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This full-length recording, made available freely, was recorded on the 29th of July 1999. This recording is one of twelve in this series. The series is available in the paid version of the podcast, available on The Barry Long Podcast on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-barry-long-podcast/id1709595005) and Spotify Podcast (https://open.spotify.com/show/34rcMFK6b4CcicY7JDxo9f)

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Extracts from this episode:

Taking charge of your own life. Being responsible for your own life. This is a rare thing in existence because people act from their feelings. And they think that's being responsible for their life. But then it is the feelings being responsible for the life because the feelings make the decision, instead of the intelligence that you are. And feelings are emotions. There is no good feeling. If you have a good feeling, then you are going to have a bad feeling. Because in this existence, this existence exists on opposites. For every good feeling, there's a bad feeling. For every up, there's a down and everyone's struggling to get ups all the time...

The human condition is based on endeavouring to be happy. And as soon as you endeavour to be happy, there is a reflex action that's going on in your psyche that is going to bring the endeavour to be unhappy. Is it true in your experience? What is very difficult for people to see it because we live attached to everything that we do, acting out of our emotions, and our feelings – we have a momentum going on all the time. We're so busy trying to be happy that we forget that our bad times came from something that pleased us two years ago...

Once when you and your lover first came together, it was so beautiful, it was so lovely. And then it started to slip. Because what was beautiful was taken for granted. Well, true love is beautiful. But not imagined love, not love without intelligence – it's only beautiful for a while. And then you have to pay the price of a downer depression, uncertainty about your lover or your own life.

When you get down here in depression – what do you do? What can human nature do when you go into depression? You can get drunk, as we see on the movies. You can do that. But then that's no good, because that gives you an upper. And the next day you got a downer. So then you got to have another upper and a downer. So then you get into the drug situation where you take an upper. So you get a downer. And this is how humanity lives...

So what's the enlightened truth of this? The truth is – the only fulfilment is – never to be excited, which means never to be depressed. That's the only way of living in this existence without being torn up and pulled down, torn up, pulled up, torn down...

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Barry Long was a spiritual teacher who taught internationally from the 1980's up until his death in 2003. His spiritual teaching is grounded in practicality and addresses all aspects of modern day life.

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