Speaking to the Intellect: Barry Long in Oxford
From the transcript of a talk at Trinity College, Oxford, 26 October, 1981, advertised as ‘Wisdom and Where to Find It’.
I am a man of truth. I am a talkative truth, because I come through the intellect. There are men of silence, true teachers of silence and Masters who do not speak, who have entered the body in the meditative process, coming from the East. They know nothing, only love, truth, beauty. I am also a man of silence, even if I talk to you all night - I have to be, because I love and I know the truth, which is nothing - but I am here in the West. The teachers of silence who come out of the East have entered their bodies,and their emotional selves and gone deep down into the unconscious where the truth Is, where I am. As you go deep and deeper into the unconscious the body and the mind becomes stiller and stiller. You stop thinking and wanting. A rhythm comes into the body and you start to feel ‘ananda’ - not the bliss that in our western culture is the wrong word for it, suggesting some gain; ananda is beauty and love.
This meditative process of going into the body started in the East thousands of years ago. Eventually man reached the profundity of his own unconscious, where original power is. (That is all one does in meditation - consciously sink down into the unconscious.) Then, as a reaction to that, and by the evolutionary process, the intellect started to rise up out of the body to conceptualise the world. The world is not the earth; it is the edifice of our intellectual existence. To a man of silence, who is deep within his body, there is no world. He only starts to enter the world if he thinks and uses his memory. You will notice that thinking and using your memory are all part of the intellectual process.
— Questioner: Excuse me. I don’t want to be pedantic but as you have spoken about being a man of truth, and not thinking or needing a memory, and you have used a term such as 'ananda’, it would be true, wouldn’t it, that to use a term like that, you have to have been using your memory?
BL: Yes, it seems so. I used the term but I didn’t remember ananda, for you see I am describing the energy of ananda that I have within me. 'Ananda’ is just another word, like all the words I am using now. I am not thinking when I use these words. Like you, when you spoke to me, or when you talk to your friends, you are not thinking. Before you spoke, you did think you could catch me out. But when we speak we do not think. We only think when we stop talking and go into memory.
— Questioner: I agree. But you said, if I remember (using my memory now!) that bliss does not suit western civilisation and you tried to explain what ananda is. Your explanation must rely on memory, unless it is possible to say you exude ananda?
BL: No, no, I don’t exude anything, except what you think I exude. I exude nothing. I am what I am. To myself I am in ananda in my body. Do you understand? I am only what I am.
—Questioner: I understand but still don’t see how you can define ananda. The description of anything must rely on memory.
BL: If I am something, I don’t have to remember what I am, do I? Do you see? You have picked me up on something I said and it was right to do that. I do not criticise you. It is wonderful that you have spoken. We have to speak to get our reservations out, so that we can become more profound.
I was speaking about the depth of the unconscious and intellect rising up out of that … What I do when I sink deep into my unconscious is sink deep into the earth. I am a part of the earth and the unconscious is the depth of the earth. We are of the earth when we are born but then we leave the earth inside our bodies and go more and more into the world. The child is born. The eyes look out and the ears hear with an almost blank receptivity. Then the child gradually starts to enter the world - the world of food, of the parents; the world of demands and desires, concepts and memory.
In the evolutionary process, as a reaction to having reached the depth of the unconscious, or the deep meditative state of the East, man started to flower as an intellectual being. The intellect rose and the West was born - the world of intellect and memory. The world we know today consists of the intellect. And so in this world we have our universities.
Western man, intellectual man, is not prepared to accept the truth without putting intellectual demands on it, and rightly so. For when he talks of science, of proofs and facts and not beliefs, he is using the scientific mind - the Western mind at its best. I am here to address the intellect. That is why I am speaking here in a university college, where one might get a serious approach to the intellect.
I can speak to the intellect of the world anywhere but is it worth talking to? It only wants to talk about what it thinks. It wants to tell its story and speak about yesterday. Who cares what anyone thinks?
We of the wonderful western intellect have to find the truth. But the problem is that the intellect alone cannot find the truth. No scientist has ever found the truth. And never will - because he deals with something outside himself. You can be worldly-wise, build aeroplanes, go to Mars, but who cares when you are going to die?
The question is: Can we ground the intellect and get the intellect to acknowledge the truth? Here’s a challenge to the intellect. Bring the finest scientist here and let him demonstrate the truth of Man. Or will he demonstrate the truth of the world? I say he cannot demonstrate the truth as I do. If he uses any scientific means to find the truth, he’s going to fall short of it - because the scientist comes after the man. First he is a man and only secondly is he a scientist.
— Questioner: I’ll jump in here and play the game . . ,
BL: What game is that?
— Questioner: I know what game. To see how this truth that you have can evolve.
BL: No, the game is to prove that you have the truth, now. That’s what you are going to do, isn’t it?
— Questioner: I am going to relate a logical equivalence and ask you if it possesses the truth. It’s about Einstein and his way of thinking - sometimes he called it a 'gedanken experiment’, a thought experiment, asking himself what it would feel like to be in a certain situation …
BL: How do you know? You are quoting someone. Haven’t you got the truth inside yourself? Tell me the truth in your own words. Einstein is not here. You are here.
— Questioner: Ah! Then I’ll say the truth is for example that all is given without work, that gifts come unexpectedly. All is given free.
BL: And what is the point in the truth you are endeavouring to communicate? It has no meaning unless you can demonstrate it to me. Does it solve anyone’s problem?
I have no dispute with the statement that 'all is given free’, But I don’t find that it is a statement of wisdom. Life is wonderful but living is horrendous, sooner or later. Where is the meeting ground between life, in which all is given free, and living, where you must work, pay the rent, suffer and go to hospital? I say let’s look at this. I will tell you I haven’t found that all is given free. I had to suffer to find the truth. I meet people who say 'Let it flow! Everything is done. It is all great!’ I do not find they are true or honest. We are here to find the truth within the wonderful yet horrendous interaction of life and living.
The truth is not in quoting Einstein or any other person. I accept that in the university you cannot get through without quoting others because it would not be acceptable here to say you know the truth. That is the way of the world. But we are talking now about different values. We are here to find the secret of life, which is the secret of death.
Am I truly immortal? Is that statement true or false? And the next question: What is immortality? I cannot conceive of it, so can it be demonstrated? Every endeavour towards the truth is first and fundamentally the discovery of my own immortality. That is why we go through all the religions, why people take drugs or do anything else in the search for truth. To know this: Is it true that I am immortal? If it is not towards this, what then? What more do we want to know once immortality is realised? The need for striving goes.The worry about death goes. The problem of living goes.
— Questioner: But doesn’t that depend on a belief in something beyond your experience?
BL: Not where I am. I have realised immortality. But you must not believe me. You must ask me to demonstrate it.
— Questioner: What kind of experience have you had?
BL: That would be to ask me to use my memory. And then you would think about my experience. This particular truth is most ungratifying. I am not going to give you something to remember me by. I will give you the truth, and you will not be able to remember it because it will be the truth about you. The truth about you is what you are, and you don’t need a memory for that.
— Questioner: I want to say that I have enjoyed being here very much and it sounds to me that you speak the truth.
BL: It’s nice of you to say that. We have much to discover, though I have nothing to add to you, or you to me, except love. And love takes anything that gets in the way of the moment of truth. What are we looking for? Only that point of love between us, when you and I have got rid of the memory and can just be here.
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