#hooe

great art hanging on the wall

making bad things small.

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Barry Long often referred to world events in the monthly Tamborine Talks. Black Monday, the Stock Market Crash of 19 October 1987 was the largest one-day market crash in history, the result of a bubble of belief that the value of companies would always go up.  Barry used such topical events to illustrate a universal truth. Here is a good example from the November talk that year:

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The Stockmarket has crashed. All that's happened is the shaking-out that occurs at every level of life on this planet as soon as something becomes excessive. As soon as hope - dependence on something outside the truth of now - starts to balloon out beyond accepted levels, there will be a crash.

If you are attached, say to your mother or your child or your lover, you build up the expectation that they're going to live forever; along with all the speculators around you. In the living of an immortality that is not the truth, you become speculatively attached to the person. And God or life  in its mercy, in its desire for you to find reality so that you might live free of unhappiness, then kills your child or your mother or your father. Your expectations are punctured, shaken. For a while you are shocked, brought down to earth.

It's not the truth, though, is it? Life does not end when you are shaken out. The shake-out is the opportunity for you to see the truth of life without attachment - the wondrous now.

~ Barry Long