The end of the world, not the earth- BARRY LONG

by Barry Long

I HAVE SAID that the world is going to be destroyed, not the earth. That’s very important to remember; because it's the earth, not the world, that you love. The earth will be here; and if you really come to life in the time you’ve got, you’ll be here too.

The earth and the life-forms on it will receive a savage, punishing blow. The earth too has to pay a penalty, as it’s already doing, for the selfishness of the intelligent life – us – that came out of it. We humans are of the earth; we are the original life-form of pure reflective intelligence on earth. But out of our ignorance – our willful disregard for life – came the destructive human self-conscious intelligence that created the world. The earth is responsible for us as a mother is responsible for her child. If the child is irresponsible or unloving, the mother will suffer in some way.

Our tremendous freewheeling intelligence is the problem. We are very clever, very smart children. But right from the start we have been takers. With our unfeeling intelligence and selfish greed we took from the mother without consideration, until a third of her was reduced to desert for which we cleverly blamed the elements; and at the same time we took from each other until half of us were starving or impoverished, for which we again cleverly blamed everything but ourselves.

Without let-up the mother and the life on earth continue to be denuded and deprived by our rapacious intelligence. At every level of existence human intelligence has demonstrated greed and exploitation using the excuse and euphemism of progress. Progress is essential, says human intelligence. Is it? Or is it only essential when you’re running from something?

The trouble is: We got it wrong to start with. Our intelligence should have been the servant; that is, it should have served some real value. But the human race has had no real values – nothing of worth that ever lasted. And with nothing to serve but its shifting self-interest, the smart servant became the clever master.

Today we still serve nothing of value – only progress and convenience. What do you serve, give your life to, that is not of your own? What is the world devoted to? We simply don’t know what to do with our intelligence. We’re stuck. We’re going towards self-destruction and we can’t stop.

Can you believe it? You’ve got to believe it. Keep reading the newspapers: it’s actually happening. All we do is fight and oppose, be for or against, vote this way or that, and hope for a final compromise. That’s all human intelligence knows.

Will you try a different way? Put your human intelligence second? Will you give life itself a chance? Is there anything human intelligence has created that is worth saving in this world? What in the world is worth preserving? Would you make a mental list please?

— Persons? If you think certain persons are worth saving then why does everybody die; and many of them very young, too? Life on earth, which is still the master of death, doesn’t rate persons valuable at all, as our intelligence tries to. Life is indeed valuable. That’s why it’s always here. But persons come and go; as you and I will. The person you are is not the reality you are. The infinitely more intelligent reality behind your person is what I endeavour to address. The person is what you and I project into the world and give a name to. My person is called Barry Long. The person you are is what performs and reacts in the world. The person, every person who ever lived, is what has brought us to this awful point.

— Art? Our intelligence has murdered art. The art we think of as art is a last pitiful remnant of the great art that once was life on earth itself, before the self-conscious person took over – the great art of being a trouble-free human being. Why do so few of the earth’s population value what we call ‘art’, even in our own intelligent society? Why is there so much room in art for posturing and humbug? Because it is not art. It’s just all we’ve got left, all we can muster at the end of an inglorious era. A few paintings, statues, texts, ruins, is all we’ve got to show for five thousand years of intelligent civilisation, of creeping westernisation. And what will we leave of our art today, apart from the nuclear bomb, biological weapons, missiles and other death-dealing achievements? Our dance, music, film, paintings, sculpture, words? Are they memorable? Are they alive – like the great art of producing really intelligent men and women? Or does our art just manage to give a temporary living to the few who try so hard to give it life? Is our art truly worth preserving as the creative spirit itself? Or have we debased the creative living spirit that was Man – the great art on earth that once was us – and replaced it with human intelligence which is no more the living spirit than its fruitless offspring, the sterile spaceship, computer and nuclear reactor.

— What about ideas – such as those that developed the means of creating electricity, space travel and our high-tech, high-con society? Perhaps you think they’re worth saving? That’s because you can’t see life beyond progress, beyond the intelligence that produced the means of total destruction. Our ideas do not serve anything of real value; they all go in one direction – away from life or the earth, towards death, the nuclear bomb or the cultured germ. We can’t get rid of the bomb, or its cultured partner, no matter how hard we try, because our technology will invent a better device – a simpler, easier one; a do-it-yourself more instant one. It can’t be avoided. That’s the way we think. That’s progress. Hoping to improve the world, we develop wonderful ideas; and invariably they contribute to greater competition, rivalry, political opportunism, fear and exploitation – whether of space, nature or people. All because we don’t know what to serve. Our intelligence is out of control. The rich have won. The share-out stays fixed. In winning at the expense of others we have lost it all.

Anything worth preserving is of the earth and not of our civilisation. Our achievements are completely expendable, as were those of all previous civilisations. Nothing of any consequence has survived any of them – except the earth and the life on it, which is all that will survive of this civilisation.

Your dismay and attempt to disbelieve what I’m saying is because you happen to be at the end of this civilisation. Life is the same at the end of every civilisation. And of course it’s almost impossible for you – as it was for all the others at the end of their civilisations – to imagine that your world is finished. Would you please look at this? See whether it is true. For I can only point out the truth. You have to recognise it for yourself.

All previous civilisations were corrupt like ours – futile attempts by man to create a world of his own on the already perfect earth. And all eventually destroyed themselves, or unsuspectingly allowed themselves to be destroyed, through what they considered to be their finest achievement. In our case the means of destruction will be our scientific genius, our clever intellectual materialism.

Nothing of previous civilisations do we consider to be of sufficient value to retain as our way of life. Because nothing in those civilisations – like nothing in ours – was of any real value. The bits and pieces we keep around are not a way of life. Whatever is of real value – once you find it – you live. You don’t shut it up in museums or books; and you don’t study it. You simply live it.

There are no scholars, professionals or professors of life or love – life or love being the true value of life on earth. All scholars and practicing students are of the world and they study the things of the world. They are as unconsciously lacking life and real love as the things they study. Likewise the world’s workers and its wealthy players who have lost touch with the power within. They are as unconscious as the world they toil and play in. Life can’t be studied. You can’t study life on earth because you are life on earth. You can only love life and be life. What people study are lifeforms and formulas, not life. A form of life is not life itself.

IN WITNESSING and being totally involved in the catastrophic tragedy of the end of the world, man and woman will undergo an enormous change in consciousness. The unprecedented experience will disintegrate all the old patterns of mind, incendiarise and purge the human psyche of its shaky foundations, and transform self-consciousness on earth. The personal self in self-consciousness, with all its false notions and troublesome ways, will be obliterated, leaving the survivors in an unimaginable state of pure consciousness.

No class of people will be left out of the devastation. No politicians, industrialists, royalty, financiers, generals, scientists or workers will remain to imagine and discuss the carnage from the protected position of bystanders. Every individual will be the battlefield of personal soul-raking tragedy.

Why? Why in the purpose of things is such horrific devastation and suffering necessary? Because only personal tragedy changes us. Of all the tragedy that has ever been in the world, it has never affected the majority before. Consequently, humanity has always lived off the imagined security of the majority – the world – and has changed very little. This time, however, engulfed in a total tragedy which leaves no escape, no room for intellectual discussion or fantasy, the survivors will change. The world will be literally blown out of them.

From our worldly point of view, it would seem that these men and women will know enormous personal suffering for a long time. But in their new impersonal consciousness they will not see it that way. They will not recover and embrace the world again, as we do now when tragedy strikes here and there. None will ever again be the man or woman they were before. Each will be a creature of higher intelligence.

It is impossible for the human mind to imagine what the new life on earth is to be. We cannot conceive of the earth without the world. All our imaginings are of the world, of our self-consciousness, and are not true. But by simply reading what I have to say, and not employing your worldly faculties of thinking or reasoning, you will hear the truth; and you may notice a subtle elevation of recognition within. It is the world alone that prevents you from hearing the truth and being what you really are.

As the world within and without vanishes, the survivors will be in contact with the power I’m endeavouring to reveal in you now. This power, guiding from within, will be intensely real and immediate because it will no longer have to come through the deadening barrier of the world. Helped and directed by the power, the survivors will be intelligent and responsible – since at last they will have discovered something of enduring value. Each will have discovered the reality of life within – his and her reality.

Surely everyone already knows that they are life? Isn’t it implicit in being alive? People are aware of being alive but are not conscious of being life. If they were they’d realise immortality – life without the world – and be free forever of fear and doubt. Every living thing, including your own body, is a form of life; and all forms must pass away, die. We’ve become so used to living and seeing things die that we have lost the consciousness of life, through identifying with death as an end.

Life is a far more subtle consciousness than the awareness of living and being alive. Living and being alive depend for confirmation on the physical senses, which are mortal. But life is immortal. And the realisation of life itself, the immediate consciousness of immortality, is what is coming. So really, the end of the world is only depressing while the individual holds on to his or her mortality.

After the end of the world, everything worth preserving in man and woman and the rest of the species will continue. The survivors will love, serve and know life – as men and women have longed to do, but have not been able to do, for thousands of years. They will be in continuous intimate contact with life within, and with the earth and life around them, as one living organism.

The survivors will have an enlightened aversion for the past and retain practically no memory of it. They will not long for what has been. They will know that it was the past – that which we defended as our way of life and allowed to happen – that decimated the earth and the life on it. They will have no sympathy at all for the likes of us, no affection for us. They will regard us as the unforgivable barbarians who wantonly and willfully deflowered the earth. And if any person like us should reappear, the world will be summarily obliterated from them, just as it was from the earth and the survivors.

The men and women who survive will have nothing to learn, nothing to study and distract them; nothing that would allow another world like ours to build up again. They will have learned the only lesson to be learned from living, which we never learned: that to lose contact with the power within by trying to create another world with human intelligence is inevitable disaster.

As the conscious surviving part of future life on earth the survivors will have access to the creative genius of life – as distinct from our much-prized human ingenuity. The creativity will be directed from within by the creative spirit itself. No longer will they have anything to do with progress. They will have discovered a real value to serve, the supreme genius of life. And their ideas will work for life, for good, not for death-dealing devices or personal gain.

 I WILL NOW say more about the time after the end of the world, and the survivors. I speak of life in a different time, life free of the complication of the world. Time in the world is sluggish and tedious as everybody knows. But time devoid of the world is so swift as to be immediate, and therefore is incomprehensible to us who live in the world.

At the end of the world, the few survivors will be in this new time. The world will have been extinguished from their perception by the sheer terror of having been directly involved in this unprecedented tragedy. They will perceive life in a new light. In describing the new state in what follows I realise I’m attempting the unspeakable – which means ‘impossible of being expressed in words’. Of course such a disaster itself is unspeakable so it’s not surprising there are no words for it. However, I have to use words or concepts relating to our own worldly time and perception. Words and concepts cannot in themselves convey true meaning. They invariably provoke imagination, speculation and questions. But in the new time of the survivors there’s none of that. Everything, as you will see, is exactly as it is.

The way for us to receive a true reflection of what’s being said is to get the idea behind the words. This only requires a simple degree of intelligence, somewhat similar to the purified intelligence of the survivors. Getting the idea means simply reading the words through, without pausing for thought or reflection. That doesn’t mean you cannot pause and look at what is being said. But it does mean that you can’t think about it; that is, you can’t allow your mind to move back into what you’ve heard before or forward in speculation. Just read what is there. And let your intelligence, which is deeper than your mind, inform you wordlessly.

With the deadening and distorting world removed from the perception of the survivors, they will see the earth as it really is. As it really is, the earth is an ethereal reality. It is that ethereality now and every moment, but the screen of the world has hardened our human perception so that the earth and all that’s on it appear as material substance. Circumstances, instead of being always helpful, are mostly constricting. Thus do people often find the world not only difficult but ‘hard’.

The ethereal reality is the original divine emanation of the earth. With the perception of the survivors no longer worldly, their intelligence will be one with this amazing pristine purity of life on earth. All inanimate objects and living things are ethereal. The survivors will see the earth and every object shimmering in fundamental reality. The images will be semi-transparent and glow from within. Together they will form a beauteous array of soft shimmering light, varying constantly in brightness and intensity. The outlines of the objects will be undefined, like heatwaves. Every object, although separate in its own right, will be connected to everything else, even to the stars, by an even more indefinable ethereality – a supernal, omniscient matrix of intelligence. This, to our worldly perception, is space.

The remarkable thing is that our worldly perception parallels the state of ‘life without the world’ – with one huge difference. Life without the world is the original cause, and the world is a distorting and misleading effect. (An effect however can never be representative of the cause, and as we proceed I’ll draw attention to the world’s deceptive parallel perspectives.) Nevertheless, the manifest purity of the natural earth as we may sometimes see it and love it, is a pure reflection in matter of the pristine reality behind. But any attempt to analyse or name the phenomenon introduces a learned worldly perspective and short-circuits the immediate delight and pleasure.

The survivors will apprehend each ethereal image in its meaning, now – in a way vaguely similar to how we apprehend objects by recognition. Recognition however is a worldly perception based on having seen or cognised something in the past. As the survivors will have been freed of the past, and because the ethereal reality is now, there will be no re-cognition – only immediate knowledge of meaning. Meaning is the ever-moving value of life perceived without the distorting effect of the world.

In place of being caught up in humanity’s futile and problematical search for meaning through personal and collective progress, the survivors will enjoy the constant delight of seeing deeper into the limitless mystery of life. This is what happens to people on earth in those rare moments when they are truly seeing and loving the beauty of nature – without thinking. On those occasions their intelligence is momentarily one with the beauty (at-one-ment). But the purity of the moment is quickly obscured by thought, which pulls them back into tedious worldly time. As the wondrous moment of oneness with beauty will be continuous for the survivors, they will be in another time – a new time without meaning to our thinking, worldly selves.

THE KEY to this amazing life beyond worldliness is that the intelligence of each survivor (which we call individual consciousness or awareness) will be the central point of the vast reality of life on earth. In a similar, though self-conscious way, does everyone in the world unknowingly act and respond as though they were the centre of it all.

The surviving intelligence will be individual in the sense that ‘individual’ really means un-divided. Being undivided, the intelligence will not be separate from the whole, as our individual consciousness is. Each will be pure perception or pure knowledge – super intelligence without a centre while being a distinct all-connected place in the whole. Furthermore, each individual survivor will know implicitly that mankind, in its original simplicity, is the intelligence of life on earth.

Although the survivors will all share the common perception of the ethereal reality, there will be degrees of depth of that perception. Some will be more super-intelligent than others, although all will be far more intelligent than us in the world. In our world of sluggish, tedious time the intelligence of the population also varies enormously (although we do our best to ignore this). Even so, at birth all share in the same common intelligence of earth without world – unrecognised by the people around them. Inevitably, the original intelligence is slowly degraded by personalised impressions of the world and attachment to experience thereof – aided by the worldly ignorance of others. In the absence of any common delineator or reality as a guide, ignorance of the world and attachment to the world take over. The result is that the global population continuously seeks some sort of permanent security and ongoing reassurance – even though both are worldly impossibilities. So they form personal friendships and partnerships with like-minded individuals; and come together through business, political, social and religious affiliations.

Religious affiliations are probably the most dangerous as they can appeal to the destructive extremes of human nature – a fact demonstrated throughout history by religious fanaticism. The key is that all religions refer to self-sacrifice as leading to a better life after death. In extremes of zeal this is taken to mean the sacrifice of the body for a cause, whereas in truth self-sacrifice means sacrifice of the worldly self that is responsible for such unholy notions and beliefs. The frightening thing is that people go to war and kill people bolstered and self-justified by alliances and allegiances.

Although no longer attached to the world through alliances and loyalty to causes, some of the survivors will still be attached to the earth. Such attachment – the love of the earth’s beauty, the life-forms on it and its continued physical presence – is completely natural and fulfilling, as is experienced by many people in the world. In fact, being in nature is a way most people gain temporary respite from the world. The crucial difference is that the survivors’ loving attachment to the earth won’t create problems – such as in people’s sense of disturbance at the apparent destruction and exploitation of nature, and their efforts to prevent this. The survivors will be in the reality behind worldly appearances where the purity of nature is untouched and untouchable by the world.

The attachment to the earth will vary in each of these survivors. It will slow the intelligence marginally but without impairing the wondrous fundamental vision. As a result, however, the meaning of each object, including the survivor’s own presence, will vary very finely and faintly every moment with the incredibly swiftness of now. The slightly different perceptions will add to the scintillating beauty of the whole.

In the world, the parallel of this is that the condition of a person’s intelligence determines the impressions and experience they have of people and objects. The difference is that in reality there is only pure meaning and no impressions or experience because impressions and experience are the products of worldly time. So everyone in the world – despite alliances and allegiances – also tends to see things differently; but with the differences frequently leading to misunderstandings and personal confusion.

Another parallel is that in our world, love of the earth and the life on it manifests as a certain sensitivity to natural beauty. This usually expresses itself in some art form, or in an unrequited longing to be creative – both of which invariably involve frustration. But unlike in our world, the survivors’ love of the earth will allow the intelligence to function creatively, without restriction, over an amazingly profound and fulfilling range.

Although all the survivors will see the ethereality of the earth as described, those still attached to the earth will have what I can only describe as dual vision. On one hand they will see the shimmering translucent reality, and on the other, everything will have substantive form. In the play of intelligence as meaning, their perception will be of both states at once. A great blessing – which will not be at all disturbing (as it is in the little-understood worldly condition labelled schizophrenia).

FOR THOSE FEW no longer attached to the earth there will be only the ethereal reality. As the ethereal reality is the essence behind the formal beauty of the earth, these survivors will have no need of the physical. But, as purified intelligence, they will still be perceived in essence and love by the others.

The less there is of earthly attachment, the less is the need for physical bodies – and therefore of procreation. Sex as such will not exist for the survivors, since the drive of sex is responsible for most of the unhappiness on earth. Sex is the unconscious, universal craving to find love. But as love is a conscious earthly quality, sex misses the point and leaves a trail of unhappiness, violence and war – all of which can only find expression in the world. There will be no sex without love. Sex in reality is simply attraction. As love is the fundamental quality of life, attraction will have purpose. Indiscriminate self-gratification and sexual exploitation of others will have vanished with the world.

The division between the genders of male and female also will not exist. The genders exist only in division, and it is our worldly perception that divides them. Man and woman will exist. But the way of perceiving and enjoying each other will be completely different. Today our perception of the opposite sex is the worldly result of thousands of years of developing sexual imagination. Sexual imagination or fantasy is a strictly personal, and therefore selfish, stimulation. It has reached a compulsive global intensity now evident in every walk of life – from the mainstream movies, the media ads, the fashions and sexual liberation propaganda, to the undeniable personal experience of every man and woman. The sexual imagination – lurid or not so lurid – has corrupted the natural procreative instinct in both genders. The instinct is still there of course but it is now largely driven and manipulated by fantasy and sexual imagery.

The final world calamity will eliminate the need of sexual imagination in the survivors. Each will perceive the other direct, as each is. Couples will come together out of pure attraction, which is infallible, instead of dubious personal selection and preference. In other words, the survivors will be male and female bodies with nothing between them but purpose and love.

In the reality – where there is no world – man and woman unite to form the one super intelligence of life on earth. The population of the survivors will be controlled by life with the same precision as the regularity of the seasons and all that is natural. There will be no personal wanting or wishing to interfere with the rhythm of life. Death will no longer exist because the presence and oneness with never-ending life will have removed all fear and made death irrelevant.

The survivors will love all things, as they will see the reality in all things through the reality of their own perception. They will not have personal likes and dislikes; and, being one with endless life, no need of hope or belief. Life, the great intelligence of the earth, will guide them moment to moment without any sense, or need, of personal involvement. They will simply do as they do in a state of intense love and delight; and what they do will be right.

Nothing will be fixed or static. Every moment will be an extremely fine overall descent into a greater purity – the power and knowledge of unlimited life. The constant inner pull will originate in the source of life itself, which will never be known or need to be known by any surviving intelligence. The wondrous reality of participation will be enough.

In contrast, the compulsion of the world is to try to know, and then to know more when all that can be known is the world. This gives rise to material science, speculation and invention without regard for the source of it all. As a result, we in the world are compelled to be seemingly dragged along by the force of progress; not realising that we’re not being pulled at all, but are being pushed by our own thirst to know more – more burdensome information mistakenly called knowledge. Nevertheless, there is an implacable and irresistible pull – familiar to everyone in the world but not discerned as the cause of their periodic discontent, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. The pull of Source does not allow anybody to remain content, satisfied or at rest for long. All are kept moving and changing as the Source, acting through the tedious time of living and the swiftness of death, compassionately draws intelligent life back towards reality.

The uninhibited creativity of the survivors will lie in the simple unique quality each one of us is beneath the personal facade of learning, studying and struggling to achieve or be recognised. If everyone was their unique originality, and no longer their own worldly person, there would be no necessity for competing or struggling. Such is life when the world has been eradicated from the individual.

‘Unique’ means being without a like or equal. It’s not a form of life. It is life. When everyone is unique there’s only continuous harmonious acknowledgement – one to the other and of the whole. We who are living now can’t comprehend the whole because we perceive through the fragmented world of what each of us has learned and experienced. The result is countless opinions, advice and points of view – no single, meaningful focus. The survivors of the end of the world, however, will have a common simple and straightforward viewpoint and a certainty of knowledge which we can never have. They will be seeing and appreciating the unique quality of each other, not as personal differences as we do, but as utterly inseparable parts of the amazing ethereal whole of life.

The whole of life, which escapes our narrowed perception, will be the immediate knowledge informing the survivors. They will know without doubt that life is sustaining the earth, themselves and everything every moment. And their dedication to serving the purity of life within and without will be absolute. By virtue of the unique quality of each (virtue means worthiness), the survivors will initiate a new way of life on earth beyond all imagining. That will be the vehicle for their unlimited creativity and love.

© The Barry Long Trust 2012