The Human Condition

Well, good morning again, and here we are, by the grace of God. We've been able to make it through all the forces that would keep us away; we've been able to make it into this very still and holy place because we don't have any interruptions here of our mind, our emotions or people's demands on us – no demands from our mother and father, no demands from our job, no demands from our lover, I trust if he's or she's here. Isn't it wonderful to be free of the emotional demands of your self and others?

You only have emotional demands of yourself and others because you put up with it. Today, I want to go into how your self is getting away with deluding you that everything's all right in your life when it's not. I define the self – my self – is the accumulation of all the unhappy emotions that I have had since I was born. Each emotion over the years, through babyhood, infanthood, boy or girlhood, and particularly the sexual, disastrous sexual experiments, the disappointments and the bitterness and the heartbreak – they are all emotion – and it all gathers in the subconscious.

It doesn't go away like we seem to think. It gathers in the subconscious, and then we start to think that this emotional ball inside of us is 'my self' – well, it is my self – we think it's 'me', but it's not – it's my 'self.' And, so, we've discovered that myself, thank God, is not 'me.'

My 'self,' this pain in my body, has been running my life as long as I can remember – it's been running my life in that body, listening to me. It makes my decision who I'm going to make a partnership with. It makes decisions on the looks of people. It makes decisions on how it feels at the moment – and all these feelings are not true. It makes decisions out of fear. It makes decisions out of the terrible lack of security inside – it's always insecure inside, so it goes for the money instead of the joy of the job. It goes for the sex instead of love. It goes for everything that causes problems and unhappiness.

If you look at all the people around you – and you have to observe them pretty closely – you will see that everybody is unfulfilled, unhappy in some way, making excuses for the lack of love in their life. It's this self that makes the excuses, making excuses for what mum and dad demands on me, making excuses – 'well, that's all right –' while inside, something in me, in that body, knows that there's something wrong. 'I don't want this demand of people on me, I just don't I don't enjoy it, It's not right, –' and yet my self puts up with it, and my self makes excuses for it. My partner makes demands on me, terrible demands on me, wants love, which I can't give, because it's a demand for love, and I know it's not right, but I can't do anything about it, because I've never been told what to do about it until I came to Barry Long – because I deal with your life.

God is in charge of everything. God the great creator behind all existence and my body and my life – your life – that I can realize within. That's the easy part, although it's terribly hard and terribly rare to realize God within, but to bring that God into existence, to eliminate unhappiness from this body, which is your that your body to eliminate the self's utter obsession with itself and being unhappy.

Now let me define unhappiness again for you please, so that we don't get mixed up because the mind is so slippery, it's going to just gloss over what I'm saying. Now, if I get angry – I have unhappiness in me. Well, you couldn't deny that, could you? If I got anger in me – I mightn't have it now, I'm so sweet and lovely now, but just push a button over there and I'll get angry and I'll get aggressive and I'll get violent and I'll throw things around, or I'll accuse you and I'll lash you with my terrible tongue and words. That's anger, and that's in me. If it's ever in me, it's in me.

Now the thing is, can I get rid of this anger forever, out of my body? And the reply is 'yes, of course,' if I take responsibility for it, but if I allow myself, which is anger, to just run my life, then I'll never get rid of it. I'll be able to make excuses. And the children will say, 'why are you angry, Mum?' 'Why are you angry, dad?' And you'll say, 'well, everybody gets angry.' Just like your mum told you that everybody gets unhappy. I now say – what do you mean? Who told you that everybody gets unhappy? – I never get unhappy. So what are you on about? What's this talk? You trying to fix me, with which they've always done, mothers, fathers, grandparents, everybody to excuse their own suffering have said, 'Oh, everybody has to take the ups and downs of life.' 'What do you mean, the ups and downs of life?' Just define that for me.

It is indeed possible that I might get knocked over by a car and break my arm. That's not a down in life. That's an event, isn't it? And although my body would rather not have it happen, I don't have to consider that to be a down. That's an event. It is my mind that says, 'Oh, this is bad.'

You see, the mind judges everything. T'his is bad,' and then it's got to judge something that's good. So it says 'this is good, and well, that's bad.' 'Well, this is good, well, that's bad.' And so my life has lived up down, up down. Good today, unhappy tomorrow, good today, unhappy tomorrow. A saint today, angry and violent tomorrow, and accusing others and blaming others for my life tomorrow. What sort of a life or a human being is that? What sort of a human being is someone who carries resentment against someone inside of them?

I'm all saintly now, but inside of me, just mention the name of someone and I resent them or hate them for what they have done to me in the past. What sort of a being is that? Do you think such a being can really love if he or she says, 'Oh, I love you' in those beautiful, saintly moments, don't you know that the monster of resentment is still in her or his body, ready to come up when someone pushes the button and they say, 'Oh, I hate that person,' or 'I dislike that person,' and 'look what he or she did to my life,' which is an utter irresponsibility.

Nobody ever did anything to my life. It is my life. I'm responsible for it. So how dare I blame or accuse another for what you did to my life?

'Look how you betrayed me.' Now, if I am going to attach myself to a betrayal and consider that you betrayed me, am I able to love? Or, have I got this weakness of blaming you for the unhappiness in my life that you might have caused me?

We are talking about the human condition here, and the reason I talk about it is for you in your own experience, to see how much of the human condition, which is disastrous, you are allowing to be in your body and your life.

Because you've allowed it to be in your life – you've allowed it to be in your beautiful God made body, which is made for love and love alone and walking and tasting and smelling and hearing, your beautiful body is made for that alone. No body has resentment in us, no body. Your beautiful body does not have guilt in it. Your beautiful body is in the moment. It is in the moment that you're hungry. It is in the moment that you drink water. It is in the moment you make love. You never make love in the past. You never drink water in the past. You never see a tree in the past. Everything in your beautiful body is now. So what is this hideous monster that hides down inside my beautiful body, in the subconscious and makes me consider that it is myself? – Well, it is myself, but I have not realized that my self is the monster inside of me that says 'I love you today' and argues and argues with you tomorrow.

Now are you getting this dichotomy, this contradiction that we that we tolerate in our bodies, and everybody does it – I mean the whole world out there – it doesn't matter where you go – it's in them, the human condition of suffering, of attachment to suffering. 'Oh, oh, I have a right to be angry' because he did that to me, or she did that to me. 'Of course, I have a right to be angry and or I don't want to talk about it,' because I'm too busy seething down inside my own self, in my subconscious. I'm busy with my emotions going over and over and burning me all the time and making me more resentful and more unhappy. So that when the children come in and say 'Hello, dad' or 'Hello Mum,' I say 'hello,' and I'm too busy with my own stinking self to turn and be loving. Because I if I say I love them, where is the love gone in that moment – the monster of myself has devoured it.

Now this is what the world does not know until I have come to Barry long because all the Masters seem to deal with God and heaven and beauty and all those sort of things, or the absolute, try to find the absolute – bullshit. You've got to get rid or you've got to dissolve this terrible monster that's inside of you. I've done it. That's why I can speak to you with such authority and earnestness and sincerity and truth because I've done it. Otherwise you could think I could talk to you like I do? I would be struck dead by the Almighty God if I assumed to be able to help the people and had not lived it myself.

What I am endeavoring to do is to penetrate so that you will just see for yourself the condition in which you are in. That's all. The first thing is to be able to see straight. That's half the battle, because in the human condition, you can never see straight – unless it involves money.

Ah, that's how the businessman runs his life. He's just as crooked in the mind. His mind is just as circuitous. His mind is just as aimless, except he's got this wonderful concentration of money profit. So then he straightens his mind out. Then he works. God is his money. And when you have any sort of God you serve, even if it's the devil, it makes your mind straight on that particular aim at that particular time. But when the businessman gets home, does he love his partner, or is he too busy with thinking about his money and his plans is his mind so focused on that that he he knows doesn't know how to love? The answer is – no. The same with the scientist, he's focused on all these atoms and and Blackboard ideas and silly ideas of the speed of light, which he thinks is the speed of light, and it's not. And he's focused on this, and he comes home from his laboratory, where he's been so objective and unemotional, and then he's got to deal with his partner, hasn't he? – whom he hasn't loved, who's getting very uncomfortable because he doesn't love her enough, and she hasn't been to Barry long, so she doesn't know what to do about it. She's in a terrible mess, and he tries to tell her he loves her. And then she says, 'Well, I know we love each other, don't we?' And they both agree, 'yes, we love each other.' Isn't it terrible what's happened to us? Because they're so ignorant they don't know what's happened to them. They don't know that their own emotions have come between them, that they're living a lie, not a life of love, but a life of lying to each other.

I want to be loved enough, not just loved, and that's the question for each one of you are you. I know every I know your lover loves you. We can take that. I know your mum and dad love you. I know all your people that love you, love you. But I want to know, do they love you enough? That's the word in my teaching which shakes the whole Universe of people who listen to me, because it's a terrible thing to suddenly, in one word, have your life turned upside down. Because if you're with someone who doesn't love you enough, what are you going to do about it?

That's going to stay with you, and that is the value, one of the values of being with me. I will not let you drift into this unconsciousness like our mothers and fathers and all the friends of everybody, like the whole human condition is, as far as I'm concerned, if you're in front of me, I will not let you drift into that terrible human condition, which is a lying condition, a compromising condition that says I love you, and then is violent or angry.

Then we come to guilt. It is the human condition that tolerates and thinks I have a right inside my beautiful body to be guilty, to harbor this guilt to protect it, like having a rat in the house and protecting its nest. And the rat is myself, my guilt. I love this guilt. Oh, what a pleasure it gives me in myself to be guilty. Oh how pathetic I feel. Oh how a failure I have been. That's self indulgence. Self indulgence is guilt. There is no guilt in my body. So therefore there's no guilt in your body, if you will only take responsibility for your body and not for your guilt and wallow in it.

So now we've got a couple of things that are myself – anger, a dreadful, violent thing can't be trusted; guilt, a thing that you can hide inside and just seize and yet destroy the beauty of your life and your love through your own narrow looking into your own feelings and the whole wide world is here that you say sometimes you love and you're so busy looking into your own narrow, putrid feeling. God, what a what a way to live; and then you've got self judgment, ah the evil of self judgment, which goes on very quietly inside, doesn't it? Nobody could know, because you can put on a nice personality and you can say, 'Everything's all right.' Is it? Everything's all right. And yet inside, you feel you are a failure. You feel that you're not good enough to be loved. You feel really that nobody really loves you, or you feel that you're ugly. The personalities puts on a nice little front, a lying front. A liar I am. I am a liar with my personality. I'm a liar with it, because I cannot be honest through my personality. Well, personality is always positively directed outwards, hiding myself.

So that's only three things. Did you judge yourself this morning? Did you judge yourself yesterday morning? Did you think that you're not making any spiritual progress, something like that? Did you ever feel, 'Oh, I can't do it.' 'Oh, I'll never do it.' That's self judgment. Do you ever feel a failure in love, that you can't really make love? Ever feel that self judgment? All utter lies. The self being pain judges itself, and the result is pain. Any thing to do with self, any decisions made by my self, result in pain.

So I love this woman. I love her so much. And we come together with our beautiful bodies on our best behavior, and we say, 'Ah, you are the most beautiful thing I have ever met,' the man and the woman say, 'Can this continue forever?' And I say, of course, it can continue forever, because love continues forever, but my self doesn't have the staying power.

So as much as I love her, somehow a word comes out of my self, after a few days or a few weeks, which somehow pulls her down. You know, woman, how man pulls you down, undermines you with a smile on his face? And he says he loves you, but somehow he can't help saying, 'Yes, well, I love you, you know.' You burnt the toast again, didn't you? But, you know, I understand. You push it home. 'You did it again, didn't you? You did it again, didn't you?' Next week, 'you did it again, didn't you?' And so the woman, you know, she takes it on. There's no one takes it on more than woman, because she is pure love. Essentially, she's pure love, and all she wants to be is love. She doesn't want to work in an office at all. She doesn't want to be a computer whiz. She doesn't want to be in the army, killing people – she really doesn't – that's her personality and her conditioning. All she wants to do is to be loved. And if her love is pulling her down, 'you did it again, didn't you?' You know, she takes it, and gradually, every time it's done, there's a little bit of doubt comes into her of whether she's good enough. And so the two bodies that were so close together, this doubt then comes into her, something comes between them because she feels that her love does not love her really, because he has put doubt into her. Is this true, woman, or am I making it up?

You know this is the human condition. The woman does something to the man too. She gets emotional, and he can't find out what she's emotional about, and since she accuses him or blames him or something, the two bodies that were once so close together, sleeping together, they come apart, and they don't know what's happened between them. It's because of the lie they're living. No one's being honest in the in the relationship.

No one's saying the truth. The woman is not saying, 'How dare you say you love me and keep repeating that sort of words to me. How dare you do that to me? Now you grow up, little boy, or I'm going to leave you. You're not big enough for me.' Now that's a real woman dealing with a little boy who wants to pull her down, undermine her so that he can get a bit more power over her and get his way, whatever that might be.

Now, man, we've got to stop that, because that's the human condition of man – to undermine woman as much as he can, very subtly, with a smile on his face, jokingly. You've got to be aware man, every time you do it until you stop it. Much better to say 'how beautiful you are.' Much better to put my arms around her, if I live with her and love her, and tell her, I love her. Much better. Is it not? Than to subtly let this self be in charge – it's not the man or the woman, it's the self that you've got inside your body that destroys everything that's good.

The better it gets, the more the self will try to destroy it, your own self, not someone else's, your own self, because it's made of pain. Anywhere where there is harmony or sweetness in a relationship or in your own body, the self comes up, tries to get into it, and as soon as the self, which is pain, gets into a painless situation, the situation that was painless becomes somehow or other pain.

Now, that's clear enough, isn't it? Isn't it clear enough, in your own experience, what the human condition is? – That's all I'm here for, to make you with your intelligence see what you are trapped in and what you allow to go on in your bodies and your relationships. That's all. That's all I'm here for, for you to see it.

If you don't see it, it doesn't matter how much enlightened I am or God-realized I am – that doesn't make any difference to you – you have to see it for yourself. And only when you see it, the muck that you're in, is it possible to possibly get out of it. But if I still wallow in my muck and say, 'Ah, well, you know, he's just talking' and that and 'everything's pretty good in my life,' you're still trapped in it, and it will keep returning to you in all your relationships, with your children, with your lovers, with everything, it will still keep returning and upsetting you, disturbing you.

What I'm endeavoring to do is get the people who come to me to take responsibility for their life and to take responsibility for their self by not allowing myself to ruin my beautiful life.

We've been talking about this emotion, and the question has arisen, well, 'how do I get rid of it?' I've already dealt with how to get rid of guilt, that's by not thinking about it. If you want to get rid of anything, you don't think about them. If you want to get rid of a previous lover who just left you, easy, don't think about him or her. Are you hearing me, please? Am I making it up? If you think about anything – you give it life. That's what we do. Isn't worry thinking about something and bringing it back – worry, worry, worry – because I thought, thought, thought about the matter, the subject of my disturbance – I keep bringing it back.

Say I didn't think about my disturbances. What would happen? I wouldn't have any worry or disturbance in me. I would just have the difficulties in front of me that I have to overcome, and I overcome them in the moment, by being practical and doing my best.

Difficulties I cannot avoid, but problems I certainly can avoid. I have no need of problems, and I should discourage my children from ever saying the word 'problem.'

Say 'difficulty,' my son or daughter, and then we can look at it and see. If the bridge is blown up and we've got to get across within half an hour. That's a difficulty, it's not a problem. Because if you make a problem of something, you look through your emotions, you then say, 'Oh, I've got to be there at 12 o'clock' Then we start imagining what's happening over the other side. 'Oh, they're going to leave me,' 'I'm going to miss out on the job.' Speculation, speculation. Instead of looking at what are we going to do to get across the bridge? That's the sensible thing to do. But we love to speculate about all the problems and the negativity. We love to say how bad it's going to be, how terrible it's going to be for me – but not for me, for my self.

We never can be practical, and we're so impractical in love that you can see everybody's love life is in a terrible mess. Because we're utterly impractical in love. We rely on our mind to solve all our difficulties in love, instead of using our love and our intelligence to solve it.

So you've got an idea of what my self consists of. I've mentioned resentment, anger, guilt, self judgment, and there's about 10 others that we all know about that escaped me just for now.

Yeah, moodiness. Oh, I get up in the morning and I feel so crook. That's to use an australianism. 'I feel so crook.' Well, 'I feel so dense, so unalive, so melancholy,' – there's no life in me because I've got a mood here. And then I stumble downstairs or into the room where the family is, and everybody knows that there's a dark shadow has just come into the room. Nobody dare say the wrong word, because old Moody's here again. Last night after a few whiskeys, he or she was so full of verve and joy, and you'd think that you'd love to be with him or her forever. And here today, what have we got here? Who wants to be with this black cloud? That's the human condition, and that's emotion, that's my self, which I have indulged, and therefore it keeps coming back to me.

Any sort of emotion that I have in my body is my self, and it will get me to make wrong decisions. It will lead me into thoughts that will cause me unhappiness. It will do everything it can, this self of mine, until such times when I dissolved my self sufficiently, dissolved my self sufficiently to align my self with me.

Now, for the few people who are new here, there are only two things in my body – whenever I use 'my body,' it is your body – I'm talking about your body. And if I am talking about 'I', I'm talking about 'I' in you.

There's only two things in my body. There is my 'self,' which I've just described to you in great detail, in your own experience, so you know what it is, and there is 'me.' So there's myself and there's me. Me is what I call the sweetest and dearest and most intimate place inside my body. I never call anyone else me, and I never have and I never will. It is so intimate that I never called anyone else 'me.' This 'me' that is inside of me is more real than myself, which is always causing trouble on the top, but 'me' is very silent. You know it's there now. Me is silent. This room in which we do not have the mind going and the emotions going, this room is very close to me, because it is like me, the stillness of me inside my body, which never moves, which never thinks, which never gets emotional, which is just stillness and sweetness.

It is me that is behind my living existence, inside my body and myself is always going around, rushing around, liking this, not liking that, wanting that, not wanting that, and that's all going on the top, on the surface, on top of me.

Me just waits there for my intelligence to come back to me, please. But me does nothing for it, because me knows that your self is going to cause you so much pain eventually that you will say, 'for God's sake, what is it all about? Please help me.' And a slight intimation is likely to come from inside your body. 'I am here. You have left me. You have been so busy getting emotional and wanting and trying and competing, you have left me. I am always here. I am your love. I am your rightness, I am your truth, but I do not act like your self. I'm just here forever and ever.' That's the difference. And your self can't stay the same for 24 hours. It's not reliable, but I'm always here.

So that's me and I've got my self — there's only the two. As I reduce my self – and you know what my self is, all that negativity and that thinking and worrying – as I reduce it, and I'll be telling you how to identify it in your own life more and to reduce it as I reduce myself, I align it with me.

Now let me show you what my self does and why it's so ignorant. My self always thinks emotionally and thinking goes in circles. You know? You know how worry goes in circles, round and round it goes. My emotions go in circle. Happy today, unhappy tomorrow, gloomy today, all filled with life tomorrow. Going round and round – that's my self. Every time I sit at the bus stop, my mind starts to think aimlessly about anything that's my self – round and round, in circles.

The speaker in front of you has realized me. I am me. I just say that only to make the point to you, I am me. Me enables the mind to see straight, once my self is aligned with me.

How is me? Me is straight. Me is able to see straight. Me is able to think straight or to see straight – really, there's no thinking straight – it's just seeing straight. Me is able to be straight. You know, you will find me being very straight and very practical, very down to earth, very honest, very truthful, very loving. That's me, which is inside your body. It's always straight, right?

Me does not try to pull someone down – to try and pull my love down. Me only wants to say to my love or to anyone the good that I see, not the awful or the terrible that is in them, because I know that's only their self. And I might point that out to them, for them to get rid of it, but I do not judge them for it, for I know that is the human condition, to not be responsible for my self.

Now as I reduce my self, that is my moods, my anger, my selfishness. In other words, as I reduce that, my self starts to get aligned with me, and instead of going in circles, it starts to gradually straighten out and hears me and hears my self gradually gets in line with me, then myself becomes straight. My mind becomes straight. My mind, or my intelligence, is in charge of my emotions, so that they are not active and do not take over my beautiful body and my life. And that's what you're doing in the spiritual life – endeavoring to stop this terrible circular movement of repetition of unhappiness and ups and downs, so that my life is aligned with me – and when your life is aligned with me, there are no more problems in your life. The difficulties even recede. Things become harmonious. There's no more ups and there's no more downs. There's an equilibrium called life.

Like all the animals know the love of life – the animals are instinctive, and as far as we are concerned, they are unconscious, they can't reflect on the good of me and the beauty of me, but the human nature has become so twisted, is the human nature that it reflects on my self. It reflects on the troubles that I had yesterday. It reflects on the argument that I had with a man yesterday – I'm walking along through the park today, and suddenly my mind hooks on to yesterday's argument – and it then goes and repeats the argument and thinks of what I should have said. That's how tricky it is. Instead of being in the park and seeing the nature and being one with everything, which is not difficult, we all love to do that, except this tricky self, this tricky mind, will think of something that is negative in my life and drag me down, drag my intelligence down. This is the human condition, and nobody can deny it.

Everybody is trapped in it. Every little child that's growing up is gradually climbing into it, the suffocating web of the human condition. Because we, the parents and our parents, parents and all the parents, have been so ignorant. We have taught the children nothing about love and about truth. We do not talk to the children like I talk to you. We are yesterday's children. If we were only talked to them right from the moment we were born, as I'm talking to you now, we would be utterly and completely different. But what we've listened to is the scientists, the religionists. We've listened to so many ideas – everybody's got an idea about God, everybody's got an idea about truth, but they know nothing about God, and they know nothing about truth, but we've listened to them and got – imaginatively got – notions of what these things mean. We do not know the truth, and we certainly can't live it if we don't know it.

So what you're endeavoring to do in the spiritual life is to align yourself with me. When you do, you start to get the knowledge that I'm thinking straighter, I'm looking straighter. I've got a new authority in my life. There are certain things that I have to attend to, but I know that things are better, and also my external life has gotten better.

You know, there's so many people here that have been with me and practicing my teaching that their life has got better and better since they have started to be with me and practice my teaching. Would you like to put your hand up if that's happened to you? Well, if you're new here, could you have a look at that show of hands please? Thank you very much. We're talking about people whose lives have actually gotten better – they're not fools you know, that they're in public and they will put their hands up and say, my life is better than it used to be. That's what we want, isn't it? We don't want to believe in God and be praying for God all the time. God's All right. God's trying to give us everything. So you don't have to ask for it. What you've got to get rid of is the negativity that's stopping the realization of the beauty of life, now, because the beauty of life is nothing more than God, but the negativity says, 'but –' every positive statement that I make to you or mind is likely to say 'but, but, but but, –' because that's how you get negative. 'Oh, I love you, yes.' 'Do you love me?' 'Oh, I love you so much, but...' But, but, but. That's what you're endeavoring to do in the spiritual life.

Now, as I said to the lady yesterday, you have to realize, because you are here, you have to realize, if you can, that the spiritual life is all embracive – you can't have your job over there and say to me, 'Well, I'm endeavoring to live your teaching and endeavoring to live the spiritual life,' and you can't have your job over there separate from your spiritual life, because any difficulties you've got in your job are put there by your spiritual life. We intend to live our spiritual life here – you know, we come here to the seminars, and yes, we come here, and then we go to our job, and the spiritual life disappears, or we get into with our partner and we have a nice discussion and everything, but we don't make love anymore, but we think that that's the spiritual life – well, the spiritual life is always making love with life or making love with what I love, even if I'm not physically doing that, I'm in love.

So you've got a difficult job – well, you've only got a difficult job because you haven't faced yourself in that direction. You're not doing what pleases you, you're not doing what you enjoy, and you're not thinking straight. So your job became comes a problem.

And partnership – same with partnership – your partnership becomes a problem because you're not doing, you're not loving, you're saying you're loving, but your actions don't show that you're loving, and that causes the same problem. You're not enjoying it really. You're making do. You're afraid to get out of it. You're afraid to make a new start, which is a normal human condition. So it becomes like your job – out of balance.

Then there's your friends, or whatever it is, and there's problems with this one or that one. And so this is not regarded as my spiritual life in most cases. But to live the spiritual life that I'm talking about, which is really the whole life, I have to put all these things and say, 'Well, this is the spiritual life, is it? Yeah, that's a really hard one that's been put on me. That's pretty difficult.'

There's an old saying that I've always remembered since whence, when I the Spirit for I Am, the spirit started to enter Barry long 30 odd years ago. There was a lovely saying that I saw which said, because I had to go through it as I got rid of my stinking, unreliable self, as in the spirit that I am, pushed it out of my body, you know, pushed it out. And it was very, very painful while that was done, while I was coming into Barry Long's body, very painful to get rid of his self. There was a saying that used to comfort me, because we always need a good saying. When you're in the midst of the suffering or the difficulties of the spiritual life, it's very good to have a good saying said by people who have been through it. There's so much bullshit in the old testaments that it's very difficult to find the truth in it, except the statements of the prophets that mean something, and one of them was the 'shadow that you feel is but the outstretched hand of God' – of life, because life has put that shadow on you, and the human condition is about struggling up out of this terrible human condition into the place of harmony and rightness, which, of course is me inside your body.

The outstretched the shadow that you feel is but the outstretched hand of life or God – which is just above you and guiding everything. Because in the spiritual life, if you look back, if you look back on your spiritual life, if you look back all those who raised their hands, they look back on the miracle that brought them to my teaching, they will see that they were guided here, guided to my teaching by an extraordinary sequence of events that weaved its way through all these circumstances and difficulties, but relentlessly and remorselessly led them to the place where suddenly they came to somewhere where somebody speaks the truth for a change. That's a wonderful miracle, to be able to look back on your life and see, 'yes, there is something guiding my life,' despite everything else it gets to hear.

You must not separate the problems that you have or the difficulties that you have in your life from your spiritual life. They are there for your spiritual purposes, so that you will deal with it and get rid of the damn thing forever by facing what is the cause of this unhappiness that is in me, this discomfort with what I'm doing. 'What is it?' – And to that, you've got to have a straight, straight mind that's able to see through your own personal emotions and likes and dislikes to get to the cause of the problem, instead of just seeing the effects.

So everything I'm doing here is to help you to see your human condition and for you to dissolve as much as possible by seeing. No phantom can stand up in front of intelligence – the human condition and its emotions and negativity are all phantoms – if I can only bring My intelligence to bear on them and to look at them straight and not turn away and shudder and cry and weep and complain. If I can only do look at them straight, they will gradually disappear, because nothing can stand under my vigilance, nothing that is false.

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