The Wisdom of the Gut

You wouldn't think a meditation cd could have the opposite effect to which it was intended but that's exactly what happened with a cd which was given to me by a friend.  I tried listening to it a week or so ago and found, despite good instructions and good intentions, that I could not sit still.  Why was I so agitated?  Put it down to just one of those things, one of those days and thought no more about it.  Except that every time I thought about the cd there was this tinge of agitation, this reluctance.   Not the usual response to meditation cds.  I've got a couple and have listened to them without anything other than a calm receptivity to what they have to say.  But I was being silly, wasn't I?  This friend was so impressed with this cd that she made sure I had a copy.  She glowed with enthusiasm.  It had to be good.  I respect this friend and her intelligence.  So yesterday I put it on and clicked through to where I'd left off.  And there it was again.  Agitation.   A visceral antipathy.

Why did this man's voice affect me so?  If you must know, it's Barry Long.  He's long dead so anything I write won't hurt his feelings.  And I am in the minority.  Googled him and found he had/has quite a following, that he'd studied in India, was influenced by Krishanmurti and Gurdjieff but maintained that his teachings were his own.  The rest of his life, he died in 2003 from prostrate cancer, was devoted to disemination of his teachings. 

But I have known men like him.  Autocratic.  A magnet for women (and he had 5 long term monogamous relationships during his life).  How can I say I know him when I've listened to one cd and never met the man?  I don't know except that the sound of his voice and the things he said set up a roiling in my gut and, in my book, the gut knows. 

I was hauling myself over the coals for being such a ninny until I looked up his life story.  Five women.  Uh huh.  Prostate cancer (this may be unfair but I do suspect that illnesses manifest in the body where we are conflicted or where negative feelings and memories are stored).  Plus a large part of his teachings, according to Wikipedia, had to do with sex and love in relationships.  Clanging bells and sirens!  So going out on a limb here and judging where I have no right to, I suspect this guy had a magnetic personality, that women were drawn to him, that he was wise yet he couldn't help but use his wisdom for self-aggrandizement, not in money or even, in an overt way, power, but in his need for women, their admiration and sex.

Or maybe I'm just not evolved enough.