Purpose of Partnership

From an interview with Barry in 1995.

What is the process in partnership?

The process of partnership is to diminish my self. My self is my negative emotions: my anger, my resentments, my jealousy, my self doubt. 

When I'm in partnership with a woman, because she is my opposite number, she's like a mirror to me and she's going to reflect those parts of my self that I'm not really facing. So the process of partnership is for me the man to face my self through her mirroring and for her to face her self through my mirroring. There's no doubt that there's nothing like a partnership to bring up my self and her self in the forms of emotion and argument and all the discontent that arises between us - as well as the love that is naturally there.

There is no problem with love. Nobody ever has any problem with love. We only have a problem with our self: our emotions, our discontent, our unhappiness and our conflict together. So it's the conflict we've got to deal with - the love is okay. But what we tend to do is to look for the love without dealing with the conflict and eliminating its cause.

A woman might say, 'The cause of my conflict is that you man are not loving me as I know love to be'. And man says to woman, 'But you're not loving me as I know love to be because you're emotional'. And so we get this terrible discontent and conflict between us that seems insoluble.

Love is endeavouring all the time to converge to enter the body - and the self of each man and woman grimly fights to hold onto its negativity, to hold on to its unhappiness, to not yield to love. So it is a war of attrition. It is a battle between love and my self and my self eventually has to be given up, my self being my negativity and my resistance to giving and to love.

~

Barry, could you tell me what is the purpose of love between man and woman?

The purpose of love between man and woman is for you to enjoy me, man, and for me to enjoy you, woman. If that's not the purpose of love, what is?

The purpose of love is not for the woman and me to argue. How could that be a purpose? The purpose of love is not for me to want to be away from her to go to a football match, although that might occur. The purpose of love is for her to enjoy being with me and me to enjoy being with her. Now is that the truth in your experience?

If that is the truth in your experience then you start to know what you are doing in partnership. And so if anything arises between the man and the woman, such as a restlessness in the man, the woman has to be able to say, 'Why are you restless my love?' and he has to be able to say, 'I am restless because so and so and so and so'. For there's always a reason, always a reason for everything. If I can't say why I am restless, then I am not being honest.

The next essential element in this purpose of love is honesty. If I'm not honest in my partnership then we are never going to enjoy being together for long.

Now what is this honesty? It's not what the world thinks is honesty. It's not the honesty of telling everything, it's not that at all. It's an inner honesty. Honesty begins first of all with me facing my self. These negative emotions are always going to spoil anything good in my life, and that applies particularly to the love of each other - man and woman.

What I've got to do to be honest is to start facing my self, and not allowing these emotions to determine my life, to push me around, to spoil my relationships - for they certainly will. So, every time I get angry I have to say, 'Why am I angry?', because who wants to live with an angry man or an angry woman? The answer is so obvious. Nobody wants to live with an angry man or angry woman. And how do I get rid of anger? First I have to get rid of it in my self before I can even hope to get rid of it out of others.

That's what love between man and woman is about. First the purpose of love is to enjoy being together and the process of love is to bring that about by getting rid of my negativity so that we can then enjoy being together.

Now when we enjoy being together, we then come into the making of love which is the fundamental thing in a partnership.

~

What's the purpose of making love?

The purpose of the making of love is, again, to face one another so that we actually make love with our bodies and not with our unhappy emotions - with our doubts and fears and our problems. Generally speaking, the whole world makes love with their emotions. They want to be excited, which is sex.

When you get excited you get into fantasies. When you get into fantasies you are not making love with your body; you are making love with your mind. No mind has ever made love yet and never will. It is bodies that make love. As you get rid of our negativity, you start to make love only with your body. When you do that, you enter a natural state which is the natural state of life on this earth. You enter the same state of innocence as for instance the animals, but with a fullness and a fulfilment of our own creativity which is what we as human beings have over the animals.

~

Can you explain the difference between excitement and passion?

Excitement is what ruins the making of love because it drives us into imagination, into our minds and into comparisons. We want to repeat excitement. It is such a seductive energy that we want to look for excitement and that drives us out of our bodies.

Passion is not exciting. Passion is fulfilling. Excitement is satisfactory: it satisfies us to go up to an orgasm for instance. We get excited and the peak of the excitement is the orgasm and for a little while we are satisfied. But then, the demand of excitement comes again and we have to have another orgasm. It starts off and then starts going up like a ramp and then it finishes and drops suddenly.

Passion is not like that. Passion is enduring. If you make love with your body and with innocence in your body, there is a pleasure that starts to rise and that pleasure is constant. It doesn't get excited and lead up to something. It can lead to orgasm - and there is nothing wrong with that - but it's not working towards an orgasm. Orgasm might happen but it is secondary to the beauty of passionate love between two bodies.

It is the negative emotions in us which separate us from the innocence and the beauty of the animals and separate us from our own beauty which is our own physical body. It is the physical body that makes love and not the mind. So we've got to still the mind in the making of love and the way you do that is to be one with the sensory pleasure - because the making of love is a great pleasure in a sensory sense. The senses are alive in the making of love and if we keep the mind still and just focus on the sensory pleasure, we don't get excited. We are just in a state of passion and that passion can go on making love without going towards some end. It is just the pleasure of making love.

As you start to get the pleasure of making love between two bodies, love then gradually becomes beauty. The more innocently you make love, just making it with the body and not with the fantasies or the imagination or the emotions, pleasure turns into beauty. And more and more beauty comes into your life because you are bringing more and more pleasure into your body, more and more beauty into your body. It energises it in a different way. It makes it more vital, more healing, more healthy. But that's only if you keep the mind out of it and become innocent like the animals.

I was saying that the purpose of love between man and woman is for them to enjoy being together. Now purpose has no end so the next question I would ask myself would be 'What's the purpose behind that purpose?' because you are not there just to enjoy yourself, you don't make love to get something for yourself.

If you make love rightly in your body and you go through pleasure into beauty, where does this lead? What's the purpose of that? Its whole purpose is to realise the union between the two principles called man and woman. It is to realise that, inside the body, inside the intellect, to actually make it a living reality.

Here we have man and here we have woman. They will always remain separate as two separate bodies; they can never merge and become one body. That is absolutely impossible. If they are going to become one, how is this done? It is done within. It is done in consciousness.

The purpose of making love and enjoying one another and doing all that I have said is to have a union of consciousness which is called God realisation. For when the principle of man and the principle of woman are realised in the body, are realised in the intellect, are realised psychologically, the two have union and that is what is called God Consciousness.

God Consciousness is the complete elimination of your self: complete elimination of all your negativity, of all your wanting, of all your trying to do something. And that can be brought about by the love of man and woman, the right love between man and woman. It is the rarest state on earth to reach an end of my self, an end of all my negativity and to realise the one divine consciousness which of course is behind everything on earth and behind your body and my body as man and woman. And the way to do it is by man loving woman and woman loving man in the way I have described.

To realise God or love is a climacteric which changes irreversibly the consciousness of the man or woman. Then I no longer ever fear again. I no longer ever doubt again, because I have realised the one perfect principle, love or God, by uniting the two principles of man and woman through my love.

~

What about commitment? Is there place for commitment in partnership?

I am not so keen on the word commitment because all things change, but it's an inner commitment, a recognition: I am here to serve love or truth (because love and truth are very much the same). I am here to serve love. I will be true to love.

If I am a man, I am going to be true to love rather than to the woman. But if I am true to love I will be true to the woman, to my own being and to the rest of existence. Love is not anger so to be true to love, I will have to get rid of my anger. Love is not jealous, so to be true to love I will have to get rid of my jealousy. Resentment is not love, so I will have to get rid of my resentments.

So you see it goes right through all the negative emotions because they are not love and if I get rid of those, then I am love. But I can never be love while I am resentful, jealous, angry, unhappy.

The whole process is to get rid of emotions and then I am in this God consciousness. And then I am one with my woman if I am a man. I am one with the love of woman.

Now the love of woman is beyond the individual - because I might have to love another woman and she might have to love another man. This doesn't mean promiscuity because there is no promiscuity in love. For love always is bringing more love into the world and does not cause others to be unhappy. Promiscuity makes everybody unhappy. The one who is doing it or thinks he is making the love, is making the woman more unhappy and is making himself more unhappy through promiscuity. But if he loves, that doesn't make the woman unhappy or his own being unhappy. Love and giving are the same.

~

This path of love, this path of transformation is not easy. It is not done in a few months, it is not done in a year, it is not done in a few years necessarily. It takes time. The one who fights most is the woman or the man in that body, in other words her self and his self. It grimly fights love and won't give in.

Love is endeavouring all the time to converge and to enter the body - while the self of each man and woman grimly fights to hold onto its negativity, its unhappiness, to not yield to love. So it's a war of attrition. It's a battle between love and my self. My self eventually has to be given up - my self being my negativity and my resistance to giving and to love.

~

The purpose of making love is to go deeper and deeper into the sensory beauty of it, until the realisation occurs eventually in one or the other that there is only I who am making this love, I who am making the love am reading these words, there is only I. Eventually, through this love I will pass through the place where the two become one in my own consciousness. When that happens, I realise love or God. This is a climacteric which changes, irreversibly, the consciousness of the man or woman. Then I no longer ever fear again. I no longer ever doubt again, because I have realised the one perfect principle, love or God, by uniting the two principles of man and woman through my love.

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