cousinbasil wrote:I just have so many questions about this Ark business, but I suppose my next step is to read this book, so please try to find a link for me.
There is no link to it that I'm aware of c/b. A fellow in Australia was kind enough to send me a copy of the book a couple of years ago. There are many inexpensive used copies of it available here online ('abebooks' for one).
However, below are some excerpts I copied out of Long's book a couple of weeks ago which I personally found enlightening and reassuring. Though as insightful into the human condition as Long was, I don't think he ever foresaw a practical way out of it. Nor did he seem to fully understand the nature and cause of man's present fallen condition.
I also posted the following link herein previously for an article of Long's called 'Terrorism' which is also an excerpt from this book. (The Origins of Man and the Universe)
http://www.barrylong.org/statements/terrorism.shtml
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The necessary effect of human intelligence is to downgrade an idea; ideas are reduced to concepts, notions, and words and they lose their original virtue. There is a feverish movement to fill in the idea in greater detail with concepts, theories, and descriptions. For any idea to retain its virtue, it must not be broken down and degraded in this way. It must be lived as my life. But the living of ideas such as truth, love, beauty, harmony, divine order and rightness is very, very rare.
Although the human intellect is practically all negative in relation to truth, it has its positive values such as kindness, generosity, compassion, patience, and giving. As worthy as these qualities are in our sensory existence, they are nevertheless degradations of the idea of love held in the terrestial intellect. Real love, living love, is all that is good. There are no other words for it; it embraces and replaces every seemimgly virtuous description.
The spiritual or holy life begins when man starts refusing to give in to the almost irresistible urge to identify with the human intellect.
Moral failure has been the cause of every civilization's downfall.
Service to humanity without personal consideration is love. And love is the finest virtue.
Each day every one of us subconsciously retouches the picture of his or her life to make the grotesque travesty of living-to-die make some sense and seem reasonable. We learn to live with a finger in the flame of doubt by refusing to acknowledge the pain to ourselves and each other, or to look for the cause of it. We are benevolent liars to our children, hearty cowards to ourselves. Apart from a few self-realized individuals, only the insane see the unbearable truth. Ours is a jungle in which everyone is kept as busy and unquestioning as humanly possible, not for common welfare but for common safety. Only in the real jungle there are no policemen, no doubts, - and no insanity. The unbearable truth, which few are allowed to realize without going mad, is that every man is fighting or trying to live through his nature in order to make a better or more meaningful life for man to come. This is the dynamic of human evolution. Each life is lived solely for another life. As the point is always another life there is never really this life - therefore no apparent point, no permanence, no peace for long, and no death. While man lives, he must fight and strive to build the individual he will be tomorrow. As there is no tomorrow, and yet only tomorrow, there is no end. Man can never rest content, even when he is dead. This is the epitome of futility, insanity. Which is why for man who is mortal, the truth of life must always remain myth.
When two or more selfconscious beings are in each other's company a powerful psychic atmosphere is generated between them.
The power to reflect on beauty came with man.....It is every man's unrealized longing to match the beauty he senses with the love he feels. In the span of his lifetime this is as difficult to do as to understand because each man has to create that love out of his own emotion.
Just as cosmic law controls the devastation man can wreak upon the earth at any time, so cosmic restraint has so far prevented him from unleashing the nuclear force now at his disposal. The balance is so fine that nuclear devastation is a possibility at any moment even though it subsides periodically as a perceived threat. The only certainy - guaranteed by man's current state of self-knowledge - is that he will survive in sufficient numbers to perpetuate the race. This is hardly a comforting thought for the billions who will be destroyed; nor for them to know that the holocaust will have been absolutely necessary for the inevitable progress of westernized culture towards the enlightened race man must someday become.
The unbearable truth, which few are allowed to realize without going mad, is that every man is fighting or trying to live through his nature in order to make a better or more meaningful life for man to come. This is the dynamic of human evolution.
Man, in spite of his nucleal might and biological villainy, still does not possess the power to wipe out the human race. But he can destroy most of it. And, as I have said, this will be necessary for his evolutionary advancement.
As future man and woman make the psychic or vital world a conscious part of their existence by being made to learn to truly love, their energies will merge and harmonize without loss of individual consciousness. Man on earth will then be united with the one divine woman all men seek, and woman with her divine man. Together they will create a new psycho-physical race of people on earth. From birth their living experience will be of the psychic reality as well as the physical world giving them an intensified sense of purpose and responsibility for life in both worlds. This future wave of men and women will be a new, mature version of the Gods.
Sooner or later every good man who has learned to love and perhaps to serve something worthy in the world reaches a crisis point. He has to start facing up to the only thing that now stands between himself and true selfless love. This is himself, the final residual red-claw emotional entity which he overlooked and unconsciously assumed was loving or doing the loving. The self itself - representing all that lives within him apart from love - must now be consciously dissolved. This is done by using his authentic being to observe and understand his emotional self. It means turning his attention inward instead of allowing it to be driven outward. For a long, long time the man must live out of character instead of out of his nature. This is extremely difficult to do as it entails going against much that is psychologically and emotionally normal in himself and society. To all other men living normal lives his behavior and actions at this time will seem to be unnatural and therefore questionable. Furthermore, while the struggle is in progress the man's ability to love may seem to the world to be doubtful or self-centered. By persevering a man gradually aligns his nature with his character. When the alignment is distinct enough the character shines through, giving a new dimension to the natural being. A man can then be said to have had power or presence added to the force of his nature - and this is equilibrium or willpower.
Character is not commonly seen in this world. Even when it is seem it has no discernable continuity like the nature of a person or his personality. If personality is to be termed positive, character has to be described as negative. Character is not so much seen for what it is as for what it is not. That is to say, character usually appears or stands out in situations where the normal instinct of self-preservation or common sense is to go in the opposite direction. Character tends to always be isolated, to have to stand alone or out front. Also it tends to prove of very little value from a worldly point of view apart from the virtue of its own existence for anyone perceiving it in another.
To observe character in another usually evokes compassion, spiritual love, or the sense of gratitude. Gratitude is the finest of emotions, but often it deteriorates into a form of self-service with the giving of alms in return. We give gifts to asssuage (abate - calm) our selfconscious feeling of not being able to give of our self. To be worthy or evolutionarily effective, gratitude demands first an immediate offering up of the feeling itself to the 'unknown' within, the one and only character at Level Five above (below). It is then divine gratitude. By expressing gratitude first to the source of character and not to another human being, selfconsciousness is helped to be cleansed of self. Any giving of gifts can come later as a compliment to the offering up of gratitude.
Character and nature are a world apart. Character is always present and implicit in being, as beauty is implicit in life. It does not incarnate. What incarnates are the vital, self-projecting evolutionary needs of man's nature. This may seem a deplorable constraint for the world. But the justice of it is undeniable: it is up to each individual to express character and virtue in the world by manifesting them himself if he thinks those qualities should be here. Otherwise he - and the world - is stuck by default with his Red Plane (level 1) self and existence.
Seven Levels of the Terrestrial Mind
Level 7 - Spirit of the earth and of Man
Level 6 - Will (static) Will (dynamic)
Level 5 - True soul of man
Level 4 - Evolving soul of man
Level 3 - The unconscious - dreamless sleep
Level 2 - The subconscious - thinking and dreaming
Level 1 - Sense perception and the physical world
You can't perceive reality except through self-knowledge; and you have to have a very deep knowledge of the experience of life on earth as your own existence - which our self obscures. Self-knowledge is a light put down through the gloom. Reality is under the gloom so you got to put the light into the self first, as knowledge. 'Man know thyself'. To know myself is to be able to perceive reality and to have gnosis (knowledge of spiritual mysteries) or knowledge as I've defined it - knowledge of the vast memory, which is the memory of life itself. I don't suggest that I am the knowledge of all life, for that would be the place of God; but whatever I need to know to answer any question that I am asked, from this position in space and time, that knowledge is provided for me.
(Barry Long - 'The Origins of Man and the Universe')
