The Human Condition

This full-length recording, recently restored, remastered, and made freely available, was originally recorded in July 1997 at Koningshof, Netherlands. 

This recording is the fifth in a series of seven recordings. The complete set will be released later in 2024 in the paid versions of the podcast on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-barry-long-podcast/id1709595005) and Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/34rcMFK6b4CcicY7JDxo9f).

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Summary:

In this episode, Barry describes the human condition as one of suffering or attachment to suffering. He says, "I define the self—my self—as the accumulation of all the unhappy emotions I have experienced since birth. Each emotion, from infancy through childhood, and especially the disastrous sexual experiences, disappointments, bitterness, and heartbreak—all of it gathers in the subconscious as emotion."

Barry continues, "The better things get, the more the self will try to destroy it—your own self, not someone else's—because it's made of pain. Whenever there is harmony or sweetness in a relationship or within your own body, the self emerges. Once the self, which is pain, enters a painless situation, that situation inevitably becomes painful." This, he says, is our fundamental human condition.

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Extract:

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.

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.

To continue reading visit: http://barrylong.org/articles/294/the-human-condition

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We are excited to announce the creation of an extensive digital archive of Barry’s talks spanning 30 years. This repository contains an impressive 500 hours of video footage and 2,000 hours of audio recordings.

Over three years, a dedicated team undertook the monumental task of digitizing and modernizing a vast collection of historical recordings, some of which were stored on outdated formats like cassettes and magnetic tapes. Driven by the goal to preserve and safeguard this invaluable material, the project involved meticulous planning, cutting-edge technology, and a deep expertise in both analog and digital audiovisual systems.

In the coming weeks and months, we will share further updates about this digital archive.

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