Love Brings All to Life
An extract from one of Barry Long's public talks.
I'd like to tell you the myth behind my teaching of love between man and woman. It's not unlike the Greek myth of Pygmalion. You remember that in the Pygmalion myth there was a sculptor and he selected the most beautiful block of marble in the marketplace and had it delivered to his studio. His object was to carve the woman of his heart's desire. And so he set about doing this and he worked day and night, chipping away at this beautiful piece of marble.
Sometimes as the figure emerged he'd gaze upon its emerging beauty without moving. He so loved this woman inside of him. And he slept beside the statue, when he did sleep he slept beside the statue - and he woke up and it was always in his consciousness and before his eyes for he did nothing else but chip away and sculpt this figure. He used to rub his hands over the statue as it emerged with loving, beautiful caring as he felt the wonderful lines that were coming from the statue. And sometimes he would run his lips over the shoulders and the head and forehead and the arms just because he couldn't help it.
He just loved this emerging figure of his heart's desire – a woman of his dreams – his love within him. And one day he kissed it on the lips so lovingly and to his great surprise the statue moved and the arms came around him and embraced him.
Now the myth behind my teaching – the myth of man and woman – is that woman is delivered to man with something like a hardness of a beautiful piece of marble, let's say. But she has this hardness that has hardened her beauty because woman is all love. And as she grows up through pubescence and has her first experiences of love, it very seldom and eventually is never, like her knowledge of love – her inner knowledge of love. And her teenager experiences of the awkwardness of young men's love or as ardent as it may be, the awkwardness of it, and their attention to sexual excitement because of the indoctrination of their society, the woman gets a fear, a fear of love in her. Although she enjoys the excitement and the love, when it's there, a fear starts to enter her, even though she enjoys it. And her experiences, her subsequent experiences, as she goes through into her twenties – there is a certain hardness in her – the hardness of the past, the hardness of the disappointment - that love, as she knows it to be in her deepest being, that love she cannot find - it's not there.
And every time that she surrenders herself to the man to be reached in love, inevitably it ends in either disappointment or heartbreak or indifference – the worst of all those conditions, and a compromise.
And so this puts into woman a certain hardness which can be somehow or other related to the beautiful marble block that the sculptor has before him. In other words the man has before him a beautiful woman who is encased in the past of her disappointments about love and therefore is not really a woman.
As much as she is a woman inside, of course, filled with all that love and beauty, the ability to express it is denied her because love brings all to life and unless she is loved rightly by man, she cannot come to life.
Of course she has life within her. We can't deny that. But I'm talking about that life within her, that love within her coming up to the senses, coming up so that she can be that love, can be that beautiful woman that is encased in that past experiences of disappointment and unhappiness and moods and all that has been put into her by lack of love.
I'm talking about that and the only thing that can remove that from woman according to my myth is man, the sculptor. Man's sole task according to my myth is to free woman, and in freeing woman, he frees himself. In bringing woman to life he brings himself to life. That is the truth or the myth behind my teaching.
So man, like the sculptor, has to address this beautiful piece of marble and start to bring it to life. He can't do that with sexual excitement, like it never would have occurred to the Greek mythic sculptor, the Pygmalion sculptor. It would never have occurred to him to get excited about loving this beautiful statue as he rubbed his hands over it and caressed it with the shear love of the lines of beauty. And, of course, every woman's body has these lines of beauty – every one of them – the hair, the cheeks, the shoulders, the face, the features, the chest and the breast. Every part of her is so beautifully created by God who has put the potential woman inside her body.
This glorious woman, this wonderful figure of love and truth, made by God and that is in a woman's body if only a man can bring himself to love, to see what is there like the sculptor sees in this whole block of marble, which has nothing in it. He sees with his inner eye a beauty that is potential within that marble and so he works with love. An intuition indeed is love. The best communication on earth is love and it's better than intuition because he just doesn't work according to an idea. He works - instantaneously, spontaneously - from the genius of love that is in him.
Now love is a genius in all of us. It's not personal. There's no personal genius. All genius is impersonal. And so the man has within him, because he is made by God, because he has been given the power by God, by Life, to bring this beautiful, beautiful woman to life.
He has that power and so he begins by seeing her beauty. It's not just noticing her beauty and wanting to possess her but seeing her beauty, loving her with his hands, loving her with his lips, loving her with his body so that she feels not the threat of sex, not the threat of excitement but sweet beauty and passion of love. And it is man's task to do this because he has the power.
No woman can bring herself to life – now I'm talking mythically so don't get disturbed please. But I am telling you the truth and yet I am talking mythically. Man is the only thing that can bring woman to life – man's love that is.
But what he has done – through sex and this society of sex and excitement – instead of bringing her to life he brings her into more and more stone - more hard - so that she gets a very convincing, defensive exterior or personality, which is most convincing but its not her because it hides this soft and beautiful woman inside of her who is waiting to be loved and brought to life.
God's creation, which man has encased in his sexual cocoon for his own pleasure and excitement rather than for the real pleasure of man, is to actually bring a woman to life.
Now for that he can't be hopping into every woman here and there and prancing along with a great momentum, pleasing himself and satisfying his surface desire. He can't do that and bring a woman to life because woman, being love, is inclined to accept any offer of love. Now I'm not belittling your intelligence woman but I want you to hear me from the depths.
Woman is so starved for love that if someone comes along and starts to show love she tends to open herself to it because there is the eternal knowledge in woman that Love is. And so she is vulnerable throughout all her life for man who comes with words of love or some behaviour of love or manner of love. She tends to be open to that and finally to give herself to that and not always with the best results because man is a very cunning man when he is sexual. He can present himself as love when he is not. If he does that he denies himself his own life for I tell you that there is nothing equal, nothing equal in your life man, to the love of woman.
Everything else is a substitute – you're yachts, you're businesses, your great skills at all the things that you can do – are just substitutes for the love of woman.
For life on earth begins with man and woman. All there is is man and woman – the male and female principle – and so that travels down that principle, down through all the animal kingdom, through all the kingdoms, but at the top of it is the male and female principle, expressed and embodied as man and woman.
They are the two polarities of love. And the only way that love can ever be found in existence on the surface of this earth so that it is enduring and revealing of the consciousness of God itself or Life itself is by man and woman's union – right union through love in which they bring each other to life.
Now man also is afraid of the task. He sees with his inner eye from the myth that I am speaking of. He sees the job that is there – this block of hardened woman – he sees that and he often is daunted by what he sees to be the task that is being given to him, that to love this thing, this hardened thing, to life and bring the life out of it. He sees that and he often doubts himself, because he has a consciousness that has been conditioned by sex and excitement and so he doubts himself because he knows himself. He knows that really there is a part of him that just wants to satisfy itself. That is the sexual part and yet there is the part in him that is noble made by God for the task.
And being so many thousands of years into existence as we are – what is it - 20,000, 30,000 years – how do we know how long this existence has been going on as man and woman? But as it's been going on, the whole of existence itself has been getting harder and harder – more stony, more lack of life. And so we all today crave for some Life. “Please let me have some Life,” because we are cocooned in 20,000 or 30,000 years of gathering stoniness and so we are all being turned to stone, as it were. We are losing our bodies, the contact with our bodies – the beautiful, wonderful thing of being free in the body. We are blocked with our own emotions which are a representation of the past of 20 or 30,000 years.
We have developed a self that is like stone inside of us, that knows nothing about love but knows everything about sex and excitement and orgasm and self-satisfaction. And yet under that self is this glorious thing made by God called the essence of man and the essence of woman – each of us waiting to be somehow or other brought to life; to be brought to love; to start to really breathe again; to be able to be free again; to get up and be free every day in a freedom of love; to be brought to life.
As I say love brings all things to life and without love we gradually get more brittle, more hardened.
We start to dry up – not inside but somewhere there, we start to dry up. For love brings all to life. Now all man has got to do is to love woman and I tell you that inside of each man here that is the thing that he thinks about more than anything else in his life. He thinks about woman.
He is busy with his business and activities but the fundamental motivation within him, the fundamental desire is for woman.
But of course he has this fear in him, fear of his own sexuality, fear of his own incapacity, fear of his own lack of love to do the job and sometimes he has to adopt an attitude, a bravado and of strength, which is not really true of him. It is more a defence than a surrender to love and it is that that woman does not enjoy, man. She doesn't want you to be anything. She just wants you to love her, to appreciate her beauty. Not to please herself because you can't please a woman's self. There is no end to the demand of the self to be pleased. But woman will give up herself if you begin to love her. And of course herself is the stoniness, the hardness that has come into her from her previous experiences and heartbreaks connected with love of man.
And so a man's task is to go into that past, to be strong enough to stand there while the past expresses itself as emotion and tries to overwhelm him; tries to frighten him off. And he must stand fast as best he can and endeavour to love through that.
When a woman knows that a man is truly taken her on and is going to love her she will give up her personality, give up her past, give up everything for love. She is made to give up everything for love but she is not a fool and she will not be fooled. And if I the man come to love her, pretending whatever it is, you will find that she is emotional. And as beautiful as she is she will continue to be emotional and make your life hell because she is no fool and her protection subconsciously is her emotion.
That is not to justify her emotion but it is to point out that that is woman's natural way of repaying man for his dishonesty and untruth. For when he starts to love her, and for a while she exudes this emotion and responds and gets rid of some of the past out of her, eventually she will give up all her emotion and she will respond in love.
Only love brings all to life, nothing else.
I'd like to demonstrate that in another way. When the world was very young and so was man and woman, our bodies were not hardened like they are today. For we are very, very substantial in our bodies. But in those days because there was so little past, so little self, we had bodies that were not formed. They could be called vital bodies but not formal bodies like the shape of our bodies and the substance of them today. We existed as beings, each one an individual consciousness, each one, as it were, a light, just a light, a vital light. We were connected with the developing earth. We were connected to all of nature by this wonderful thing that we now call space. We now look across space and see each other. We have no inkling of what this space is.
In the beginning when Life and we were very young, that space was actually Love. The space that you see in front of you now is actually Love. But we have hardened our bodies with past and self-consideration and selfish motives. As we have hardened our bodies and made them filled with past, so we have hardened space and we have taken the wonder and beauty out of space, the communication which it innately has within it.
And we now communicate across space with our voices and messages. But when the world was very young and so were we, we did not speak. We did not have any fancy gadgets to send messages because we were the message. We were the light. Each of us was an individual consciousness, a consciousness of God and life and truth and the wonder of being one with this massive Whole, potential Whole of Life on earth.
And, so, we were connected, all of us, nature and each being by this extraordinary Love between us, which of course was the Love of the Creator, the love of the Most High, the Love of God. And that's what this space that you are actually looking at today, now, is. Only it has been hardened. It's had the life taken out of it like most of the life has been taken out of us. We do not know what it is like to live in freedom and love and life. We think we do, so we have booze and we have drugs and we have sex and we have everything to substitute for life because it has been just hammered out of us, taken out of us, extracted from us by our own lack of communication by love.
For love brings all to life.
Extract from the recording Love Brings All to Life
The purpose of partnership