Love is not a feeling – interview
Barry Long was interviewed about Love is Not a Feeling by Hal Blacker, editor of What is Enlightenment magazine.
This interview was published alongside the article in What is Enlightenment Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995. Reprinted here with permission from 'What is Enlightenment'.
WIE: In your article you make a distinction between feeling and sensation. But it seems to me that sensations are as ephemeral and time-bound as feelings. What's the relevance of sensations to enlightenment, which is beyond time and beyond change?
BL: I have no feelings at this moment and I don't have feelings. But if I want to I can feel a sensation in my body within, which is the pure sensation of my sensory existence, which is the beginning of time. That sensation never changes, it's always there. But as I detach myself from existence, that is from my feelings, from the necessity to think or feel, that sensation disappears. It's not necessary. It only appears when I want it or when somebody mentions it. Otherwise I have no sensation and no feelings and I exist in knowledge.
You can't be enlightened unless you've got sensation, pure sensation. I'm choosing the word pure sensation because pure sensation doesn't have any feeling in it. I don't like to use the word experience because experience isn't direct. Pure sensation is direct being and that's the basis of your and everybody's sensory existence. Now enlightenment is the other side of that. Where sensation itself even disappears because it's not necessary, there is enlightenment. It's the other side of pure sensation.
WIE: What is the connection between love and enlightenment?
BL: Love is the state of enlightenment and enlightenment is the state of love. You can't make any separation between them. Enlightenment is the state of no feelings and pure knowledge and so is love. And both are impersonal. Now to be personal is to have feelings, feelings about this, feelings about your mother, feelings about your father. Oh, everybody lives off their feelings all day, as you know I say in the article, but that's personal. The personal is what changes every couple of seconds, although we don't know it. So that's your feelings. Now the impersonal state of love is something that very few people on this earth know anything about. And to bring that impersonal love into existence - which is where you and I are speaking now - that is even rarer than the realisation of God.
Now I'm going to tell you what everybody's problem is: it is love of woman in the case of a man, and the love of man in the case of a woman. All your problems come down to love. Your love life is what your problem is, and everybody else's on earth. God in existence is man and woman. There's nothing else. And unless you have loved God in existence - your duality which is woman or man - unless you have united with that through love and devotion without going through your feelings of love, you're not going to be enlightened.
The love of man and woman is the beginning of the love of God. You can realise God within like many men have done. It's one of the rarest things on earth to realise God, but everybody seems to think that that's the end. Where I come from, realising God was the easy part of it. That God of love which is already here anyway - who wouldn't be able to realise it? The difficult part is to bring that God into this world where God or love is not, into that body listening to these words and this body speaking them. That's the task.
WIE: You write that all feelings are false and deceptive. It seems though that having feelings is part of being human. Isn't it possible to have true and appropriate emotional responses such as anger at injustice and hypocrisy?
BL: Oh, no, no, no. That is a justification of your feelings, your negativity and your unenlightenment, and that's what everybody on earth does. They don't want to bite the bullet. Nobody wants to be utterly and completely honest and natural. So when you justify feelings, tell me, what feelings are genuine? Now for instance, do you want anger? For God's sake, I don't want it, thanks very much! And I'm sure the people I live with don't want it. So what's the good of it? It's purely selfish to be angry because it satisfies me, myself, instead of being universal.
WIE: But it seems that if you are human you're going to have an emotional response to the complex and sometimes terrible situations that do arise in life.
BL: Now wait a minute. In the article I say that feelings are the interpretation of events. What you're describing - these terrible things that happen in life - they are life, and terrible things happen in life. For instance I might lose an arm today. That would be, let's say, a terrible thing. But it wouldn't be a terrible thing to me. It would be that I would lose my arm and possibly suffer physical pain. That would not be a terrible thing to me. If it were terrible that would be a selfish and feeling interpretation of an event. The fact that it hurts is not terrible, that's life; and the fact that it happened is not terrible, it's life.
WIE: Well, it's life but I don't know that life necessarily excludes making those kinds of judgments. The way that you're describing it seems to exclude a large area of human existence.
BL: Because humanity is not enlightened. Do you know what humanity is, what the word "human" means? The word human where I come from - which is the enlightened state - means suffering. So when you say you're a human being, you're saying you're a suffering being. And I say you have to get rid of your suffering and then be being. Enlightenment is the state of being which I am, this moment and every moment. So I'm not suffering. But humanity loves to suffer. People love to suffer because they love to get excited with their feelings.
All you've got to do is get rid of your feelings, which are always negative. Why not get rid of the whole lot of it, now? That means you don't know feelings and then you don't know negativity, and then you'd be in love, and then you would love everybody by not loving anybody in particular as a feeling. That's the state of enlightenment. People want to get rid of this feeling, they want to get rid of their jealousy, they want to get rid of their anger - but what you've got to get rid of is the whole lot.
WIE: You seem to be very much against Eastern Traditions. Aren't there some teachings in those traditions that can be helpful, but the problem is that often those teachings are not really being lived?
BL: That is so. You will find that nobody is living those teachings now because the master who wrote them was not enlightened, or the priests that copied them out were not enlightened and the original master is dead. Now only while a master is here can you realise what the master says. You can't realise it in the written word. You can get help from that and you can realise little bits here and there, but the idea is to be with the master like you are with the master now. He's speaking to you and this is direct communication.
All Eastern teachings are partial. The teachers themselves don't live them because most of their audience is in the West and the West is a totally different place than the East. If you try to live an Eastern teaching and be in the West, you're not facing the immediate difficulty. The immediate difficulty is the Western mind that believes so many concepts and writes so many dictionaries and invents so many things. You are a Westerner and that's where God is found - in your culture. Not in trying to find some other culture to solve it for you.
I am master of the West. No one is as straight as I am because I do not have any Eastern beliefs. I do not look through any sort of film. I see things precisely as they are. The West puts nuts and bolts together and sends space-ships to the moon. I do the same thing in connection with God. I am very, very practical and I have no Eastern thought in me.
WIE: Do you feel that all traditional religious teachings have to be rejected?
I am enlightened. No man is more enlightened than I am, and I am no more enlightened than any other enlightened man. Enlightenment is enlightenment. And that's that. It's an unalterable, unwavering state of knowledge and being beyond doubt, a completion every moment by grace of the Most High, the unspeakable one, God. That's the ultimate; the absolute being beyond any description. But the ultimate, the enlightenment of man, must translate into his living life. And to me and my teaching that means an enlightened man is liberated from unhappiness. Being and living free of unhappiness is the natural and simple state of all life on earth - except man. He has been misled away from it by spiritual lures and glamour and the result is the conflict and pain, the fluctuating unhappiness, of his short life.
Enlightenment can't be pursued or sought after. Even mentioning the word puts people further from the state. It gives the impression enlightenment is something to get that they don't have. This creates a multitude of inimical reactions; chasing it by following paths and ways; or feelings of discontent, self-doubt, frustration and inferiority; or the defensive ridicule of this most admirable and completely natural state of consciousness.
Today the carrot of enlightenment through priestly traditions continues to promise something to be gained in the future. Whether it is the Buddhist nirvana, the Christian heaven, the Islamic houri paradise, the Judaic Eden or the Hindu moksha, the prize is never now. Paths take time, ways take time, and traditions are the very stuff of time. So there's always the talk of time past in the form of Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Mohammed or other past masters and what they supposedly said or did.
Truth is the reverse. Truth is here now; no past, no future. People are unenlightened only because they believe in the truth of the past and therefore must look to the rewards of the future. To be enlightened, to return to the original state of life on earth, requires action now in the present with no reference to the past. What has to be done is to kill the old priest in you, starve out the traditionalist, the follower, the believer.
If you go to think about what you should do next to become more enlightened, don't. The thought is the priest trying to get you to think of what some teacher or so-called master said instead of being responsible for your self and the truth now. If you see yourself discussing enlightenment, stop; it's the unenlightened priest talking. If you want to run from the present difficult situation, don't; it's the priest giving you more time to suffer again. If you want to wear clothes of another culture midst the people of your own culture, don't; it's the priest wanting to dress up, impress and glamorise himself. If you are moved to shave your head for spiritual reasons, don't; it's the priest getting up to his old tonsorial tricks when your only concern is being what you are now.
In other words, to be enlightened of the acquired burden every spiritual belief and notion has to be abandoned, every reference to what any spiritual teacher or master has ever said must be set aside.
What does that leave? Your own experience. Not your historical or memorable experience, for that's the problem. Your own experience is your self-knowledge of life. Let's establish once and for all what this means now. Forget everything I've said in this article except this question: Do I want to suffer or not suffer NOW? That's the only truth for you. There's no tradition, no past, no discussion in it. It's all you need. Keep it with you and at the next temptation to suffer it will prevent you suffering.
But only if you've learned in your own experience what causes you to suffer. If you haven't learned that, you're still attached to suffering and will unwittingly embrace it. In that case you have to read on, take more time and ask yourself more questions.
Have you learned yet that you only suffer when you think about events or feel about them, that you don't suffer from events themselves?
Have you learned yet that every thought about yourself is a thought of the past, that worry is thinking and that all thinking eventually leads to worry, fear and insecurity? If so, each time you go to think, or catch the thinker thinking even about "good" things like last night's movie, don't; stop. Not because Barry Long says so but because you've realised the truth of thinking in your own experience. It's what you've learned from life, not from someone else's experience. Therefore it is the truth for you now and every moment. Otherwise you must go on thinking and go on suffering. One day, when you've had enough of the pain, you'll come to your senses.
Have you learned yet that every feeling is a feeling of the past and that every "good" feeling soon changes and eventually becomes the feeling of doubt, confusion, boredom or sorrow? If so, stop believing your feelings; don't act on them; wait.
Action will happen in its own time. Action taken on strength of feelings inevitably leads to more feelings to correct the action previously taken - and so the feelings of discontent and conflict, and corrective actions go on and on repeating themselves. If in your own experience you haven't yet learned the truth of the deception of feelings, then you just have to go on believing and thinking, having faith in the past and hope in the future, being happy today and unhappy tomorrow, but never being in command of your own life for long.
What about compassion? Compassion is another word like enlightenment that Eastern-based teachings have ritualized, taken out of context. This influences followers to try to be compassionate. But compassion is natural. Any concept or thought of it is phony. You can't try to be or do anything that's natural; it's already there. What has to be done is to stop indulging what's not natural in you- such as suffering. Trying is trying to get something for yourself, the sufferer. And compassion is the absence of self or personal suffering. Only then, in the absence of motive, can the one and only compassionate God be compassionate as God sees fit, and not as selfish man imagines. No self means no selfish intent, no personal satisfaction, no personal feeling of achievement, no personal decisions or choices. Compassion then is simply an activity of divine being and not of any person.
Is suffering humanity (suffering under its own self-delusion) really served by the hoary old story of the bodhisattva who supposedly out of compassion refrains from entering nirvana and chooses to save others instead? Where is he? If he's not here now he's a phantom of the imagination distracting people from the truth of being now. And anyway, in the enlightened state life unfolds without the burden of choice or alternatives. You just do as you do.
Barry Long
Man's spiritual challenge