Truth is not philosophy
Barry Long was interviewed at his home in Crabbes Creek, New South Wales, on 23 June 2001 by Neal Bowhay.
There's a generally accepted difference between spiritual masters and philosophers. Could you say what the difference is?
The philosopher is always asking questions. The spiritual master never asks the question: What is truth? What is love? What is death? What is life? He has the answer in the whole that he has realised. Only the spiritual master who has realised God-consciousness, the whole, has the solution for every person who asks: What is God? Why am I here?
That's the end of philosophy, the end of everything – but not for the human mind of reason. The basis of philosophy is reason. But you can't try to reason out the truth.
So, having dismissed the whole of philosophy, let's look at some particular bits of it. Then you can dismiss it in other ways . . . Everybody looks to Socrates for the start of it all. He questioned any assumption that he thought people had and would reduce it to the point of unintelligibility. He didn't really put forward a positive philosophy. What he did was show people that they didn't really know what they thought they knew. Would you say that served a purpose?
It seems he was a man who always went towards negation. And negation is the truth. Negate everything you think you know – every opinion, every thought. It has no value whatever. Everybody thinks their thoughts and their opinions have value; that their reasoned conclusions and theories have value. They have no value whatsoever in respect of the truth. Why? Because everybody dies. Only the spiritual master would say that.
Taking this to the next stage: It appears that Socrates was successful in his lifetime at quietening people down in their beliefs, but what followed him was a person called Plato. And then Aristotle. Plato held true to a lot of what Socrates said, in the beginning, but later on was impelled to say things he thought had never been said before. He came up with Platonic ideas . . .
There are Ideas. Where I come from, Plato was absolutely right. There are Ideas that are beyond the concepts of the mind.
What role do those ideas play in our existence?
Our entire existence is due to the light of intelligence within – the divine intelligence – projecting existence through Ideas. This existence is an Idea projected through the brain by the great, indescribable divine intelligence behind the brain. But when it gets to the human mind, the mind of reason breaks the Idea down into concepts. And there's a continuous degradation, a corruption, of the Idea. That is the human experience, living through the mind and the reason.
Do ideas exist in a particular realm? Apparently one of the things Aristotle didn't like about Plato's philosophy was the need to resort to some sort of metaphysical realm, which he couldn't test.
Then Aristotle couldn't access divine knowledge, which is the area of pure Ideas. Every Idea is pure; it doesn't have the corruption of existence in it. In the Idea of Tree, there's no 'green trees'. There's no 'brown dogs'. There’s only Dog and Brown and Green and Tree. Only here, in this corrupted, degraded, physical, sensory, materialistic existence do these Ideas become combined. That's the miracle of this existence – it's a complete and utter miracle – how things are combined. It's due to the human brain, the great synthesiser of existence.
So can we talk in terms of ideas that are either synthetic or 'a priori'?
No. Ideas are not synthetic. Synthesised, they are concepts. We form concepts of Tree. When Ideas come into existence, they become blended due to the brain, which informs the mind, so then you have 'green trees'. The divine light is projected down through something we have nothing to do with – the psyche behind the brain – and is broken down, through a gradual degradation, and divided into more and more forms in the brain, which is the father of form. The divine light is broken down by seven states, or heavens, in the psyche and the brain forms its form and projects the whole thing. It projects the body – with the light behind.
Everything happens in the brain. This is why it's difficult to conceive of 'realms'. Even the seven heavens are realised in an aspect inside the brain. There's division: Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one – down to this place, the lowest heaven, which could possibly be called hell, where everybody suffers, dies, loses their children and loved ones.
I can talk at every level of the brain because I have realised what is beyond the brain. That's where my knowledge comes from – the divine light. Not that I'm the divine light, but I have the knowledge of it, by grace. So I have the knowledge of the whole. And the fact that I have realised the whole means that I don't have any questions. Not one single question about the mystery of life. The philosophers have their questions, trying to find it. The Christian religion bends over backwards, making a Trinity of God, which is a ridiculous division because God is the whole. And the whole is beyond concept. It is not particular. The whole is a complete Idea. That’s what I have realised.
If we go on to someone like Descartes . . . I think he championed the way that people now see their own existence, inasmuch as he came up with Cartesian Dualism, although what he was looking for was certainty.
What was the dualism?
Mind and body. The only thing he could be certain of was that he was aware of things: I perceive or I think, therefore I am. In his argument, he started by saying, 'What if some sort of cosmic devil is making me dream all of this external world? I can't be sure any of it is real.'
Absolutely.
The only way he could get the external world back was to say, 'It must have all been created by God. God is an idea I can't be without.' So he set up the problem: 'How can something immaterial, such as the mind, interact with matter?'
That's the fundamental confusion of everybody. The fact is that the divine light of intelligence, which embodies life and death and everything else – the mystery of it all – is absolutely one and whole. It has to come through to us, but we couldn't stand the divine light in all its purity because we were animal creatures to begin with, and then psychological, mental and emotional creatures. So its wonder and mystery has had to be introduced gradually into the psyche through degradation and division – the corruption of the original light into a lesser intelligence. The intelligence of a child, running around throwing a ball, is relative to the philosopher's reason, questioning, 'What is God?' And that intelligence is relative to the way of mysticism. In divine realisation, the way back to the whole, you give up your opinions and dissolve the value of thought and reason. To have knowledge of the whole, everything men and women treasure with their minds and emotions has to be completely and utterly transformed.
Is it a genuine question: How does the mind interact with matter?
No. First of all, nobody knows what matter is. It's an invention. All you see is form. If you cut the body open, looking for matter, you will never find it. What you find will be form. If you dig into the earth, what you will find will not be matter. It will be form. If you're a scientist, and you dig into the atom, what you will find is form and force. The disintegration of form gives rise to force. So there's no such thing as matter. It is form or force.
The body is a sort of battery. That is 'the mind'. The mind is the body and the body is the mind. There's no distinction between the body and the mind – none at all. And that's demonstrable.
But I think in inner space, which appears to be different to the space out here . . . Is that true?
The space out here is a space projected by the brain. There is an 'inner space' but it is abstracted from existence. It is only abstract. I mean, you can't show it to me. You can think and imagine in there, but it's not like space out here. You can show me this space. Your 'inner space' is nonsense. It's where we think and what we think is a lot of old nonsense. Inner space cannot exist unless there's something in it. You create an inner space so that each separate thought can go somewhere. That's how you know you're thinking.
So if I'm not thinking, there's no inner space. There's just this.
Yes.
And when I am thinking, the space it's occurring in is abstracted from existence?
Your 'inner space' is abstracted from existence. Yes. And the thought is extracted from existence – not abstracted. It's extracted by the mind and emotions – by your emotional self.
Due to having an existence, we have built up an emotional self – the thing that's discontented. The body is not discontent. It's this emotional self inside every body that causes the problems, the unhappiness. The body is not unhappy. It might be made to cry by the self, but it is not unhappy.
Doesn't that create another kind of dualism? Now you have the self as a different entity.
No, because the self is a phantom, made by the unhappy mind that can't get its own way and doesn't understand life.
It comes down to this: Everything is God being God. In other words, everything is the whole being the whole. The tree is the whole being the whole, and only particularised by my brain as separate from the whole. To me, in my knowledge, it is not separate from the whole. Everything in our purview is part of the whole. But the mind sticks to particularisations and extracts something from the whole. The particularisation then becomes extracted from existence, as it is, into a phantom image of it. It's a phantom because we emotionally synthesise all events that happen to us. And that's because of all the unhappiness in our life.
We build up the idea, for instance, that if I love a man or a woman and they die, then that is bad. It is only bad for my selfishness. In 'the whole' the person had to die.
There's a greater intelligence behind the whole of existence than you and I, or anyone, can possibly conceptualise or imagine. But the realisation of God informs me implicitly that everything must die. I am selfish when I weep because someone has died. It was only right that they should die. I know that . . . But if you said it, you wouldn't get elected President of the United States, would you?
Everything is God being God. The whole purpose of existence – this whole thing out here – was to create a human brain out of all the brains of everything that had ever been: a human, self-conscious, self-reflective brain. And that was done a long, long time ago. But then, instead of reflecting on the whole, that self-conscious brain reflected on its own unhappiness. The intelligence given to man and woman corrupted its facility by reflecting on 'what I am interested in'; on what I think I'm here for; reflecting on why I'm unhappy – on all those things instead of reflecting on the whole of the intelligence. And so we get a relative or conditioned intelligence in every single body on earth. That is God being ignorant of God, the whole, isn't it?
I am not ignorant of God. I am utterly and completely in union with God, meaning I have realised God and therefore can speak from that place. No one who has not realised God can stand in front of my intelligence. Someone who has realised God . . . We have nothing to say to each other except 'Hello'. We might not agree with each other's teachings, because they are particularisations coming out of the person, from the various levels of the person inside the body. But in those of us who have realised Supreme Being, in essence there is no question, no problem between us.
'God realised' knows there is no death; that there's only glory awaiting everyone. But the part of us where God is unrealised will cry when someone dies, because the human brain has its self-consciousness. It reflects on self. The person crying is reflecting on a self that is thwarted. Every self is trying to do what is not the divine will; that is, to have a happy life. You cannot have a happy life. The secret is not to be unhappy. End of story.
So, the human mind is self-conscious or self-reflective. And what is the intelligence of philosophers? It reflects on a question, on a perceived problem that is not a problem at all.
You're saying that by separating myself, I've created division. So now the problem I've got is that I am trying to get rid of it?
Your self will continue to divide, because it is a copy of the ignorant human brain which is the divider of existence. It is the brain that’s particularising all of existence into form.
If the brain projects everything to make it what it is, does that mean that everything is completely dependent on the brain?
Absolutely. Everything is completely dependent on the brain. But that doesn't mean the brain is creating it. It might be making it, but what is causing it all? The philosophers, mathematicians and scientists never address the cause of it all. There's only one cause and that is God, the whole, the divine intelligence behind the brain. And it cannot be conceptualised – only realised. That is what it's all about – for each brain (not just the individual's such as my own) to realise this God. You can see by the state of humanity how far the human brain is from doing it. But that is the purpose.
If everything out here is dependent on the brain, is anything here when I'm not perceiving it? This is one of the great problems of the philosophers. We behave every day as if everything out here exists when we go away from it. And we expect it to be there when we come back, believing it continued to exist in our absence.
We have to live that way. That's how the divine intelligence has organised the brain. It made the brain and it is part of our brainy existence to see objects outside of us. We are brainy people. And we have to live in this existence like that. But there is an intelligence inside of every body that knows the truth.
You said earlier that Descartes seems to have realised that there is a thing called God. Well, that's what is behind the brain; that's what made the brain. And I have no trouble with it because I know the whole – that there's an intelligence within me that is not dependent on the brain; that there is a vast, vast intelligence behind it all.
In your book 'The Origins of Man and the Universe' you talk about what we were before we came into existence and say that at a particular moment in time our consciousness entered physical existence from the psyche.
Yes, a body was developed for humans. The human brain was developed and at a certain point Man realised a light . . . He suddenly saw the sun and reflected that he'd seen something. Really, the sun is a symbol of an inner light. Physical existence all happened in one moment. But the scientists can't possibly accept that because we have a divided brain that puts time or succession into things. We've got fossils and geology which suggest that there was a period thousands of years ago when this happened and that happened . . . The explanation, that nobody can really grasp, is in the demonstration I give of our fax machine: There's no paper in it but it goes on receiving messages and then as soon as you bang in the paper it starts printing out. That is analogous to the creation of existence – as best as I can describe it.
Intelligence had the idea of all the species, and the natural kingdoms: the geological, the animal, the plant world and the starry heavens. I'm the only man to add that fourth cosmic one to the mineral, plant and animal worlds. It is the cosmic that has allowed intelligence to come into our bodies, which are the product of the mineral, plant and animal. The magnificence of the starry heavens is a symbol of the intelligence that we have. It's only a reflected intelligence, because we can't be the heavens; we can only reflect on them.
A question about history. There's the common idea of history as something that happened and if you gather enough evidence you'll piece it together. Is there such a thing as an objective history?
No, because there is no body without the brain. The body is a projection of the brain, which has always got to go from the past to the present to the future. The brain cannot help but do that – that's how it's been formed. So the body is a memory; and is historical because the brain is historical. And there's no objective history because it's all in the brain. Or it's what the brain can remember.
But there is another memory, which has got nothing to do with the human brain. Or if it has, it's at the extremity of the human brain within. And that is what in The Origins of Man and the Universe is called the Vast Memory, in which every single moment of everybody's existence is recorded, or registered. I say 'recorded' as though it had past and present and future in it, but that's not the truth of it because it is occurring where there's no succession. Human existence happens in a thing called time. But time is a misnomer. This is an existence of succession: this moment, this event, succeeds the last. It's all succession; there's no time. If we only looked at everything as being succession, then we would not have the vast scientific discourse about time.
Time is like a great gunshot down the street, whereas succession is the bullet. Succession is one moment succeeding another. What I am today succeeds what I was yesterday. What I am this moment succeeds what I was last moment. This gets rid of a lot of scientific and metaphysical speculation.
Can we bring in the philosophy of Spinoza here, because he said something you may be in accord with. He said existence is all one substance; and there are what he called 'modes', to describe the different properties or behaviours of things. So, if existence were like a blanket, each thing would be like a wrinkle in it, changing shape in different ways. Does that make sense?
It would, but now I'd use modern terms: the objectification and particularisation of the whole. The brain objectifies the whole and then it becomes particularised into this part and that part, with an extraordinary beauty and wonder. Even in what they call 'a vale of tears' – because everybody dies, gets sick and your loved ones die – even so, there's the beauty of the flowers . . . It's beautiful, like life now, when everything comes together and there are no problems and no self wondering 'Why am I unhappy? What can I do? When am I going to be a success?' Living is a vale of tears and life is a wonder, as we all know.
What would you say about our identity? What is your identity?
Beginning with the child, when it's born it starts to gather its identity from people calling its name. And also from its own body, which it focuses on with its senses, as much as it can. It assumes the identity of a body, and of a name, and the identity of being 'my little darling' and all the rest of it. And then there's the coming in of sexual energy, which strengthens it, and that starts very young but doesn't necessarily come to awareness for a while. Then we get identified with what we want and what we don't want: 'Oh, I like this. I don't like that . . . Oh, you like that. I don't like that at all!' So we get clashes of various identities and as we grow up, and are thwarted in our ambitions, we get excited about our successes and then depressed about our failures . . . And this continues until a man or a woman in their thirties and forties has a pretty complete identity, mixed up in the mind and emotions with failures, successes, sexual urges and all the rest of it. And then comes – let's say by grace – perhaps a bit of the spiritual or mystical life and the divine light of intelligence starts to shine into the body; and a sort of disillusion goes on. And that happens in many people, not necessarily those we would call spiritually inclined, or who are with a spiritual master. Many people have to go through some disillusion of their identity. That's the divine intelligence dissolving some of it. Finally, in the complete realisation of God there is the dissolution of all identity. That means the complete and utter dissolution of the attachment to an identity as a body, as a self, as an opinion, as an image.
Is there still something you can call distinctly 'Barry Long'?
In the very early days, teaching in London, I used to say that 'Barry Long' is a name I use, just like you would use 'John Lewis' or 'Selfridges' as the name of a store; so that you can identify who's speaking – because there are many people speaking who don't speak as I speak. But, really, my knowledge comes from the whole. It doesn't come from any identity. It comes from the mystery that is behind us all.
But that knowledge, specifically yours, appears in the same body from one day to the next.
Yes, indeed. I‘m certainly not going to deny that I have a body, the appearance of a body. This knowledge happens to reveal itself through this body. Why not? The knowledge that you have reveals itself through your body. But I'm not identified with my body or my image. Whoever I am, or whatever’s speaking, is not identified.
But there's the common experience of going to sleep and waking up and the recognition that I'm in this body. So what is that?
That is a continuity in the brain, an historical connection. The brain is historical and makes everything historical. Barry Long is historical. My brain is historical so I can enter the historical at any time and talk about the past. But I, who am the intelligence in Barry Long's body, am not.
You see, that's the problem with philosophers and questioners and scientists. They all start down there [in the historical] and try to get up here. You just cannot do it. You have to get rid of the impediments down there by sacrificing your self, your opinions. The scientist can never realise the truth until the man that he is gives up his attachment to his opinions and his science. He thinks it’s important, but on his deathbed he won't be thinking about Einstein's theory. It won't do him a bit of good.
I was asking you before about the role of history. When I went back to reading about philosophy, preparing for this interview, I seemed to be delving into my own history, as distinct from an objective history of philosophy. And then what I am, the truth in me, got diverted by arguments and I actually became more rational and scientific.
That is true. We are traveling through our own past. Yes, it is your history. The whole history of existence as recorded by the brain is your history. You -– your brain – came out of it all. So, obviously, the brain's historical. But the intelligence is not.
The brain has usurped the intelligence. The brain thinks it's intelligent and so we got to think that we're intelligent. But we are not. We're a reflected, corrupted intelligence. We're only a relative intelligence compared with the pure, pristine intelligence that comes through the brain. If you realise that, you can come into the history of the brain and, as you saw, you can read your own history there.
Another question: Historically, philosophers are invariably men; it's a male pursuit. If I start speaking philosophically to a woman, she's not liable to stay listening for long. Perhaps the woman's response is more intelligent . . . Since philosophy has ignored the female intelligence, is that the error in it?
No. Everything, as it has been, is absolutely right. Philosophy is right, where it is and in what it has done. And, as you say, it's a male province. The male is completely different to the female – two different species, where I come from. The thing is to have the knowledge of what the female is.
The philosopher tries to address the question: What's it all about? There's only one way you can know the mystery behind it all. And that is, to love the mystery. Love does not have any analysis in it. Love does not question. Love just is. I love the mystery. And when I truly love, I have no questions; I have no analysis; I have no thoughts about it. I just love it. That's how it is. I love, utterly and completely love. I worship the mystery, which I can never know – and no wonder, because I love it.
To me, and for man, woman has a mystique he does not have. Mystique, from the word 'mystic', is the finest part of the mystery, apart from the whole of the earth. All you can do is love the mystique in her. But unfortunately, she's become historical. She has become like a man, in her own way. She has followed him by personalising things. She thinks and gets emotional. And whereas man, the philosopher, has tried to get rid of his emotional concerns, and just address that narrow area – 'What's it all about?' – and has impersonalised his narrow vision, she has done the opposite. She has personalised everything. And so woman is not always lovable as the person and the emotion that she is.
Woman is always the mystical truth to man. Otherwise he wouldn't think about her all the time. She is another form of God for him. And the female I speak about is the essence of God on earth. The mystery is what you love and woman is an expression of that to man.
So, would you say that women are more attuned to love and men are more attuned to intelligence?
I would say that woman has a greater knowledge of love and that’s why she's not so interested in philosophy and 'reasons why . . .' She's interested in being loved and being love. Man's rational mind wants to know why – when the mystery is always there for him. The mystery cannot be known; it can only be loved. Woman knows that. But in her present condition, it's a sub-conscious knowledge. Can she hold that knowledge? Can she find a man who just simply loves her? Love is not what we think. How we personalise and particularise it is not love at all. It's sentiment and attachment. To love is to acknowledge the beauty. That's what love is, in the first instance.
Do love and intelligence eventually become the same thing?
Yes. But love is only in this existence. There's no love in pure intelligence. Love has been divided into male and female here, and that's a division that does not exist beyond the brain. The sexes, the genders, only exist here, in existence.
You're talking about going beyond the brain and of course that is the point at which all the philosophers run into trouble. They invariably come to the conclusion that they can't talk about what cannot be deduced either rationally or empirically. Wittgenstein argued that all the problems of philosophy are problems of language, because all words are concepts. So the transcendental itself is a concept. And the rational mind can't reason beyond itself.
Well, it can't! But there's the endeavour to invent, or in some way deduce that there is something behind the brain. What I'm endeavouring to do is take away the identification with the brain. You see, the problem is that philosophers talk about knowledge – when the only way is to be it. There is sufficient intelligence coming through the brain for you to realise the intelligence that is there.
Everybody thinks they've got a brain – whatever the brain is. I don't know I've got a brain and you don't, either. It's all an invention. You don't have a brain. But you can have one if you want one!
What? Didn't you say the brain is necessary for existence?
Yes . . . But come with me. I talk about the brain because everybody thinks they've got one. Now I'm saying you haven't got a brain. And does it make any difference to you? No.
All you've got to do is realise the intelligence that is there. If you get rid of the brain, what have you got? Intelligence. You've got the intelligence that is creating all this. You know that intelligence is not this thing that thinks it has a brain, because this thing dies. And intelligence cannot be any thing that dies – because that wouldn't be intelligent. Okay? That's my knowledge.
I can look through my senses and see I've got a body, because that's external to me. But I've never seen the brain – and I never will. It's an assumption, like the whole of science, with its theories – its assumptions. So that gets rid of the brain. It's intelligence that is the very means by which I communicate – not my words, but my intelligence behind the words. And what is that? We don't know. It's a mystery. Isn't that wonderful!
So, here I am with no brain, but then there is my body, my form. What about when I am dead? Is my form irrelevant?
It is irrelevant in relation to death, or reality, but not irrelevant to that which is here. Whatever is looking out of my eyes sees a body. And I know it's my body because I know it's not your body. No problem – that's just the way it is. Don't make a problem of it . . . Why don't you just be the intelligence?
In this existence we have to talk about things, instead of just being what is. So if I have to talk of love, I have to talk about my idea or notion of it, instead of being love. When I am love, I can describe what this love is; and it is not sentiment and it does not weep for the dead. This love is intelligent enough to know that all things die, because all things have died since time began. That's intelligent -– to be able to see that all things die and that my body is no exception.
So, that's intelligence. The philosophers and the scientists are only relatively intelligent. They are rationally intelligent – reasonably intelligent.
The Cartesian philosophy says 'Here I am and everything else is outside me' but sometimes it seems to be my experience that everything is inside me. Does that make sense? Do you have that?
That's a mystical state of intelligence. It's a greater intelligence than the intelligence that weeps for the dead. It is a mystical knowledge: 'How can there be death when I am in all things and all things are in me?' You can't rationalise it – it's just how it is. And to my knowledge, it is the truth. I've had that realisation where I was life and I was one with all things and all things were me. But that was a long, long time ago and so I don't have much of a memory of it, really. The realisation becomes your state. Now I only have knowledge of the mystery – where I'm one with all things.
How would you describe your state?
I'd say that my focus is within. That I am nothing within. I have nothing arising . . . And that's fine. I'm in my senses. I can hear the birds. But mostly I'm just nothing. I don't have any thought. I don't have anything missing.
I don't go into those dreadful states that you hear about – 'samadhi', going into blissful states and all that nonsense. To me that's a form of trance or unconsciousness. I am here every moment to be conscious in the senses. Otherwise I'm denying a part of me that is an imperative, as it were. I don't need to go into some other state while my body stays here, until eventually I come back to it. I don't need to go into samadhi to be with God. I'm with God now. I'm with love now. I'm with truth now. I'm with intelligence now.
I've had ecstatic states on the great ramp up to where I am. They are indeed exalted states, let's say. But they all disappear . . . They're not important. I'm just intelligent, that's all. I am intelligence. That's about all I can say.
Finally, I wanted to ask you about the need for spiritual teachings. As a spiritual master, you lead people in a certain direction and away from spiritual ignorance. But it seems to me the problem with any teaching is that it gets conceptualised. And I wonder if, in the end, realisation only comes by grace?
Yes, it is grace. A spiritual master has realised divine consciousness out of grace, which always has some purpose to it. And the purpose of grace, for a spiritual master, is to enlighten the burden of the people – because the people represent God. But the people, being all their opinions, fears and doubts, resentment and anger, are the impediment to the realisation of God. And the whole motivation of a spiritual master, being a servant of grace, is to help the people give up their attachment to their emotions, their selfishness, so that they may come towards the realisation or love of the mystery – instead of loving their self.
In so doing, any master will have to give concepts, because that's the only thing the brain or mind can understand. As soon as I say, 'I'm pure intelligence', the question is: 'What do you mean?' And I have to give a concept. So the spiritual master gives concepts that dissolve other concepts, so that the person takes on a larger concept. The spiritual master is always luring whoever he's speaking to towards the realisation of the pure intelligence that he or she is – which is God.
It is a terrible thing for a spiritual master to see the people that come to him conceptualising beyond the concepts he's given them. And so Barry Long says: 'Please, if my teaching is the truth for you, any part of it, live it!' You see, the living of something gets rid of the concept. But people will not live it; they would rather think about it.
You can't live a concept. If you do, then you've got conflict. You're trying to live up to something, aren't you? If only the people would live what I say . . . They can't live everything I say – only what is meaningful for them. If they could only live what they hear in their own experience as the truth . . . But they go away and think about it, reflect on it, try and analyse it, have discussions with their mates about it. That's the human burden: discussion, discourse, talking about it. Talkback radio – everything is discussion, and absolutely useless in terms of being free of unhappiness.
So yes, it still comes by grace. Eventually – and I'm not predicting anything – you will have to turn your back on everything you love in this world if, by grace, you are going to realise the greatest love. That is so for everyone, for every body is the most important thing in existence. But that, of course, is too much to ask of the people. So the divine intelligence doesn't do it that way. There is a ramp of existence and everybody is travelling up it to receive as much intelligence as they are capable of containing, and no more. They are given as much light as they are capable of appreciating, and no more.
Even in someone dying of cancer, or dying from anything, the divine light is coming in to destroy something that has now finished its time: the concept that is our body and our existence. Death is destroying a concept, at a very deep level. That's the process of dying. Otherwise, what's the purpose of it? When somebody's dying horribly of cancer – going through all the chemotherapy and radiotherapy, with the quality of life taken from them so they get a couple more years – they're going to die anyway, so what's happening here? It's the divine light coming in to prepare them to give up their attachment to this existence. The person who has to undergo those terrible treatments loses something of their attachment to things as they used to be. They are more purified, even if they just get a couple of years longer. Or they might not get any time, but something is done. For this existence is all about ending existence. That's what it's about: ending the attachment to existence. That is the essential attachment, which eventually, has to be given up.
A good moment to stop. Thank you.