The impersonal life
Recording 05 of 10
From personal identity towards impersonal reality
Barry presents the human being as a cell in the greater body of mankind, infused with both enlightenment and darkness, and calls to reduce the selfish person so that impersonal truth may live more freely.
LENGTH: 1 HOURS AND 58 MINUTES
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
YEAR RECORDED: 1995
PLACE RECORDED: LEICESTER, UK
MAIN TOPICS
Courage, Recurrence and reincarnation, Family relationships, Levels of psyche, Cell model, Vital cell, Personal and impersonal, Great body of humanity
SUMMARY
The talk begins by distinguishing the inner life from the outer one. The outer life is built on person, self, memory, demand, and personality, while the inner life is impersonal, without personality, though not without character. Barry asks the listener not to remain in the head but to verify all this in their bodily experience. The body, he says, knows and absorbs experience directly; memory is secondary and often misleading.
From there he returns to the image of the cell. Each person is an impersonal cell in the vast body of humanity, and humanity itself is an expression of a greater consciousness. What happens on earth, whether war, cruelty, despair, courage, or tenderness, reflects the degree of enlightenment present in that total body. Hence every private burden is linked to a greater universal task. One's pain is not merely personal fate but part of the labour of enlightenment of this greater body.
He then turns to death, reincarnation, and the person. The person, with all its selfish hopes of continuation, does not survive. What remains is not the continuation of the troublemaker but the value of the life, the enlightenment within it. The spiritual life therefore means reducing the person, facing oneself, and ceasing to make life personal. Only then can one live with courage, let go of blame, and begin to come home to the still intelligence he calls 'me'.
04 - Enlightenment is the absence of becoming
