A Star Diamond
Barry Long speaking on 1 July 1981 to men in his meditation group about a proposal to form a Barry Long Centre in London.
Every man is a star and what he is endeavouring to do is become a star in his own experience. What I am endeavouring to do is make him a star in his own experience and in the firmament of men. Taking the star as a symbol, a man who has become divinely and rightly oriented within himself is a star inasmuch as he has tremendous gravity and mass but also has the wonderful light we all associate with the beauty of stars.
But a man cannot just be a star … I once wrote: I have seen what virtue is and it is the death of me. What I meant, and saw then, was that it is only in the destruction of a star that virtue is released. Let’s say the star of a man reaches a point of shining glory, of worthiness in his own right, to just radiate and be, and shine and be self-illumining, but virtue is only released when the man disintegrates himself. It is a divine surrender, creating a 360 degree explosion and at the same time an implosion, a brilliant splintering - a star diamond.
That star is how I see the symbol for The Barry Long Centre. The Star of David and other symbols have structure, five or six points. But the Centre, as I see it, will not be tied to a structure. It has to be structured to complete disintegration - but a destruction that brings a self-illumined mass, a sheer brilliance, in its own annihilation. That is the divine quality in man - surrender to the force that holds all the stars together, the star’s final offering of itself to that which contains it.
That is what faces every man. No matter how fine and brilliant he becomes, the Christ must sacrifice himself in that way to release virtue into the world. You have to disintegrate yourselves, as I have to disintegrate myself, to truly release the virtue that is God within us. But this is a realised state - not an imagined thing. Everything is done by the purity of your own state.
Without Questions