What about commitment?
An extract from one of Barry Long’s Gold Coast talks in Jan of 1988
Is there place for commitment in partnership? I am not so keen on the word commitment because all things change, but it's an inner commitment, a recognition: I am here to serve love or truth. I am here to serve love. I will be true to love.
If I am a man, I am going to be true to love rather than to the woman. But if I am true to love I will be true to the woman, to my own being and to the rest of existence. Love is not anger so to be true to love, I will have to get rid of my anger. Love is not jealous, so to be true to love I will have to get rid of my jealousy. Resentment is not love, so I will have to get rid of my resentments.
So you see it goes right through all the negative emotions because they are not love and if I get rid of those, then I am love. But I can never be love while I am resentful, jealous, angry, unhappy.
The whole process is to get rid of emotions and then I am in this God consciousness. And then I am one with my woman if I am a man – I am one with the love of woman.
Now the love of woman is beyond the individual – because I might have to love another woman and she might have to love another man – sometimes lovers must leave each other because that is how it is here.
This doesn't mean promiscuity, this doesn’t mean that you do what you want, because there is no promiscuity in love. For love always is bringing more love into the world and does not cause others to be unhappy. Promiscuity makes everybody unhappy. The one who is doing it or thinks he is making the love, is making the woman more unhappy and is making himself more unhappy through promiscuity. But if he loves, that doesn't make the woman unhappy or his own being unhappy. Love and giving are the same.
As a man you must take a woman on, and as a woman you must take a man on – until death or until either of you must leave because you must. Anything else creates pain and unhappiness in you and in the one that you leave behind.
This path of love, this path of transformation is not easy. It is not done in a few months, it is not done in a year, it is not done in a few years necessarily. It takes time. The one who fights most is the woman or the man in that body – her self and his self. It grimly fights love and won't give in.
Love is endeavouring all the time to converge and to enter the body while the self of each man and woman grimly fights to hold onto its negativity, its unhappiness, to not yield to love.
So it's a war of attrition. It's a battle between love and my self. My self eventually has to be given up - my self being my negativity and my resistance to giving and to love.
The purpose of making love is to go deeper and deeper into the sensory beauty of it, until the realisation occurs eventually in one or the other that there is only I who am making this love, I who am making the love am reading these words, there is only I.
Eventually, through this love I will pass through the place where the two become one in my own consciousness. When that happens, I realise love or God. This is a climacteric which changes, irreversibly, the consciousness of the man or woman. Then I no longer ever fear again. I no longer ever doubt again, because I have realised the one perfect principle, love or God, by uniting the two principles of man and woman through my love.
Excitement and passion