Body and No Soul
Why do men and women have to work perhaps all their lives to realise the harmony or fulfilment they intuit to be the truth but which for some reason they cannot seem to reach?
Musing on this today I decided to have a go at telling you why.
I’ve said it often enough at my meetings but so deep is the cause and persistent the effect that I’m not sure anyone has ever really heard me.
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.
~ an extract from Barry Long's book, Journal 2
Divination and Divine Gold