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.
