My inquiry into Tantra has not been very significant yet, except for the discussions I've participated on at OneTantra online. I was prepared to make a serious committment not too long ago to hands on training and study but my offer was not reciprocated properly or equitably by the instructor I contacted. NOW, one of the ladies at OneTantra mentioned Barry Long, which I spent a good deal of time last night briefly reviewing, when I ran into a wildly powerful teaching which was at the same time expressing much of the corruption which destroyed my relationship with the Fellowship of Friends Fourth Way School.
Additionally, I found years of blog posts, both praising and criticizing him. The manner in which he expressed himself was familiar to me as I read his words in a published interview with a journalist at an online magazine dedicated to enlightement and spiritual issues/teaching.
The egoistic lack of compassion and perversion he evidenced (2nd hand for me) said to me that there was a limit to his realization. This limit, this self-centeredness, was a mega contradiction to his teaching, something which was clearly echoed among his closer students' observations about how he would say one thing and do another. The response of course is no one can comprehend the behavior of a master, especially using ordinary social standards.
That's not going to fly with me, however, after reading quite a bit of him about his ideas and teaching, I cannot deny that I was left with a powerful impression regarding what he was offering in terms of a perspective on the relationship between men and women. Clearly, he made it up. The thing I read which was the key to this was a statement regadrding how every 5 minutes men and women are constantly thinking about each other throughout the day. For him, this was something he expanded and USED to be creative regarding his higher realisations of mind.
I'm certain that there is a distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge. What I've described here is a man who tasted objective states but returned to a very high subjective creative state and began to REASSEMBLE himself there. My bet is that his mechanics produced a continual stream of 'teaching' and because he was able to disentangle himself from that enough to gain some fairly distilled higher thought forms, his words began to ensare those listening like a web. The glue or stickiness came in the form of creating enough insightful space between his ideas that those listening were able to relieve themselves of useless suffering.
He assumes the title tantric master and yet it isn't at all clear whether he wasn't in fact harming more than he helped. The few nuggets I gleamed far underweighed the mass of red flags et al. I found opposing his legitimacy as a true spiritual teacher.
Additionally, I found years of blog posts, both praising and criticizing him. The manner in which he expressed himself was familiar to me as I read his words in a published interview with a journalist at an online magazine dedicated to enlightement and spiritual issues/teaching.
The egoistic lack of compassion and perversion he evidenced (2nd hand for me) said to me that there was a limit to his realization. This limit, this self-centeredness, was a mega contradiction to his teaching, something which was clearly echoed among his closer students' observations about how he would say one thing and do another. The response of course is no one can comprehend the behavior of a master, especially using ordinary social standards.
That's not going to fly with me, however, after reading quite a bit of him about his ideas and teaching, I cannot deny that I was left with a powerful impression regarding what he was offering in terms of a perspective on the relationship between men and women. Clearly, he made it up. The thing I read which was the key to this was a statement regadrding how every 5 minutes men and women are constantly thinking about each other throughout the day. For him, this was something he expanded and USED to be creative regarding his higher realisations of mind.
I'm certain that there is a distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge. What I've described here is a man who tasted objective states but returned to a very high subjective creative state and began to REASSEMBLE himself there. My bet is that his mechanics produced a continual stream of 'teaching' and because he was able to disentangle himself from that enough to gain some fairly distilled higher thought forms, his words began to ensare those listening like a web. The glue or stickiness came in the form of creating enough insightful space between his ideas that those listening were able to relieve themselves of useless suffering.
He assumes the title tantric master and yet it isn't at all clear whether he wasn't in fact harming more than he helped. The few nuggets I gleamed far underweighed the mass of red flags et al. I found opposing his legitimacy as a true spiritual teacher.
1 comment:
Would you care to elaborate on what legitimacy might be for a spiritual teacher? Whose laws apply?
If any of those listening to Barry Long were able to relieve themselves of human suffering, what more do you want?
The real test of spiritual teachers is surely not to be found in opinions, reviews and judgments – but experienced in the truth, love or gnosis that they impart. Without this subjective knowledge there can be no objectivity – perverse as this assertion may seem.
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