Soul

The Reality of Soul

MasterSession 2002, Session 18, Question – Do we have an immortal soul that is separate and distinct from every one else's soul? Something that we anticipate will have some kind of a existence with God after the physical body dies? Or is it the end of the road for everything when the physical body dies?

Barry responds: Well, where I come from, if you've got a soul, and God help you, because a soul, a soul is separate from God and it's always trying to get back to God, isn't it? So if you're trying to get back to something that you've left, then you must suffer. So everybody with the soul has to suffer, right? That's, that's where I come from on it.

Is there an immortal life? Indeed there is. The only thing is that for there to be an immortal life, in the true sense of that word, you have to have realized it while you are here – if you haven't realized it while you are here, there is no immortal life.

Journal 1 . I define a human being as being a sorrowful, suffering, unhappy being. It is unhappy because it has a soul that thinks it is separate from God. Because it is always trying to unite with God, it is always unhappy: anything that is separate from God, I tell you, is unhappy. The reason people are unhappy is because they are separate from God. 

Journal 2. I am this body that you see, called Barry Long. I have no other body. This is it. I have no other existence. This is it. I have no soul, and no self other than this body; no higher self, no lower self. This body is me. I am me and this body is me. I am one – this body. 

As far as I can find out, the mischief that caused you to think you have another body, and which creates this gigantic all-encompassing illusion, started with Plato. A soul was invented; an intelligence or another existence separate from where I am in this body, here, now. This diabolical intellectual conception, being unfertilised by any substance of truth, started off as a seemingly pleasant and entertaining mental baby and grew into the monster which lives on in you today and keeps you from the one and only truth of your own being or body. 

The Greeks were a bored people by Plato’s time. They had buried the nature spirits that once had been so alive and present in their life and culture. They had nothing much of value left to do. They had lost touch with the living art of the earth and had turned their minds (now becoming separate from the body) to representing man in mind-made forms of art, which in their growing ignorance they thought was creativity. 

By the time Jesus came along, the intellectual rot had already set in. Jesus, the master who was only a man, frequently praised the beauty of the earth and the wonder of life as seen through the senses but all this was deleted from the record by the Christian Church Fathers. These ignorant founding fathers of the second and third century quickly seized upon the notion of the intellectual soul. But they went one better. They emotionalised it. They made it a suffering soul. They made everyone sinners. They condemned everyone to hell or suffering. And that rot is in you. 

I am my body. As I say, I have no soul. In other words there is nothing in the way of me – ‘me’ who is the inner reality of the body you see in your bedroom mirror or looking down through your eyes. 

The difficulty is, you have become intellectualised. That means you have made an object of yourself. You look in the mirror or look down and see your body but you think of yourself as something apart or different. This is due to the influence and conditioning of the Platonic concept and to the Christian betrayal of the master’s message that the kingdom of heaven, or the right and the good and the true, is inside my body, inside of me. 

This is a purely subjective state. There is no object or separation in such being. I am my body, all feeling or love is in my body, or me, and anything that I know or perceive is reflected as a perception in me, in my body. 

Now the question of physical death, the death of the body. How does this fit in? 

Again, physical death is perceived intellectually or objectively. It is always seen to occur to another body, and is only then imagined as a future event occurring to the body you see in the mirror or looking down. In other words, like the Platonists and the Christians, you separate death from the body. 

I am saying that death occurs inside the body. Death that is seen to occur in another body is objectified. This simply projects the fear of death, not the reality of death. Death is subjective and occurs in the body. Death then becomes life, another life but not a separate or distant life. 

What happens is this. When I, my physical body, is dying it becomes immobilised in an objective or looking-out sense, but to I, me who am the body (the subject), there is no such projection. The sense of separation, the Platonic and Christian soul, being a man-made invention, never existed. So at the moment of truth, which is the moment of death, I who am my body simply lose interest in or consciousness of the objectified perceived existence, which would have included my body in the bedroom mirror. That projection has now all gone. The door has just closed and now I am looking only at what’s in front of me in my body. 

I have simply withdrawn behind the senses that project the physical world; as I do to a lesser degree every night when I go to sleep and my body and every body, and even the whole universe, vanishes – just as in death it vanishes forever. So I am looking into me, my subjectivity. I am still in my body, for it is still me, but I have no objective sense. That is I don’t have anything else to compare myself with. In this I perceive the truth of life beyond the objective phenomena of the visible world. 

Nothing really has changed. I can be said to be still inside my body but I no longer know of any body. 

The dead outside of me, still living an objective existence, see my body and in their ignorance presume that I am dead. For me that body does not exist for I am now the life. 

Journal 3. Today I’m going to make another major contribution to psychology. Here it is: I am my body. I am nothing else but my body.
I have no soul, no lower self, no higher self and no self. I am simply this body that you there see here.
This opposes Plato, Judaism, Christianity and most of the religious beliefs of the world.

Some more soul references: 

Origins of Man and the Universe

At that time the physical constitution of human bodies was different; they were less solid in the sense that the psychic double was less entrenched in the physical habit. (In this lies the origin of the monk’s habit, his traditional tunic.) And further, the degree of individuality was variable: the psychic double (the reality behind the word ‘soul’), alternated between the two worlds — contracting to appear as the ego in the physical, and then expanding back again into the vital. Sometimes a man would be fully physically orientated; at other times he would be mainly in the psychic world. After a time, as involution increased and man became more exclusively absorbed in the play of sense-perception and the physical habit, the double flowed more rapidly backwards and forwards between the two worlds, finally to become our rhythmic breathing principle. (The true significance of the Greek word ‘psyche’, meaning both soul and breath, will be appreciated from this.) 

At Level Four of the mind the living dead and the dying living contribute to the same evolutionary purpose, for Level Four contains the evolving soul of man. ‘Soul’ is a much misused word, now commonly used to describe some mysterious aspect of the personality. Historically ‘soul’ has been religiously attributed to individuals who demonstrate spiritual yearning, and by abstraction to some personal immortal essence that survives death. This conception is limited by ignorance of truth. There is no soul that survives death, only the impersonal consciousness which has no individual memory. No aspect of personality survives beyond Level Three. 

The perfect soul of man is contained in Level Five of the mind. Here is the true soul of every human being who has ever lived. Each soul is a unique facet of the original earth-idea of man and all combine here — without ever having been separated — to represent one extraordinary, indivisible soul or character. 

Behind Life and Death

- the Psychic double 

Your psychic double’s realm is the first level of the psyche – the first heaven in from physical existence. Its influence, however, extends from physical existence to the third heaven and wanes or ends with lunar space on the other side of the moon’s orbit. There, attachment to the earth and world has been virtually dissolved and planetary or cosmic space begins. From the fourth to the seventh heaven is the realm of your ethereal double. 

In the german language the psychic double is called the doppelganger – ‘doppel’ for double, plus ‘ganger’ for goer, demonstrating an ancient perception in the german psyche of the ‘going on’ of consciousness that I speak of. It is further defined as ‘a ghostly counterpart of a living person’, the word ghost indicating psychic. But so far no reference is made to the ethereal double. 

The psychic double is responsible for the look of your body, its psychological make-up, gender, dispositions, and the circumstances of its birth and death in each living-life. It is your immediate reality – as close as the life and intelligence empowering the body – yet completely abstract. It is you and yours.

Heart references: Journal2 -My sweetheart

When we say ‘my sweetheart’, what do we mean? Where does such a tender and meaningful expression originate in us? What is the truth of it? It arises from my organic heart, the heart felt to be towards the left side of the chest. Here in this heart lies the sweetness of my nature, the nature of the earth which created the heart as the vital organ of this natur-al or nature-full earthly body. When Isay ‘my sweetheart’ to a man or woman I love, I am drawing upon the tender sweetness of my nature as the love of the earth.I am perceiving the other as a wondrous part or reflection of that nature in the flesh. I say ‘I love you’ but I cannot really express this love to you because you are in fact and truth, and in reality, the sweet nature that I myself am as a son or daughter of the earth. You are me, apart in form as we both seem to appear. But in my heart we are one, my sweetheart. Due to our basically loveless times, due to sexual excitement having replaced the sweet tenderness, profundity and reality of physical (sensuous) love and passion, the original heart of every man and woman has been filled with the pain and discontent of hurt and emotion. The original sweet love, the nature in every heart, has been overwhelmed by the coarser demands of emotion. The person has become confused as to what love is, what emotion is and the difference between love and sex. Every heart contains original love as a fundamental intimation or feeling within the being. But the person, endeavouring to find comfort and solace for his or her isolation and hurt, settles for the appearance of tenderness and sweetness, rather than waiting to perceive the finer evidence of the presence of love and tenderness in another. We all know how convincing attractive behaviour can be at first meeting. How can you distinguish between sex on its best behaviour and real love and tenderness? The truth is that there is not sufficient love in anybody who is at any time moody, emotional, grumpy or bad-tempered. These are all signs of strident emotion and violence that will cause you to be unhappy. Such things never get better – unless the person agrees with you that he or she is prepared to love and work with you to get it right. You agree that you must help each other without compromise to rid yourselves of these selfish, loveless emotions. They take all that is good from a partnership and give little but selfish excuses, regrets and ‘being sorry’ afterwards, only to repeat themselves again.

To love one another is to agree to face one another; and through honesty every moment in your partnership to clear the sweet organic heart of those corrosive emotions that eat the heart out of man and woman’s love. This causes more pain and reaction. The term heartbreak describes this condition as well as the cure for it. When the heart is broken it is not love that cries. It’s the old emotions which thought they were love and were not. To regain the sweet tenderness of love in the heart everyone will therefore have their heart broken. But this will not be ‘heartbreak’ if you hear what I am saying and you do not settle for any man or woman who pretends to be love. As you and your partner face each other honestly and help each other to be rid of these dishonest emotions you will know pain. But when you know what you are doing you don’t suffer. Only when you don’t know what you are doing do you suffer – as when partners scream at each other for understanding and love. And sometimes you’ll know a feeling of despair at not being able to find a partner honest enough to help you clear out your hearts together. But that will be tolerable, for you will know what you are doing and what you’re waiting for. The doing and the waiting is the living of the divine life that eventually purifies the heart and restores the sweet nature of the earth to the body that you are.

Journal3 - In my teaching the solar plexus is the centre of love. You might hear other masters talk about a ‘heart centre’ up in the chest, or you might think it’s around the physical heart, but I will tell you once and for all that the centre of your being, the centre of your love – your solar heart – is physically in the region of the solar plexus. Here is where your love is felt. Whenever you are in love, the first place you will feel the attraction is around the solar plexus. That is always where the attraction is felt of one toanother, or to anything of beauty. The solar plexus is the seat or heart of love. And as it is the heart of love, nothing but love can reach it. If you are very still, within the solar plexus you may feel a cosmic pulse. This is a pulse that comes from deep within the psyche; or, using the model of the sensory universe, it comes from deep in outer space. This is the pulse of life. Sometimes it really pulses, really throbs. And sometimes it cannot be felt at all. The physical heart takes its pulse from this universal pulse. Every pulse in the body is taken from it. I went into this in some of my earlier teaching, when I taught awareness of the solar plexus and what it means. [See ‘Stillness Is The Way’ in which the entry to the universe is demonstrated through meditation practice]. My teaching always moves on. Now when you are with me, you go down into me, into nothing, into the black. In this way you go down into space, under the whole system that is represented in the body by the solar plexus and other centres that you may encounter. The way in the spiritual life is for certain things to be introduced at certain times, so that their place or truth is acknowledged and lived; and then you get rid of them as soon as possible, to arrive at nothing.

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