Living Love

Barry Long

Sujets

• Mind

Informations

• Publié par: Barry Long Books
• Date de parution: 09 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781899324514
• Langue: English

Extrait

THERE is such a powerful attraction between men and women. So how is it that we make each other unhappy? What’s the solution?
BARRY LONG examines the real purpose of love and shows how sexuality and relationships can be transformed until finally human love is suffused with the love of God.
Barry Long (1926-2003) was an Australian spiritual master who put the love between man and woman at the heart of his teachings. His radical solutions to the human predicament challenge us to face the truth of life and discover the reality of love for ourselves. He is best known for his book ‘Making Love – Sexual Love the Divine Way’
Also by Barry Long
Meditation: A Foundation Course
Knowing Yourself
Wisdom and Where To Find It
The Origins of Man and the Universe
Only Fear Dies
Making Love
Stillness is the Way
To Woman In Love
To Man In Truth
Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth
The Way In
Where the Spirit Speaks To Its Own
A Prayer for Life
My Life of Love and Truth
From Here to Reality
Audio Books
Start Meditating Now
A Journey in Consciousness
Seeing Through Death
Making Love
How to Live Joyously
A Prayer for Life
BARRY LONG
LIVING LOVE
The Divine Union of Man and Woman
Edited by Clive Tempest

BARRY LONG BOOKS
Published 2022 by
BARRY LONG BOOKS
The contents of this book are edited from recordings published by The Barry Long Foundation International.
The right of Barry Long to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
© The Barry Long Trust 2022
‘Barry Long Books’ is the publishing imprint of The Barry Long Foundation International www.barrylongbooks.com www.barrylong.org
Paperback: ISBN 978 1 899324 25 5
Ebook: ISBN 978 1 899324 51 4
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library.
Cover design: Christina Dreesen
Digitally printed in the UK and the USA
CONTENTS
Foreword
Love’s Purpose
Beauty and the Beast
From Sex to Love
Love is Honest
Love is True
Love is Intelligent
From Self-Love to Devotion
Love is Knowledge
Sources
FOREWORD
There is such a powerful attraction between men and women. So how is it that we make each other unhappy? What’s the solution?
Barry Long examines the real purpose of love and shows how sexuality and relationships can be transformed until finally human love is suffused with the love of God.
This is a book about a love that seems impossible, a romantic myth, and how it can actually be brought into our lives, into our own relationships, if we are honest and courageous enough.
Barry Long weaves the romance into the everyday facts of life. His vision of love is passionate and inspiring, but he throws a harsh light on the way we love today.
He explains why sex corrupts love and how doubt and fear cripple our partnerships. In characteristically authoritative manner, he urges us towards the solution.
This is a powerful master-class in living and loving, based on edited transcripts of talks by the Australian spiritual master who became best known for his radical tantric teachings.
The talks have been edited to make a readable book but the quality of speech has been retained. Each talk approaches the subject of love from a different aspect, but you will notice recurrent themes and repetitions. These are not just features of Barry Long’s rhetoric but represent his teaching style – always returning to the one truth through the many forms of expression, and introducing more and more knowledge of love by going ever deeper.
Clive Tempest
LOVE’S PURPOSE
 
F irst 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