she knows that he truly loves her.
When she realises that - it is a deep psychological subconscious place - she can
give her extraordinary divine energies to him in their lovemaking. These rarely
invoked energies are the God coming forward through the woman. But while he is
half-hearted in his love he cannot bring her or himself to the consciousness of
this God within her.
The purpose of physical
love between man and woman (who are the dual embodiment of God in existence) is
for her to give him what he can never have on his own - the glorious female
essence that lures him all his life. This divine energy purifies him immensely
of his restlessness and negativity, as it does her.
The Noble Man
I have described man who truly loves his woman as a noble
man. He is noble because he is willingly dying to his own notions of love and
independence. He is in the process of realising the consciousness of God or
truth in his woman and in the reality of his own love. A quality of love or
truth shines through him. Whatever he is called upon to do, there will be
nobility in his action. For instance a noble man can love his children rightly
because he is not attached to them. He speaks to them from a place of divine or
impersonal love beyond the fluctuations of clinging and selfish human love. A
noble man is he who reveals the human spirit in love, in looking after the sick,
in caring for the suffering, in sacrificing himself in wartime or simply not
allowing his unhappy emotions to sully love. It’s all a matter of love.
So, the key to man rising within to the wonderful heights which the spiritual
life makes possible is to first identify the distractions in his daily
activities that are consuming the precious energy he needs. If he is honest,
these are always there to be seen immediately in front of him.
He must not look to absolutes, to God, to enlightenment as something to be
achieved. If he does he will overlook the immediate distractions that are
impeding him - and continue on a futile search.
When I was a young man I used to go fishing off the surf beach of an evening
with my first father-in-law. He was catching all the fish, and good ones too. I
said, ‘What am I doing wrong?’ He said, ‘You’re doing what most people do.
You’re throwing out too far. You’re throwing over them. The fish are right in
close at this time of day.’
© Barry Long 1999, 2002
"To
Man in Truth" By Barry Long
www.barrylong.org
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