Taking charge of your own life
Recording 02 of 13
Seeing the price of every upper and its downer
The talk goes into examining the human addiction to emotional highs and the inevitable lows that follow, showing how imagined love and feeling-based living create dependence, fear, and depression. It points back to the unmoved intelligence that is not excited or depressed by anything.
LENGTH: 54 HOURS
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
YEAR RECORDED: 1999
PLACE RECORDED: GOLD COAST, AUSTRALIA
MAIN TOPICS
Feelings, Excitement and depression, Living without feelings, Feelings emotions and sensation
SUMMARY
Barry contrasts responsibility with the common belief that following feelings is being true to oneself. Feelings, he says, belong to the realm of opposites; every 'up' guarantees a 'down'. Human nature seeks uppers to flee the downer, but the price of each rise is the next fall. This cyclic motion sustains uncertainty, jealousy, and the search for the stimulation of experience. He distinguishes true love from the imagined kind that begins in excitement and ends in payment—anxiety, sorrow, and loss. Attachment turns love into possession, and possession births fear: when the object shifts or disappears, suffering arrives. He calls for a return to the intelligence that does not move with circumstance. The practical test is immediate: Is your life right now? Emotion is the sign of where something isn't yet straight.
This session is not included in the video series of the meeting, and its place is between session 7 and 8.
01 - True to the situation, not to emotion
