ARTICLES

Here is a selection of articles, in no particular order, comprising at the moment 293 entries totalling a little over 400 pages, featuring articles, interviews, extracts, aphorisms and statements – many not published before.

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Barry and Eckhart

What’s the connection between Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle? Many people have asked the question. The following article was written by a man who attended many of Barry’s meetings around the world over a period of some sixteen years up until 2002 when Barry stopped teaching publicly. The views expressed...

The Real Difference Between Love and Sex

The great impediment to the love between man and woman is that they have not realized, they do not know, the difference between love and sex. And this applies, particularly in the case of woman, because she is the prize of existence. If she doesn't know the difference between love...

The Cosmic Truth - UFOs, extraterrestrial intelligence and the truth

In August last year (1990) I started to introduce the truth of cosmic consciousness into my public teaching. I am preparing the people who are with me to realise the truth behind UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. To see a UFO or perceive a being of ETI (extra terrestrial intelligence) is...

Soul

The Reality of Soul MasterSession 2002, Session 18, Question – Do we have an immortal soul that is separate and distinct from every one else's soul? Something that we anticipate will have some kind of a existence with God after the physical body dies? Or is it the end of...

The Spiritual Life Is Practical

The spiritual life is a practical life. If you're not practical, you're never going to realize God—that is, union with Me. You must be practical. People like to read books and listen to tapes. They enjoy it all the time. But that's not practical enough. You must live the truth....

Bringing the Perfect Mate Into Existence

This article is drawn from a talk which is available freely here: https://www.barrylong.org/podcast/bringing-your-divine-partner-into-existence-the-secret-to-perfect-love Your whole life is about bringing her — or him — into existence. Not someone outside of you. Not some dream figure you are chasing. But the true woman, the true man, the divine principle that lives...

What Is the Price of Knowledge?

This article is drawn from a talk which is available freely here: https://www.barrylong.org/podcast/metamorphosis What happens the more you know, man and woman? You don't get anything for nothing. It's got to come from somewhere. If you take an extra word into you, it has to come at the price of...

Metamorphosis

This article is drawn from a talk which is available freely here: https://www.barrylong.org/podcast/metamorphosis Nearly everyone who comes to me is ready for a metamorphosis — a fundamental, radical change. Like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. You are all butterflies. Only you've retrograded — fallen backward — from that butterfly state...

Love and Growing Old

This article is derived from a podcast episode which can be found here – https://www.barrylong.org/podcast/love-and-growing-old Aging often brings a heightened sense of perspective. Work and career pressures typically recede, children grow up and become independent, and many of the responsibilities that once seemed urgent begin to fall away. Yet, for...

The Embrace of Love

It is a great shock to the new-born baby body to emerge from the enclosing warmth of the womb. Until this moment there has been no need to breathe or open the mouth for food, no need for any awareness of space or time. Suddenly the environment is strange and...

History of the World

The history of mankind is the evolution of unhappiness. At the beginning of time the individual man or woman was the ruling authority on earth. There was no emotion in this authority: no past, no likes and dislikes, no unhappiness, no self-interest. Each individual was responsible for himself or herself...

The Human Condition

Well, good morning again, and here we are, by the grace of God. We've been able to make it through all the forces that would keep us away; we've been able to make it into this very still and holy place because we don't have any interruptions here of our...

Meditation & Worry

Extracted from Meditation A Foundation Course by Barry Long. It could be said that the worried preoccupied mind is one of the greatest drains of energy and eclipses the natural joy of life. Barry Long shows how meditation helps you to master the mind that worries. He suggests exercises to...

Aphorisms - Time & space

As within, so without - in time. ~ Time is the currency of being in existence, as money is the currency of living in existence. ~ As it is, the universe is stationary. As we conceive it, it is in constant motion. ~ A man is as mortal or immortal...

Aphorisms - Life

Life doesn't care - and yet it cares beyond all caring. How do you explain this? ~ Life is not a stage. ~ Life is always present before any form of life appears. ~ You, life, the being behind the womb, conceive your own body and your own existence. ~...

Aphorisms - Fact

The sun is either shining or it's not. You don't conclude, you just look. ~ There are no reasons, justifications or excuses for anything. There is only the fact. ~ A fact is a fact because it exists, not because it is right or wrong. ~ Intelligence is to see...

Aphorisms - Body

The first conditioning man is exposed to is that he is the body. ~ Your body is yours, but not necessarily you. ~ The external world does not possess the reality each of us ascribes to it. ~ None of our senses is real. ~ The tongue cannot taste the...

Aphorisms - Freedom

If only someone would show me something better to do than what I am doing I would do it. ~ Impatience is wanting a result, Boredom is looking for a conclusion. ~ I hold this house by giving What I have to give To those who are sent to take....

Aphorisms - Man & Woman

Desire is natural, wanting is not. To desire woman is natural. But you must not want her. ~ Go and love a woman. Why do you want to go and look at pictures of her? Go and love her. ~ Woman is my love. ~ 
If you can't love woman...

Aphorisms - Opinions

What stands between truth and us is our opinions. ~ The hardest thing to do is to listen. Listening is an act of humility. You have to just sit there and deny the assertion of your own opinions. ~ Everything you ever think about is rubbish. ~ The memory in...

Aphorisms - God

Where God is
 There is only the good And where is God not? ~ For I know that there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of...

Aphorisms - Truth

Truth is impersonal. ~ You do not have to find what's true: when the false is discarded the truth is there. ~ Finding the truth is finding out what you are not.
 ~ Nothing is true unless it is true in your own experience. ~ Once you discover something is...

Aphorisms - Earth/World

The point/object of the world is to free yourself of it. ~ The earth is beautiful, joyous, cosmic, eternal. There are no problems on earth. The world is the unhappy superstructure man has imposed on earth. The world consists of his problems. Both earth and world are within you. ~...

Aphorisms - Like & dislike


The daily pain, conflict and confusion of this world is the unconscious interaction of likes and dislikes. The daily pain, conflict and confusion of the spiritual endeavour is the dying to them. ~ 'Liking' and 'disliking' are one whole entity – as the two ends of a fence are the...

Aphorisms - Love

Life unlived is life unloved. ~ Intimate with love Intimate with life Intimate with myself ~ No less No more How I love thee ~ Love is always recognisable by the absence of choice in it.
 ~ Love, if it exists must be a constant thing and not the play...

Aphorisms - Knowing

Fulfilment is in the feeling of the doing, not in the doing. How can I know the feeling of doing without doing? ~ The only wisdom is the wisdom of self-knowledge. ~ It is said all men are entitled to their opinion, in truth all men are not entitled to...

Aphorisms - Death

It is the dying to opinions and impressions, the dying to the habit of reaction, that is so painful in truth. ~ You fear death because you perceive it will take all your power, position, possessions – everything you imagine you are. ~ What makes you strive so hard, and...

Aphorisms - Hell

Hell cannot get worse than what is possible on earth. ~ 
Be still and know that I am hell. Do not complain. Be valiant. Be still and know that I am just. Be patient.
 Be still and know that I am God.
 For I am God, the spirit of the...

Aphorisms - Brain/Mind

Mind is busy. It hates the state of detachment or rest without an occupying interest because then its mastery is threatened. When mind encounters this it feels loneliness, restlessness, discontent. It rushes for a book, the TV set or someone to talk to. You have to endure this state in...

Aphorisms - Unhappiness/happiness

What causes the greatest happiness will cause the greatest pain. That is the law. ~ Happiness, fulfilment, peace are now or they don't exist. ~ Unhappiness is ignorance. ~ There is no justification for unhappiness, none whatever. ~ Man's history is the evolution of unhappiness. ~ To rid yourself of...

Aphorisms - Wanting/Desire

Things must happen and what you desire will happen if you practice the art of not wanting it. ~ Where there is wanting there is no freedom. ~ Nothing desires to die before it desires to live.
 ~ You, life, the being behind the womb, conceive your own body and...

Aphorisms - Teaching

To the insane, I teach sanity, to the sane, I teach insanity, to those between, I teach self-knowledge, to the wise, I re–affirm the Blessed Truth they know. ~ I am an agent of the Black Light sometimes called the Black Sun. ~ Justice is complete and perfect. It is...

Aphorisms - Now

You don't journey to heaven. Heaven is now. ~ You are all there now beneath the garbage. ~ The moment is perfect. Thinking makes it imperfect. ~ Thinking is projecting yourself into the past or future. You cannot think and remain in the moment. ~ Living life is living according...

Aphorisms - Emotion

Ignorance is the accumulation of all past emotional hurt and pain you are pleased to avoid in yourself because you feel it's too painful to face. ~ From birth, everyone is compelled and encouraged by the emotional ignorance of parents, teachers and society to attach themselves to their likes and...

Aphorisms - Myth

The myth of man has led me to see the ignorance and falsehood of human nature – all that it holds dear and the necessity for a start to be made on its complete destruction.
 ~ Myth is the only means at our disposal to describe the reality behind human...

Key Statements

The following statements are key passages extracted from Barry Long's writings, published and unpublished. They are an introduction to his teaching, originally released as a booklet 'Key Statements' to accompany his teaching programme in July 1990. I write and speak only of love and truth Most people are not ready...

Love Is Not A Feeling - Interview with Sally & Jade

What Is Enlightenment magazine interviewed Barry Long on the subject of sexual love in 1995. This interview with Sally and Jade accompanied the published article. For a period of three years, Barry Long made love with five women in the role of tantric master. We asked him if we could...

Truth is not philosophy

Barry Long was interviewed at his home in Crabbes Creek, New South Wales,
on 23 June 2001 by Neal Bowhay. There's a generally accepted difference between spiritual masters and philosophers. Could you say what the difference is? The philosopher is always asking questions. The spiritual master never asks the question: What...

True Tantra

In Northern India when I was there, in many places there were concrete casts of what they call the lingam and the yoni. You’d see a concrete penis sticking out of a concrete yoni, the female part. We in the west are so superficial we wouldn’t have a clue what...

The moment of stillness

The purpose of meditation is to find the stillness within you. This initially may be a brief experience in which the mind slows noticeably; or it may even stop for a second or two. Either experience is dramatic. And do not think afterwards that you might have imagined it. That...

The Inspiration

This interview appears at the end of 'The Origins of Man and the Universe,' Barry Long's cosmic master work. CT: Barry, I’d like to talk to you about how you came to write ‘the origins book’ and how you see its purpose in terms of your own life and work. So,...

Terrorism

Barry Long writing in 1983 predicted the rise of global terrorism as a reaction to western materialism. He saw ‘paranational terrorism’ as a new expression of human power, which would utilise suicidal fighters, get mixed up with nationalistic and religious struggles on every continent and contribute to the end of...

Straightening your space

Space. We can attack it from various aspects. But the space that you are trying to straighten out is the space that you take with you wherever you go. All your meditations, all your rooting out of the past, all your endeavour to make your body rhythmical which is what...

Straight to the truth

You cannot see straight if you are emotional. That means, in any situation where you’ve got a feeling about a person or an event – a reaction – you cannot look straight. Your intelligence becomes degraded, corrupted by your emotional condition. How often do you really think you’re seeing things...

Spiritual enquiry is a waste of time

Does spiritual enquiry have any value? Spiritual enquiry, where I come from, is a waste of time. Everybody is wasting their time indulging in spiritual enquiry. Spiritual enquiry is basically so that you will keep living the life of ignorance. The more that you keep enquiring, the less you will...

Shakti

“Shakti is the power of divine love waiting to enter woman and come through her to man.” I seldom enjoy using Eastern words because they confuse the West. The words I do use are ‘karma’, the repetition of the past as existence; ‘tantra’, the reaching of God consciousness through the...

Real Meditation

I’m going to speak of meditation. I’m going to go through aspects of the meditation that I have taught since my first tape in 1983, ‘Start Meditating Now’. Now meditation is supposed to make you more intelligent. It is supposed to give you greater and greater discernment, the ability to see...

Original Tantra

Barry Long (1926-2003) was a spiritual master who showed men and women how to live together in truth and love. His best-known work is Making Love: Sexual Love The Divine Way, first written and recorded on cassette and later published as a book and on CD. This article includes statements Barry Long...

No, I'm not dead

This article was written 3 years before Barry Long's death A RUMOUR was reported from Canada the other day that Barry Long had died. It probably started with the death of an associate a couple of weeks ago. Four of us men in the teaching had cancer. The first died...

My cows and the truth

Noumenon, a South African publication, emailed the following question and asked for Barry Long's comments. The editor, Kiben Pillay, said he’d sent the same question to an ‘English spiritual teacher, Maitreya'. As the subject is a source of much confusion I was pleased to respond. His text and Barry Long's...

Making love

An extract from Barry Long's book MAKING LOVE ~ SEXUAL LOVE THE DIVINE WAY a turning point in the understanding of love on the planet. I teach man and woman how to be true to love and how to be honest in their relationships. I help them to discover a divine love...

Love Is Not A Feeling – article

Published in What is Enlightenment, Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995. Reprinted here with permission from What is Enlightenment. I was asked to contribute an article for this magazine. I don't usually mix my teaching with others, but in this case I wanted to respond to Andrew Cohen's personal invitation....

An introduction

'You are a light that is forever.You are consciousness.You are not just a person.The person will trouble you.The consciousness is what you know inside to be right and true.That is the love inside you and the beauty inside you.' Barry Long was a Western spiritual master. A spiritual master is...

I am here to help you realise unlimited self realisation

AT PRESENT your realisation is limited to 'I am a disciple', or a student, a follower, or a seeker of truth. And even if you do not quite understand what is being said here, you still have a sense of self-realisation: the changing realisations of yourself as, say, a doctor,...

CERN Revisited

Creating the top quark Conditions that existed one ten-thousandth of a millionth of a second after the creation of the universe have been reproduced at the CERN atom-smashing machine in Geneva. In the 16-mile tunnel called 'the electron positron collider' atomic particles are being smashed into matter at 670 million...

Barry Long Bulletins #1–7

The Barry Long Bulletin #1, 6 July 2012 Re-uniting with the Spirit Within To know what's true you've got to know it in your own experience. You have to be extremely practical in the search for the truth and the only way you can know whether a word is real, or...

Aspirant and practitioner

Now, the aspirant and the practitioner. What are you? An aspirant or a practitioner? Now, an aspirant is always aspiring after something, to get something. So aspirants in the spiritual life or the divine life love to read about the truth, to read about love, to read about the divine...

A Prayer for Life

An extract from Barry Long's book: 'A Prayer for Life' published in 2002. We human beings have been praying since time began. Whatever we’ve been praying for doesn’t seem to have done much good. Is the world as good as it is, or as bad as it is, because of...

Teaching Children What Love Is

Extracted from 'Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth.' How many people know what love is? In an extract from his book, Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth, Barry Long shows how love can be demonstrated so that a child will grow up with the substantive experience and knowledge...

Purpose of Partnership

From an interview with Barry in 1995. What is the process in partnership? The process of partnership is to diminish my self. My self is my negative emotions: my anger, my resentments, my jealousy, my self doubt.  When I'm in partnership with a woman, because she is my opposite number,...

The photo

This iconic image of Barry Long represents his awakening to the truth as he stares through the mirror of existence … It is used as such in the film ‘Scenes from an Enlightened Life’ and appears in his autobiography ’ My Life of Love and Truth’. The factual context of...

Chilkapita

Chilkapita, near Almora, India: Barry Long stayed here for six months in 1965. It was where he wrote what was later published as 'Meditation: A Foundation Course' and 'Knowing Yourself'. And where 'after three days of astonishing confusion and uncertainty’ he realised immortality. What this means is described in detail...

As You Always Are

An extract from the book 'My Life of Love and Truth’, Chapter 11, IMMORTALITY: I had realised immortality. Death was a condition of the mind but it was not a fact. I had somehow passed through that condition. And now I was exultant, filled with joy and the knowledge that...

The Truth Is Being Intelligent

The truth is not about being clever. The truth is being intelligent. The whole world is extremely clever, but it is not intelligent. It can’t be intelligent when all the people in it worry and make themselves unhappy. That’s hardly intelligent, is it? You are in the process of being...

Twenty Articles of Truth

From ‘Twenty Articles of Truth:’ The truth every man and woman seeks is in themselves. Nothing is true unless it is true in your experience. This is your protection against being duped or misled. However, because all truth - realised and unrealised - is within you, it is possible to...

Born Dead

From the book 'My Life of Love and Truth.’ On the day that I was born my mother had a vision, the only one she said she’d ever had. During the last hour of a long confinement she saw the Virgin Mary, all white, standing by her bed. ‘Your son...

A New Way to Truth and Enlightenment

I present to you a new way to truth and enlightenment - the way of human sexual love, one for another. This way may be called a Way for the West, a way of love for our loveless times, a gift from the beginning of time for those who can...

The point of teaching

From the book ‘My Life of Love and Truth.’ The point of teaching, or revealing tne truth to others at the deepest level, where I, the master, operate, is not so concerned with the individual’s ‘progress’. What’s important is that the truth is taught or revealed and that there are...

Can you see the truth?

The question for anyone is: Can you see the truth in your own experience? It is demonstrated in your life, if you have the clarity to see it. To look straight inside yourself needs clarity. People can’t see straight because of the unhappiness, doubt, self-judgment, fear, jealousy or resentment that...

No More Negativity!

From this moment on, no more negativity. Let me explain … Negativity is any talk or thought about your own incapacity to find the truth. Negativity is any despair in you: ‘I can’t do it. No matter how hard I try, I can’t do it. I am so dense. I...

Progress

From the book ‘Only Fear Dies.’ Progress is the frantic flight from truth and the love of escapist emotions, expressed through the loveless, materialistic, progressive mind. No movement is necessary to find the truth. No movement is possible in truth. There is nowhere to go, nothing to be achieved. Love,...

Stillness

Why is meditation so centred on stillness? Because stillness is behind every creative and meaningful thing you do. If you want to solve a problem, what do you do first? You go still. You look at what’s happening, or has happened. You look. You don’t reason or think. That comes...

Totally Present

In meditation what we are endeavouring to do is be totally present. To be true to all the men and women we ever meet, including our children, including our lovers, is to be totally present when we are with them … Not to want to be somewhere else, not to...

I Want Nothing

I want nothing from you. I want no followers or believers. I want you to come alive and be yourself - to be informed absolutely, every moment, from within, so that finally there is no need for any teacher, only the presence of life itself. The test of that will...

Enlightenment

People realise things and don’t make them real. Many people have realisations of truth but no realisation is complete until actually lived in the world. A popular concept is that after Self-realisation the whole life is instant bliss. This is not true. It does indeed induce an untroubled equilibrium, but...

The Longing to Be Free

"I must go where the four winds blow.Where the spirit speaks to its own;For now I am freeLike the wind I must beAnd help the others home." When Barry Long uttered these words, over forty years ago, he’d no idea of what was to come. Now we know, because his...

Being Without Unhappiness

The state of Being is distinguished by being at all times in the joy of life within - no unhappiness. And this reflected externally by the absence of any problems in the world. As within, so without. Being is pure sensation. And being in pure sensation is a distinctly blissful self-sustaining feeling....

The Hardest Death

The daily pain, conflict and confusion of the world is the unconscious interaction of likes and dislikes. The daily pain, conflict and confusion of the spiritual way is the conscious dying to them. Only when the attachment to your likes and dislikes is dissolved for all time can you BE...

The Diamond Body

Barry Long writing about his Diamond Body Realisation Through the Eye of Consciousness I enter a wisp of world. A garden. A paradise. An Eden. Truly a State where Nothing dies in the fullness of Love. Then, the understanding that this is the Body of my Fellow Man! Behind the...

The Power of Love

Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right, independent of any individual. Man changes but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women; men and women leave love. Love is all around you, like the air, and it...

Love Is Not Liking

Love is beyond liking and disliking. It is possible to love someone without liking them. As it is possible to like someone without loving them. Real love is when you neither like nor dislike, yet are not indifferent. Liking and disliking give rise to human love. Breaking consciously with this...

Love Burns

You must not lose yourself in love or you’ll suffer for nothing, like most do, when the object of love departs in time, as it must. You must hold to the purpose of love. The purpose of love is to burn you out, to remove the selfishness that suffers from...

The Locks and the Keys

Once upon a time God had two big bags. One marked ‘men’ and filled with keys. One marked women and filled with locks. From heaven he scattered the contents of both bags over the face of the earth and called down, ‘Alright men, go find your lock. And women, find your key.’  Some...

Speaking of love...

How often did you talk of love today with the person who shares your life? Unless each day you speak first of love, who do you think you are fooling with your big job, your big name, your independence, or your aloofness to the pangs and joys of love? Your...

My Vision

My vision of the Lord happened as a result of extreme love. If you love a man or a woman with a self-consuming, self-obliterating intensity equal to your love of God, the Lord may appear briefly within that form. That is what happened to me. I saw the Lord, spoke...

I don’t worry

I do not worry because my mind is straight and clear. And the reason is that I don’t imagine anything. Imagination is thinking about something that’s not real, not here now. Imagination, pleasant thoughts, worry - they are all the same. You might be imagining nice, pleasant things but they...

The Nonsense of Thinking

From the book ‘Knowing Yourself.’ Will our bodies, our families, our countries, be any less safe if we stop thinking? Are they any less safe at this moment? ~ although you are not thinking now, and may never think again. If someone walks in now and tells you your house is...

The Fact Is …

Thinking and most of our talking is an attempt to escape from the fact of life. This is a difficult and painful fact to face because it means the end of us as self-assertive, self-affirming entities. By thinking, talking and discussing we try to run away from the fact. A...

What is the spirit? What is enlightenment?

Nothing meaningful in human terms can be said about the spirit. Sufficient to say that it is the spirit of God, the supreme consciousness. When the spirit is accessed, the human mind, its aspirations and supposed reasons for existing are completely obliterated in an inflow of inexpressible knowledge or gnosis....

Immortality

The point of existence is for man to build a new world of his own and be fully and permanently responsible for it. It has to be a world where he is immortal, where his conscious presence and control are uninterrupted. The epoch has now arrived in which man is...

The Long House, Morris Avenue, Wahroonga

Extracts from the autobiography ‘My Life of Love and Truth’ In 1960, Betty and I and the children moved into a new bungalow we’d built at Wahroonga, one of Sydney’s lovely northern suburbs featuring a profusion of trees, parks and natural forest. The home was designed for us by the architect...

Tamborine Talks

Recorded every month by Barry Long on the verandah of his Queensland home, these Tamborine Talks were probably the most practical, personal and penetrating teachings he ever gave. Practical because his aim was to send out a regular message to be taken on and lived until the next one arrived....

Why do you need a Master?

You’ve probably heard it said that no one can be liberated without the presence of Guru, the Master. It’s an eastern tradition, difficult for the western mind to accept; but it is the truth. Why do you need a Master? How would you explain it to your mother, father or...

What’s It All About?

From the book ‘Knowing Yourself.’ A billion men and women before you paused briefly, in their burrowing in the past, and sighed with an intensity beyond knowing. ‘Where am I going? What’s it all about?’ But they received no answer. Before you can escape from your burrow you must know you...

Statements – IV

The spirit is a state of poise. And whenever you are in a state of poise, no matter what’s going on around you, you are in the spiritual state. ~ You will be alone when you find the secret of life. You will be alone when you find the secret...

Ways of Perceiving

From Tamborine Talk, July 1986. There are three ways of perceiving. The first is to perceive the truth. And the truth is always the truth behind existence, behind the phenomena. The next way of perceiving is the way of perceiving the fact. That is the way the businessman perceives and...

Profound Power

I, the individual hearing or reading these words, I am always at the centre. The whole of life happens around me … The closer an outer event is to me, the individual, the more immediately significant it is to my life within. And if the event has a potent emotional effect...

The Lord

From the Tamborine Talk August 1986 Each of you on the spiritual path has been in what I call ‘the absence of experience’. That is, there come these times of aridity in which you can get no experience from what you’re doing. You go out to a party; you get...

The First Seminar

Until Easter 1988 Barry Long had only taught small groups in either weekly meetings or weekend ‘intensives’. His first open seminar was held in Sydney that Easter and it was followed by three seminars at Regents College, London in August and September. Several hundred people attended these events, held from...

Getting Over Understanding

You cannot understand your life. You cannot understand your relationships. You cannot understand love. You cannot understand God. You cannot understand the purpose of life. You have to be love, be truth, be life, now. And in the being, of course, there is no distance - so there’s no need...

Living Together

This statement announced a Barry Long teaching day in Sydney on 17 December 1987, about the truth of relationships and how to get it right with the people you live with. Living together as man and woman inevitably degenerates into familiarity. Familiarity breeds the family consciousness. The family consciousness stirs...

Self-Growth?

From Barry Long’s article ‘Self-Growth and the Spirit’ first published in the Australian magazine ‘Nature & Health’ 1987 Autumn Issue. Reproduced as a chapter in his book ‘The Way In’. Many of the men and women who come to me have been involved in some aspect of the self-growth movement through workshops, groups, therapies,...

A Buddha in Australia

Article by ‘Sudesh’ published in 'Southern Crossings’ magazine, Australia, 1987 The first time I heard Barry Long speak, I hardly knew what to think. The one definite thing that came to me was that I’d heard no ego. Even in his strongest statements, still I felt no bullshit being spoken,...

The Psychic and The Truth: I Die Every Moment

Edited extract from the Tamborine Talk September 1987. The psyche is not the spirit. Spirit presents no form. All form is psychic. Spirit is death, life and all knowledge behind form. The spirit of any psychic experience is to learn, as a way of life, this: I am now free of...

The Child’s Imagination

An extract from Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth. The child’s desire is to escape the confined life of being in the body in a hostile world. The world of the child’s imagination offers escape. But that same psychic space is a future world of fear, worry and self-projection. So...

I Don’t Imagine...

Imagination is thinking about something that is not real, not here now … Imagination, pleasant thoughts, worry - they are all the same. You might be imagining nice, pleasant things but they are things that are not here now. Worry is thinking about unpleasant things that are not here now...

Bringing up a child rightly

An extract from Raising Children in Love, Justice and Truth. Bringing up a child rightly is such a total activity that it concerns every aspect of living together. I endeavour to show you how and why unhappiness arises in every child and in every family. I make suggestions about what...

Truth, The Destroyer

From the Tamborine Talk, December 1987. Nothing is as disturbing as the reality of the truth, for it destroys all that we have attached ourselves to. And I, the truth, the Master, am here to destroy whatever you have attached yourself to … It’s the only way that you can...

Don’t Look Forward

From the Tamborine Talk January 1988. Do you look forward to things?  Then you’re out of your body.  All you’ve really got is your body. You don’t look forward to having a body, do you? Do you have to look forward to love? Or can you feel your love now? ...

The Crash

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...

There Is No Spiritual Path

There is no path to God or truth. Everyone is counting on the future, is working towards some purity. And it does not exist. The only impediment to your realising this truth is that you think there is a spiritual path. You think there is a way to God, to...

The Timeless Truth

God, truth, beauty, love, peace, wonder is now. And I (who am in the body listening to this now) am that. You will notice that as soon as your brain tries to introduce one moment before or after the being of that state, you enter ignorance; you have something to think...

Gratitude

The most important thing in your life, and my life, is to give thanks for what you have - as often as you are reminded to. I’m talking about giving thanks, not to anyone or anything in particular, but for what you are, what you have. That may seem difficult … The...

A Speaking Mirror

For you to be reading this means you’re endeavouring to live the divine life. That’s not to say you’re trying to be a saint. There are no saints. Living the divine life as an ordinary man or woman simply means you are doing your best to be true - true...

Grateful Love

Two Keynotes from The Master Session 2000. I AM GRATEFUL  I love God and I am grateful. I am grateful for the day. I am grateful for my breath. I’m grateful, but not only for what I have. I am grateful that I am able to be grateful. To the...

Nothing Is As It Appears

Everything is there to delude you, if it can... If you look into the bathroom mirror, you see the reflection of your body. A reflection is not the truth. A reflection is not the reality, is it? So what is the reality of your body, which you see in the bathroom...

Difficult Circumstances

The world has very many ways of shaking us, if it can. Don’t be discouraged when you seem to lose your equilibrium for a while, under the pressure of circumstances. It’s just the world being true to what it is. And that is to test your equilibrium. Every time you...

Original Love

All love, fundamentally, is the love of God - the love of ‘It’ behind everything, all existence. And you have that love inside of you because you came out of that place, that vastness, into conception in a woman’s womb. And to that place you, your consciousness, your intelligence, will return....

To the Good

The idea [of the Tamborine Talks] is to produce a mirror for you, so you can look into your body, after you listen to them, and see what’s happening in yourself. If there has been disturbance, if there is a disturbance, then you’re looking at something I have said that...

You Who Want the Truth

From the Tamborine Talk June 1988. I am speaking to you who want to know the truth. And who, I trust, can hear the truth. I am not speaking to the majority, to all the people who don’t want to know the truth. You, the individual I speak to in my teaching,...

Stop the Battle

Edited extract from a talk at the Master Session 2000 - the afternoon session on 5 November. For goodness sake, stop the battle, the fight, the struggle to overcome. If you’re endeavouring to overcome your self, you’re fighting a losing battle. As soon as you oppose your self, it gets...

Stop Trying

Edited extract from a talk at the Master Session 2000 - the afternoon session on 5 November. When you try, you’ve got a tension in you. You’ve got a friction, a conflict. There’s what has to be mastered; and there’s me trying to master it. That’s the conflict. Would you please...

Receiving the Truth

Edited extract from the Tamborine Talk July 1988. The talks were originally distributed each month to several hundred people in Europe and Australia who paid a subscription to have them supplied on cassette tape through the mail. May I suggest that you go back to the very first [talk] in this...

Action Purifies

Edited extract from a talk at the Master Session 2000, afternoon of 5 November. The only way to live your life is to live it until it’s finished and not to live it in fear - because fear is a restriction of freedom. Your intelligence gets cramped by fear. So...

Now

Edited extract from the Tamborine Talk August 1988. The truth is now. The truth is that life is right now. Please look at it: Life is right here now. If you’re going to project yourself backwards or forwards by any analytical thought, you’re going to enter time. Any judgment of...

Shining Through

Edited extract from transcript of a talk at The Master Session, 6 November 2000. Emotion darkens the light of life in us. We start to focus on the problem. We start to concentrate on it and that darkens the shining that is natural to us. You are shining - far...

Is It Right For You?

Edited extract from a talk at the Master Session 6 November 2000. If you are oppressed by the situation, and you know it is not right for you, but you keep compromising with it, that’s self-consideration. While you compromise, you have a continuous sense that it’s not right. You say, ‘It’s...

Ready Now?

Extract from the Tamborine Talk September 1988. He or she is going to go. Or you’re going to go; one way or another. Is it not reality to be ready now? Why did you think you had more time? Who gave you that idea? Do you see what freedom is -...

You and Your Light

Edited extract from transcript of a talk at the Master Session 8 November 2000. Consciousness is always here - the light behind the life, behind the living body. You are a light. And sometimes you live very dimly, like we all do, because you are loaded, saddled with circumstances beyond your...

Light Of My Life

Edited extract from a transcript of a talk at the Master Session 8 November 2000. Your consciousness is a light. And that light is behind your life: ‘Light of my life’.  What you are is the life immediately inside your body. You couldn’t move your hand or walk around if...

Divination

I’m going to ask you to divine yourself. And you’re going to understand what the word means. Do you have any love in you? Is there any gratitude in you? - for anything you have ever received? Is there any gratitude in you for this beautiful life? Is there any gratitude in...

Loving or Leaving

From an edited transcript of a talk at the Master Session 8 November 2000. Woman of Love has no problems inside of her. She’s not trying to change anyone, not even her beloved man. She’s tried that and found that man will never, ever change. If she tries to change...

The Right One

Edited extract from a talk at the Master Session 8 November 2000. Be the joy of life that is in you, that you are, as much as you can be. Do not be the gloomy, wondering, attached, unhappy one. Then, if you are meant to be with a right man...

Be Where You Are Now

Edited extract from the Tamborine Talk December 1988. The joy or the pleasure within your body now is fundamental. No one can ever take that from you. Circumstances can always take what you are doing. You might lose your job tomorrow. You might lose an arm and then couldn’t do what...

Your Fountain

Extract from the Tamborine Talk January 1989. Feel the sensation of your body, the feeling inside that informs you you’re alive; the place where you feel hunger or pleasure or longing. Have you got it? Feel the whole sensation, like you’d look into the bedroom mirror and see the whole...

Reaction and Response

Edited from a transcript of a talk at the end of a ten-day seminar in Australia in March 2001 I have two words that I use to demonstrate the human condition. The first word is ‘reaction’. Reactions always have an emotional force or content to them. Something happens in front of...

At Least Give Your Smile

Edited extract from unpublished transcript; final session of a 10-day seminar in Australia, March 2001. Thought stirs the emotions and then emotion stirs more mental activity. And so it goes on. To reduce the emotional fire that makes thoughts so tumultuous and tormenting, start by giving. The fire is your selfishness...

The Truth of the Truth

Edited extract from the Tamborine Talk March 1989 Do you really want the truth? Let’s see … Your lover is making beautiful love to someone else. Do you really want to know? Do you want the truth? Do you really want to hear, to know, that your child is dead?...

The Source of Love

Edited extract from a talk on 21 May 2001 All love comes out of me. ‘Me’ in the first instance is the unknowable inside this body; the stillness, the silence, peace; in other words, God, the unknown. You cannot know me. You can only be me. You don’t need any other...

Enlightenment Endangered

Uninterrupted enlightenment of the brain was once the natural state of man and woman. The brain was a perfect physical instrument. It served the consciousness of man and woman and the will of the earth. Nothing suffered from its activities. Today the instrument has taken over. The servant has usurped...

Being With The Living Truth

From the leaflet introducing A Week With The Living Truth, at the Victoria Rooms, Bristol, UK, May 14-21 1989 You come to be with me to enlighten your brain. You come to be grounded in the truth. I will give you an extended and practical grounding in truth: no abracadabra,...

Statements – III

I love Thee. I do not have to put a face to Thee for I feel Thee, my love, inside me, now. In loving Thee, I can truly and safely love You, who appears as a face … Thou art the substance within of my love of You without. I...

Me, My Self And I

Edited extract from transcript of a seminar in Australia 21 May 2001. My State and My Condition Me: So still, so undemanding, unglamorous, uncluttered - so silent. It is a state. What is a state? - Still, enduring, always unchanging. That’s me, inside the body reading these words and speaking them. A...

Being Real

Extract from an edited transcript of a Meditation Group meeting in Highgate, London, 15 May 1981. No thought. The mind is stilled, which means that it’s moving at the same speed as my sensation. My mind is then my sensation and vice-versa - nothing in-between, no self. I am then one with...

The Demon Death

Extract from an edited transcript, Meditation Group, Highgate, London, 20 May 1981. Every thought, doubt, mood, is an attempt to escape from death - death as an emotion, a demonic fear. But you cannot run from death or ignore it. It is in yourself, in every living cell of tension and...

The Divine Lover

Extract from an edited transcript, Meditation Group, Highgate, London, 20 May 1981. The first need is to find God in yourself. The second is to find the bhagavat (God as man) or bhagavati (God as woman). If you truly love God, or truly love within, your bhagavat or bhagavati will...

Immortality

Extract from an edited transcript, Weekly Meditation Group, Highgate, London, 3 June 1981 Every one of us is here to find our own immortality. You might use other words. You might have heard it called something else. The truth is immortality. When you self-realise, you realise immortality. It cannot be visualised....

What Is Now Is Right or Best

Excerpts from the Tamborine Talk June 1989 ‘What is, is best.’ This is from an old Eastern tradition. And it’s not easy to accept, is it? It means that just as things are is the best way for them to be … 'What is, is best’ is a way of describing being...

Another Dialogue with Self

Dialogue at a weekend retreat in Lamorna, Cornwall, UK, 13 June 1981 I am here to demonstrate the truth to you. I did not come to add to your experience of life. I came to take that away from you, so that you might experience the emptiness inside of you,...

A Dialogue with Self

Edited transcript from a weekend retreat at Lamorna, Cornwall, UK 13 June 1981 We’re going to locate the self and isolate it. The self is a lonely, thinking, guilty, dubious thing. We’re going to get it out, express it and surrender it. I am an expert in the self. So I’m the...

Face It

From the Tamborine Talk, July 1989 When you’re really facing the truth of yourself, when you are focused on the reality of your life now, in that body, there are no problems. Even if your heart is breaking, it’s alright. It’s not a problem. You can handle it. There are...

Resistance

Your fears and resistance are life’s or God’s way of protecting you from that which is not right for you. And yet at the same time, resistance and fear have to be overcome … You have to be the consciousness aware that ‘whenever I have fear and resistance in me,...

Why I Am Here

Speaking to the meditation group in his home in Highgate, London, before he began teaching more publicly. 24 June 1981. I am a teacher of truth. I know the truth. I am reality. I utter these things to show you it is possible for a man to say them and...

The Authentic Being and the Vital Double

Speaking to the meditation group in his home in Highgate, London, 24 June 1981. At this time he was working on his book 'The Origins of Man and Universe’ and writing about the Authentic Being, the Vital Double and the various Levels of the Mind within the cosmic structure he had...

Love and Death

Love is without regrets. Normal love is love of living and regrets leaving children or a partner, or the earth. Love is ready to die now. Love looked after things before I came and while I was here and will no doubt look after what I love when I am...

Right Words

Speaking at a meditation retreat in Lamorna, Cornwall, 14 June 1981. There is only one Spirit, one Universal Man. When I say Man - capital M - I mean woman too. Q. So why don’t you refer to a Universal Woman? In the truth, when I speak of the individual there...

The Earth Spirit and the World

Speaking at a meditation retreat in Lamorna, Cornwall, 14 June 1981. The purpose of the meditation I teach is to sink deeper and deeper into our unconscious, through the levels of the mind. The lowest level of the human unconscious contains the realisation of the One Man. Men and women are...

The Power in Meditation

Extracts from a talk 14 June 1981. A member of Barry’s meditation group in London had invited him to introduce his teaching to friends on a weekend retreat at Rosemerryn, a large house in Lamorna, Cornwall. The purpose of meditation is first of all to reduce yourself sufficiently so that the mind...

'I Don’t Know What to Do!’

From the Tamborine Talk October 1989. In extreme moments, when you don’t know what to do, and you are conscious of the awful intensity going on inside of you - that extreme vibration or sensation, which is like death - the truth is you are doing what you need to...

Passion In the Flesh

From the Tamborine Talk October 1989. Right pleasure is love and passion as delight and joy. The purpose of man and woman is to provide for each other a higher speed of consciousness in the flesh, not in the matter. Have you realised yet that the matter is not the...

Ups and Downs

From the Tamborine Talk November 1989. I must always be preparing for the downgoing... Downgoing is not ‘undergoing’, as the human brain would try to make it. Things cannot remain as they are. Only the brain tries to keep everything as it is - and fails. Things cannot remain as they...

No Conclusions

From the Tamborine Talk November 1989. There are events or situations which seem to cease or change. But nothing concludes. The reason is that all events and situations are observed by me, the being in the body. There has never been an end or a conclusion of me. Things come...

True Value

When you find something of value - one thing - that is realised as something no one can ever take from you, that cannot change, it is realised that it is something you can truly call yours - no matter how small it might be. It is your authority. It is...

Spiritual Communities

From a pamphlet introducing his teachings, 1999. There’s no community in my teaching because people get to depend on a sense of community. I’m sure that if I gave the word in London or elsewhere some priest would form a community for me and act and speak for me, and...

Without Questions

Speaking to his meditation group in London, 1 July 1981. Meditation is a process of getting closer to the divine, closer to love, closer to having no self-doubt and no questions. Reaching the authority of yourself is what meditation is all about - not an authority that builds you up,...

A Star Diamond

Barry Long speaking on 1 July 1981 to men in his meditation group about a proposal to form a Barry Long Centre in London. Every man is a star and what he is endeavouring to do is become a star in his own experience. What I am endeavouring to do is...

A Way of Truth for the West

Speaking to his meditation group in London, 8 July 1981. The objective of the truth to date has mostly been to enter the body. The Eastern religions have taught wisdom through ‘grounding’, through entering the body in meditation. In the days of the Buddha it was a physical and emotional life...

I Am East and West

Speaking to his meditation group in London, 5 August 1981. The truth of the original East grew out of a state of feeling, a self-consistent, inward-looking, meditative state - the nature of man. The world has moved on and now all of the globe is Western. And the Western way is...

The Concept Is Not It

The whole motivation of a spiritual master is to help the people give up their attachment to their emotions, their selfishness, so that they may come towards the realisation or love of the mystery – instead of loving their self. In so doing, any master will have to give concepts,...

Surrender

The meaning of life is in not being unhappy. Don’t be unhappy in any situation where you are placed. Take some action: Quit or surrender. If you surrender, you have no problem. You can stay where you are, surrendering every moment and not be unhappy.  If you have to surrender, it...

Meditating Is Surrendering

Barry Long speaking to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 5 August 1981. Meditation is the surrender of yourself at any moment. Starting with the body: we hold on to it, as evidenced by the strain and tension in us. We are not generally aware of this tension unless we...

Surrender the World

Edited from a talk to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 26 August 1981. We walk through this world - the world of living and time. And the mortal part of us, the time in us, picks up the time in the world. It’s like static electricity we bring in with...

Meditating on Love

Edited extract from the transcript of a meditation at Barry’s home in Highgate, London, 26 August 1981. All that is most important to us in life is in the meditation I teach. When someone close to us dies, it is better to have been down into the unconscious - where death...

Your Place Is Not Your Position

From the Tamborine Talk March 1990. I am here to put you in your place. When you are in your place you are safe. When you find your place it is indeed a beautiful thing. But most of the time you’re endeavouring to defend your position. And in defending it...

Love Does Not Demand

Edited from a transcript: Meditation group, Highgate, London, 26 August 1981. There is enough love in us to keep giving and giving and giving. But people are afraid to love, because they don’t know how to love. Their love becomes a demand. And the people they love make demands. So they...

Reservations

Barry Long speaking to his meditation group in London, 9 September 1981. I endeavour to get you to give up the reservations you have about yourself. To give them up, not by searching for some external benefit, but to give them up in love. This also means you’ve got to...

Speaking Truth

Speaking to his meditation group in London, 9 September 1981. When I acknowledge the truth of what I am, the truth of what love is, or of what God is, or what simplicity is, then what I say is true. When anyone speaks straight from their innocence, everything said in...

Spiritual Or Divine?

From the Tamborine Talk April 1990. You hear me talking about living the divine life. And then you hear people talking of the spiritual life. What’s the difference? The spiritual life is living to some sort of code, some ethic that someone’s laid down. It’s living up to something … And of...

Insanity and the Source of Truth

Speaking to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 7 October 1981. Edited from a transcript. The story of Barry Long’s encounters with the Blessed John are told in 'My Life of Love and Truth’ - Barry’s spiritual autobiography. If you find a source of truth, go and say teach me, or...

Is This What You’re Doing?

When you first hear the truth, there’s a feeling of euphoria, elation. ‘Ah, wonderful!’ The reason is you’ve stopped banging your head against the wall. It’s a heavenly relief. You might recall this? Then normalcy, a sort of boredom, sets in. You start to feel something’s missing – you’re not banging...

The Thought of Death

Speaking to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 7 October 1981. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden saw themselves as naked and thought appeared for the first time. The realisation that they were naked was the beginning of their mortality. From that first manifestation of thought, more and...

Talking of Truth

From the introduction to a talk held on 26 October 1981 at Trinity College, Oxford, advertised as 'Wisdom and Where to Find It’. This is not a lecture. If I were going to lecture you I would be adding to your memorable knowledge. I will give you nothing worthy to be remembered....

Imparting Truth and Wisdom

From a talk held on 26 October 1981 at Trinity College Oxford, advertised as 'Wisdom and Where to Find It’. What is the difference between truth and wisdom? Wisdom comes from the realisation of the truth that every man and woman has within them. Wisdom is the imparting of that truth. And...

Are You Being - Now?

Of course you’re being. You’re always being. When you are sitting, relaxing, you’re being. When you’re frantically busy, you’re being.  The trouble is that most of the time you are being something, or trying to be something. So you don’t know this supreme being that you are - this ‘being...

A Western Mantra

From the Tamborine Talk June 1990. I have a mantra for you, a genuine Western mantra. You do it. You don’t just mindlessly recite it and hope for the best. You’re responsible for what you say - by doing what you say, now. Here it is: Don’t judge the situation. No...

To Get More Power

From the Tamborine Talk June 1990. Masters sometimes go silent. Why? To get more power, to be more conscious, to discover more of the wonder and truth of being. Talking when you don’t have to is a waste of power - a leaking you can reduce enormously by saying only...

Speaking to the Intellect: Barry Long in Oxford

From the transcript of a talk at Trinity College, Oxford, 26 October, 1981, advertised as ‘Wisdom and Where to Find It’. I am a man of truth. I am a talkative truth, because I come through the intellect. There are men of silence, true teachers of silence and Masters who do...

Blissful Love

From the Tamborine Talk July 1990 The idea of making love, of the movement and pleasure between man and woman, is to make the consciousness in which bliss is subsequently known for longer periods. Usually, bliss is short-lived between lovers in the stillness after making love, when all has been...

Doing and Not Doing

Do what you’ve got to do. But what about all those unnecessary things you amuse yourself with? Energy should be contained so that you get the power in you. The power to do what? The power to not have to worry anymore, to not have to be anxiously concerned anymore....

The Wisdom of Love

From the opening of Barry Long’s second evening talk at Trinity College, Oxford, 27 October 1981. I am your mirror. That is why I am here. I have been guided by circumstances to be in front of you and give you the opportunity to hear your own knowledge of yourself. To...

The Attachment to Myself

From the Tamborine Talk August 1990 I must not be attached to what I do.  I must also not be attached to what I don’t do. When you are attached to what you don’t do, you feel guilty - because you didn’t do something; because you weren’t kind; because, on...

Love Your Enemies

From the Tamborine Talk August 1990 Here’s an example of how the teachings of dead masters become ideals due to wrong interpretations or just simply because the words are out of date: Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies’. You can’t love your enemies. It is impossible. Such impossible precepts make miserable sinners of...

Watch Out, There’s a Mood About

From the Tamborine Talk August 1990 When was the last time you felt a mood coming on? Mood has to be watched very carefully. Mood is the basis of all unhappiness. It is as subtle as the air you breathe. It creeps in so surreptitiously that you don’t see it...

Nothing Is As It Seems

From the Tamborine Talk, August 1990 Hold a stick in a pond and the stick appears to bend at a distinct angle. The actual end of the stick is not where it seems to be. Watch the setting sun. The sun you’re seeing on the horizon is not the sun...

An Ordinary Enlightened Being

A common misconception about enlightenment is that once realised it’s an unalterable, static state. The enlightened man is always moving on. Each day or moment is a new revelation of truth; a continuous expansion in his enlightened being. Another misconception is that the enlightened person is not an ordinary man....

Thy Will Be Done

You’re making the beds, cleaning the house or you’re sitting at the office desk, gazing at the wall. Life seems pretty dreary, repetitious, unfulfilling. Want to know what God’s Will is? What the divine will is? Do you want to know what is meant by ‘Thy will be done’?  This is...

What Would I Do Without You?

I’ll tell you what you’d do, man, if you didn’t have her. You’d be looking for her. And you, too, woman. You’d be looking for him.  So you’d better have a closer look at this now - before he or she leaves and you find yourself saying, ‘What can I do,...

No Problem Partnership

Is your partner there?​ Call him or her over, and let’s do a deal together. You say to him, ‘I won’t give you any problems and you don’t give me any problems. Right?'  He agrees and says, 'I won’t give you any problems and you don’t give me any problems.'  And...

Perfection

Perfection is eighty per cent good and twenty per cent not so good. The brain, of course, thinks that perfection is one hundred per cent good. But that only shows how unreal the brain is. There is nothing that is one hundred per cent good. Perfection is all around you...

Open the Gates

Look inside yourself now and see how many people you are carrying around inside of you. Let me demonstrate this: If nothing is being threatened among your relationships - not your interests, material possessions or the people you’re attached to - then you can say, ‘I am free. I am not...

Go for the Good

Always go for the good. Endeavour to feel the good, the peace … If you can’t feel the good, then feel the sensation that’s neither good nor bad, just steady; a little drumming, a graininess. Only when you can feel the good or the sensation, do you become aware of...

The Time It Takes

People always want time… And then complain about the time it takes. You do not need time to be honest. You do not need time to see. The only time involved is the time it takes to see the truth of the lie you’re living and take action to resolve...

Vices and Virtues

Liberation, as Carl Jung said, is the detachment from my vices and my virtues. And that’s the truth. People like to detach from their bad parts and attach themselves to their good parts. But that’s lopsided. You’ve got to detach from your good as well as your bad parts. When you...

Loving and Pretending

If you want love in your life, you’ve got to be loving. Love is ever working and never ceases. It doesn’t sit back and take a break. It says, ‘Love, love and go on loving.’ Anyone who is loving and wants to keep love alive must acknowledge love - every day. The...

The Ultimate Search

From the last Tamborine Talk, December 1990. The world of men and women is searching not for wealth or peace; not for power; not for love; not for God … But for honesty. Because what is the good of dishonest wealth or a dishonest God or dishonest love, a dishonest...

Walk With the Good

From a talk on the Gold Coast, Australia, during a week of talks, 5-11 August 2001. Instead of walking around thinking of your problems and difficulties, could you just be grateful for what you have? And not just be walking but acknowledging the good inside you and in your life? What’s...

Contain Your Self

From a talk on 29 July 2002 in Coolangatta, Australia. Do what you’ve got to do … But what about all the unnecessary things you amuse yourself with? That’s where you waste not just your time but a precious power you have inside you. You expend your power as energy....

The Riddle I Am

Written as a parting message to the group around him in London when he moved back to Australia. What follows is a riddle, the divine riddle. It contains the answer to every human question and longing. And here are three clues to show you at any time whether you are...

Your Personal Problem

What’s the main difficulty In endeavouring to live the spiritual life, so that it brings you into harmony within and without?  The main problem is the personalising of your life. When you come to your senses and start to live the spiritual life, you endeavour to de-personalise it. But all...

The New Science of Practical Truth

A statement made to introduce and advertise his meetings and seminars in London in 1988. I am here to teach you the new science of life on earth; to be your unshakeable, authentic self without interruption. Until you regain this reality of being yourself, until you are immersed in it,...

The Objective Truth of the Psyche

Edited extract from a talk to the weekly meditation group, Highgate, London - 2 September 1981 To see things rightly and truly one has to have reached a very objective state of mind. The true spiritual and cosmic state of consciousness, in which one is able to be objective, overcomes the...

Me, Not My Self

Edited extract from a Gold Coast Talk, 26 June 1993 When I am just my body, just ‘me’, I walk down the street and I am pleased to be alive. Then I have no self. The thing is to reach this place as an uninterrupted state. And it is possible....

No Experience In Truth

Edited extract from a Gold Coast Talk: 26 June 1993 I have to detach from my self. For it is my attachment to my self, the clinging to my identity, that’s the problem - not my self, which is purely my experience. There’s nothing wrong with my experience. But when...

My Body and My Self

Edited from the Gold Coast Talk June 1993 What we are endeavouring to do is actually be the simplicity, the naturalness, of the body, now. But don’t think or you’ll create another body - a hidden body inside - called your self, which will be unhappy or think about the...

Pure Life

Edited from the Gold Coast Talk June 1993 Life itself is the intelligence behind the appearance of all sensory life. Life itself has to know what it’s doing, because it determines the moment my body is born and the moment my body dies. Nothing else does. There are no accidents....

Death and the Integrity of Life

Edited extract from a talk at his home in Highgate, London, 2 September 1981 When you are pursuing a way to the truth, everything is false - every thought, every formulation, every way out there in the world is false. There is only one way and that is towards the...

From Nothing to Something

From the Gold Coast Talk 26 June 1993 The reciprocal of being within is to get your life right outside. For you will be unable to descend into ‘me’, to get through your self, while you are emotionally disturbed. And the only thing that disturbs us emotionally is the external...

Being Nothing

I am the subject and I am looking at nothing. Because nothing is not an object, I then disappear. You can only have ‘I’ when there is an object. And you can only have an object when there is ‘I’ looking at it. The truth is that here, inside me,...

The Film of Feelings

Your intelligence is looking out of your eyes this very moment. It is also looking out of your ears. Beautiful, glorious intelligence has no feeling. If it had feelings in it - the fluctuations of good and bad, up and down, excitement and depression - I would never, ever see...

Me and Myself

Edited from the Gold Coast Talk, 13 December 1993. I make a distinction between myself and me. I say that myself is not me – thank God. I define ‘me’ very simply. I say that ‘me’ is in everybody’s immediate experience of their own reality inside their body. I say...

The Good in Me

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 Seeing with clarity is the first mode of my intelligence as a human being. The second mode of my intelligence is feeling. That is how I register my whole existence - either by clarity of intelligence or clarity of feeling. So I...

My Mind Is Not My Intelligence

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 Be steady, be still and allow the clarity of the attention to look at nothing. This is precisely what Gautama did before he announced himself to be Buddha. What was done then can be done now. There is no mystery or secret...

Not Thinking

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 Keep the perception on ‘me’ inside. It’s quite natural. My intelligence, my consciousness, is still - focused on me. This is quite easy to do, as long as I do not think. For thinking splits my consciousness, divides me and then I...

Looking Into Eternity

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 Look into ‘me’, inside your body now. Relax. Be easy. I close the eyes to gather more of the intelligent resource of perception. I look into 'me’ with clarity and I see nothing. And it is the truth that there’s nothing in...

I Am Logical

No scientist is logical. Scientists are rational. To be rational is to put second thing first. To be logical is to put first thing first. I am logical. What comes first in my life? Love comes first: the smell of the earth, the sweetness of the rain, the twinkling of the stars,...

The Spiritual Catch 22

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 The problem of the spiritual life is that he or she who wants to understand what’s going on is he or she who asks all the questions - the monitor, the questioner inside you - and that’s the very thing that has...

Emotion Is Past

From the Gold Coast Talk 6 March 1993 The basis of my teaching is that all emotion is past. I was the first to introduce this to the public. You’ll always be able to tell when you are living in the past. If I (in the body hearing these words)...

I Go Into Me

I am using my intelligence, my attention, to look into ‘me’ – me who feels the steadiness, the sweetness or the rightness of just being here. I am looking into a sort of nothing. I might say it is black. But that’s only because there is no light in here;...

What God Wants

Edited from the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 Irrespective of what you believe in, no bible knows the truth about God or life. Bibles and religions are for the unenlightened. An enlightened being is a very simple being. To be enlightened is to know what God wants, to know...

My Love of Woman

From the Gold Coast Talk 26 June 1993 Where I come from, woman is one hundred per cent love. And therefore she is indeed the beauty of the earth. She is a princess. She is princess of what I call the royal line of love. She is my love. And...

Where Love Is

From the Gold Coast Talk 18 December 1993 What are you concerned with? You are concerned with love, with truth, with reality. You are concerned with a life that is not limited. But you think like a scientist and limit your life. You think like a scientist in terms of cause...

The Can of Worms

From the Gold Coast Talk July 1993 The self is a great can of worms. It has never solved anything in anybody’s life and never will. And yet it is the human race’s expectation that if I go into my self, I’ll be able to work it out. Rubbish! The...

Do What Is Right For You

From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 I must do what I know to be right.  You know what you know to be right. Don’t avoid it. But if you can’t do it, look at what you know to be right: ‘That’s what is right … That is what...

Don’t Judge Yourself

From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 I must not judge myself - I in the body hearing these words. I will never be responsible for life or love or truth while I judge myself. This means I have to stop being selfish. Whenever I am unhappy, I am...

Suffering

From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 You can only be unhappy about the past. It’s your past self being unhappy in the present. We’ve got to give up this dichotomy of the past in the present, this contradiction of being two things.  You can’t be the past in...

Love Without Memories

From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 If the whole world lost its memory, then we’d be very close to love. If you lost your memory, of course you wouldn’t be able to remember your old lover, or remember your old pain – what your mother or father did...

What Is Your Value?

Is there any value you can be concerned with in being anything that you are - in being an accountant or a motor mechanic? You’ve got to ask this question. Where accountants exist there is a sense of value. But it’s not the value I am concerned with - I...

The Moment of Decision

From the Gold Coast Talk 31 July 1993 Always go by the practical. Don’t fight against it. The practical is the unfoldment of what is necessary. Watch for the practical. Either you can do something or you can’t. If you can’t, don’t think about it, don’t wish, don’t want, don’t pray...

Stillness Is the Way

Edited extract from the Gold Coast Talk July 1993.  The book ‘Stillness Is the Way’ contains Barry Long’s intensive meditation course. Inside me, inside the body now, it is like deep dreamless sleep. There is no movement, no thought - nothing but the everlasting presence of that indescribable thing called life...

How to Change Your Life

Edited extract from the Gold Coast Talk July 1993 The purpose of creation is to be free of unhappiness and enjoy life as it is now, revealing itself every moment. By the magic of the divine psyche, my willingness to enjoy the creation as it unfolds in my life changes...

Suffer No More

Edited from the Gold Coast Talk 9 April 1995 What is enlightenment? Enlightenment is to be enlightened, thank God, from the dreadful feelings that sometimes are up and sometimes are down. Thinking feeds off feeling. Get rid of your feelings and the mind stops. So stop being true to your...

Why Suffer?

Edited from The Gold Coast Talk 9 April 1995 I have an intelligent question to ask you: Do you want to suffer anymore? Do you want to suffer ever again? The answer to the question must be obvious: ‘No, I don’t want to suffer.’ Why do I suffer? (Please check everything...

What Is Realisation?

Living the spiritual life is a continuous ‘dying’ of layers of the individual’s self. With each significant ‘death’ there is an advance in consciousness, marked by a finer perception of spiritual truth and a distinct change in the persona. At the spiritual energy level the change is usually startlingly dramatic and...

Spiritual Freedom

Liberation, or spiritual freedom, is gained by true love; that is, by coming alive, by opening yourself to life in whatever direction you are closed. Liberation is being vulnerable, exposing to life the part of you that would try to hide and play safe behind its fear and make an...

The Testing

Every truth realised, and any knowledge of a spiritual nature that anyone has, or professes to have, is tested and grounded in the events and circumstances of the ongoing life. This creates the troubling (testing) situations.  All spiritual knowledge, whether great or small, provides a certain detachment from events. This...

Possessed by Emotion

You’re alive to enjoy your life through the senses, to be in your body, free of unhappiness. Jealousy, resentment, hate, guilt, anger – all the negative emotions – have no body. They’re very unhappy. They’re looking for somebody to possess, always endeavouring to find some body – yours. All unhappiness...

The Place of Being

Edited extract from the Gold Coast Talk 9 April 1995 If you close the eyes and the intelligence, which is the perception, is focused for the most part inside you, in the black, you’ll go into nothing, where there is no feeling and no thought is necessary. But there’s a...

Deep Space

When you go deep enough into the unconscious within your body you eventually enter the reality of what we call outer space, or the space between the stars - astral space (from the Latin ‘astrum’ - star). This is another world of supreme stillness and nothingness. Conversely, if man is ever...

The Spiritual Mountain

I want to tell you the myth of the spiritual life and process as the ascent of your spiritual mountain. When you start out, you really enjoy living in the lush valleys at the bottom of the mountain. You love to have picnics by the streams. It’s so beautiful down...

Payback

Everybody is paying back… Every single person, including me, is paying back - paying back on behalf of the human race for all its cruelties, slavery and exploitation of woman and man, and its dreadful unkindness to the planet and the animals. We are all paying back for our lack...

The Spiritual Process

The point of the evolution of life on earth is for each of us to become cosmic enough as cells in the great body of mankind to enter the place of cosmic or universal love; to get rid of the sentimental love that ruins this earth, which makes everybody unhappy....

How do I be free?

How do I be free? I don’t think and I don’t acknowledge my feelings because I know what I’m doing. I know I do not want to suffer. I have learnt that every time I think I will end up thinking about something that makes me unhappy. And every time...

Honest to the Situation

You are given your life. The circumstances of your life are absolutely right for you. It is only our selfishness that makes us run from the circumstances of our life. We try to find another life before we’ve dealt with this one, these circumstances.  When you are faced with circumstances...

Is There Free Will?

Does mankind have free will? Where I come from, certainly not. Man loves being unhappy. If you were free, would you enjoy being unhappy? But that’s man’s free will: To go and be unhappy whenever he wants.  Free will, the way we talk about it, is free choice – the right...

Why Come to Me?

The purpose of intelligent life on Earth is for man and woman to reach cosmic consciousness. I lead you further toward that possibility. I reveal new energy in your body and deepen your awareness of life and love. A radical speeding up of perception is required. I will speed you...

Meditating in the Moment

Speaking to the Highgate Meditation Group, London, 5 August 1981. Meditation is purely being in the body in a continuous state of surrender, the surrender of yourself. Starting with the body, we might see it as a well and we are inside it, holding on to the sides of the...

The Purpose of Your Life

The whole purpose of your life is to speed up your intelligence. That’s all it’s about - to be more intelligent than in the last moment. But nobody’s ever told us how to be intelligent, have they? We’re in the hands of the scientists and the university professors … I...

What Love Wants

Pure love doesn’t want to get anything. It just wants to give. The next time you find yourself in any situation where you feel a contraction in you; where you feel, ‘I don’t want to do this’; where you feel, ‘This is impossible’, then give. Either give it up or...

To Love a Woman

Man wants something out of woman. But all you’re ever going to get, man, is nothing - because nothing is the state of being.  Just love her. Then you’ll receive back something extraordinary.  Woman’s nature is to give, to love. She’s not going to give to that which is demanding. When...

Do What You Do

You don’t have to make any decisions about what you’re going to do. You only think you do.  You only have to do what you’re doing, like sitting on your chair now. You’re just doing what you’re doing, aren’t you? Where are all the big decisions? They’re all in your...

Physical - Mental - Vital

The physical is external reality. The mental is our thought process - an intermediate reality. And the vital is the reality behind both.  We have created a world of thought between the nothing and the something. That’s the intermediate world. And more and more we are spending our time there rather...

Statements – II

Shed every notion about yourself. Shed every belief. Shed every notion about love. Shed it all, as quickly as possible. Go back to being innocent. Then there’s no need to know anything; you will be informed of anything you need to know. ~ What I have made in my ignorance, I...

Grace of God

Everything is done by grace. Finally, you will realise that this whole existence, and everything that I am, is run by God.  ‘God’ is the best word for it. 'God’ means nothing. But we’ve acquired images of God through religions. God has no image, no form. Or God is every...

God-Mad

I’m God-mad … God-mad in a vast, vast way. When I go out on the veranda at home and I look at the whole scene, I say, ‘Wonderful, God! Wonderful!’ Or I wake up in the morning and I walk outside and I see the nature all around me: ‘Wonderful,...

Statements – I

Woman and loneliness Woman – to bring love to yourself, you have to really love, for you are woman and woman is custodian of love on this planet and you are she. But unless you are loving, all that you are going to bring to you is a lonely man...

The Perfect Body

A transcript of a talk by Barry Long… The perfect body is inside you and inside me, inside everybody. It is potential. It is in existence that the perfect body which is inside of you in the psyche is made more and more perfect by living in existence. You’ll notice...

Divine consciousness and love

Question: you were talking earlier about personalities that come up from the past and can you say something about how you get rid of them or let them go. Barry Long responds: Well the wonderful thing about having a partnership of man and woman which are the two opposites –...

Excitement and passion

Question: can you explain the difference between excitement and passion? Barry Long responds: Excitement is what ruins the making of love because it drives us into imagination, into our minds and into comparisons. We want to repeat excitement. It is such a seductive energy that we want to look for...

What about commitment?

An extract from one of Barry Long’s Gold Coast talks in Jan of 1988 Is there place for commitment in partnership? I am not so keen on the word commitment because all things change, but it's an inner commitment, a recognition: I am here to serve love or truth. I...

The Transformation of Pleasure into Knowledge

The process of spiritual life, by Barry Long As you live the spiritual life more profoundly, the common feeling of pleasure we all enjoy, gradually transforms. Pleasure may be said to diminish compared with before, and that old part of the brain, being left behind, will feel that something preciously...

The pure light of intelligence

A short note by Barry Long Intelligence grows from experience: when you've had enough of the pain of a particular experience, you say, 'I've had enough of that.' As you become more intelligent you are less habitual in choosing the way that causes pain and suffering. You are the intelligence...

The Myth of Aloneness

I'm now going to tell you the myth of aloneness, the myth of the pinnacle, the myth of the solitary. This is a beautiful myth or truth that demonstrates the divine life; and this is the life that you are endeavouring to live, or that you are living, or you...

The purpose of partnership

An essay by Barry Long, reproduced as-is. Is there purpose to partnership beyond having babies and paying off a mortgage? In this edited version of an interview with Barry Long, he describes how living honestly in partnership frees us of our negativity and how making love rightly leads to a...

Love Brings All to Life

An extract from one of Barry Long's public talks. I'd like to tell you the myth behind my teaching of love between man and woman. It's not unlike the Greek myth of Pygmalion. You remember that in the Pygmalion myth there was a sculptor and he selected the most beautiful...

Love is not a doing

Love is not a doing. Love is a being. You don't have to do anything in love except to be honest and true – be true to honesty and love. At any rate, let's now open up a very interesting statement – get rid of the idea that you have...

The Purpose of Love

This is about the purpose of love. This is the truth of love–making, and it is because people don’t know the truth of love–making, that love–making results in so much unhappiness and heartbreak. For we are lost, we people, as far as love goes. But because life is in each...

Woman in command of love

An extract from one of Barry Long's books - Making Love. He states: “I teach man and woman how to be true to love and how to be honest in their relationships. I help them to discover a divine love. The key to the mystery of divine love is to...

A love that endures

Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love. So how do we start? What do we do? We will remove all our emotions from ourselves by approaching the act of love. We have to be very much ourselves, very present, very aware, and understanding of everything...

Start over, get rid of the past

The woman has learned to make love from men who do not know how to make love. The result is chaos and confusion. Since the beginning of time she has been manipulated and encouraged to feel that the finest expression of her love is to please him sexually. The truth...

Love – as it truly is

Orgasm is an end, an emotional end. The act of love has no end. True lovers continue to make love until finally, perhaps hours later, the man's body naturally and consciously ejaculates, or the couple pulls apart and makes love hours later, or the next day, or the day after,...

To love in a natural way

The saints told us to love God, which no one on earth can possibly do by an act of will. How can you love if you don't love? what kind of exhortation is that? What would you say if I told you: Feel hungry! when you're not hungry? Or maybe...

Saints and mystics

Several men and women, deliberately refraining from physical lovemaking, managed to retain a partial ability to love divinely within themselves. These were the mystics, saints and ascetics of all nations. They turned their attention inward and loved the divine energies in their own bodies. Refusing to unite with other bodies,...

Pure love, emotional love

The reason women don't fantasize about sex nearly as much as men is because sex isn't as much of a gratification to them. For women, sex is more love, and love cannot be fantasized as opposed to sex. To love is to keep the silent image of the beloved in...

Man’s sexual obsession

Man and the woman have forgotten how to physically make love. This is the greatest tragedy of all time, since it is the cause of the greatest unhappiness on Earth. This has been going on and slowly getting worse for many thousands of years so much that it is now...

True Love

True love is a knowledge: I love her. To know is to love, to love is to know. Not to know what Einstein's theory is, or how to give way at the next traffic lights, not that sort of learned knowledge. But to know because I truly love her. And...

What it is to die

Barry Long in 2003, before he died… Mystics and poets down through the ages have told us that our real home is eternity. Our short stay on earth and our deepest longing would seem to confirm that we belong elsewhere. As I approach physical death I'm looking at whether I...

Love is not a condition

Now, I'd like to make it clear to the people with me that emotions are always negative or excitement. I want to make it clear that joy is not an emotion because the world thinks that joy, beauty and love are emotions – and they are not. Joy is in...

The end of the world and afterwards

Barry Long's prophecy: written 1985, updated 2002, republished online 2012. There have been many prophecies about the coming end of time, or the end of the world. Barry Long also prophesied an end to the world as we know it. In 1985, when he was writing about prayer, he also...

Truth and Ignorance of Science Today

A scientific revolution is about to begin which will transform the world. But it will not take place in the laboratories; it will start in the minds of certain scientists in the new century. The Australian spiritual teacher Barry Long says this shift of perception marking the birth of real...

After God realisation, what next?

In my experience first the mind stops. No more aimless involuntary thought. That happens in existence. Then there's the realisation of immortality (one with all life). Then the realisation of nothing, or God being responsible for everything. Then emptiedness (not emptiness. Emptiness is what people have in the depths of...

The truth of life

An extract from Barry Long’s book “Only Fear Dies” I am going to tell you the truth of life on earth. But you are not going to like it. You are not going to like it because you already know this truth and have chosen to forget it. You are...

Transforming sex into love

All love, fundamentally, is the love of That, the love of God, the love of It, that is behind everything, all existence. All love is that. You have that love inside of you because you came out of that place, that vastness, into conception in some woman’s womb. And to...

Love has a purpose

Barry Long's Journals document a living teaching. They present selected writings, sayings and letters and include notes made on his travels and extracts from his public seminars. They offer easily accessible insights into a wide range of subjects in the spiritual life. Love has a purpose. But it doesn't have...

Acknowledging your purity

From the 17-day Master Session 1995, Cabarita Beach, Australia Now! No more negativity. From this moment on, no more negativity. Let me explain what negativity is. I know you know what negativity is – but you don’t know the subtlety of it. Negativity is any talk or thought about your...

As it is

Barry Long heard that a magazine was basing a whole edition on 'Evolution and Enlightenment.' This prompted him to write the following article: Enlightenment of course does not evolve What evolves is the individual understanding and depth of cognitive perception. This is a process of psycho-logical negation ­ a spiritual...

The living truth

You come to me to enlighten the brain There is only one truth. It is being where you are; and where you are, is where your body is. This is too simple for the brain to comprehend in its now chronically complicated condition. The brain has become so divided in...

In a world of no guarantees...

Excerpts with additions from a radio interview with Barry Long by Lois Hunt ­first aired on Bay FM Radio, Byron Bay Australia, 16 September, 2002 Lois: Barry, it's amazing to me what the mind does. I'm honoured to be doing this interview with you. I sat down and contemplated and...

Man's spiritual challenge

The first thing an ordinary man has to do to help him realise his spiritual yearnings for God, truth or enlightenment, is to examine his everyday life. He has to see where he is wasting his energies on distractive activities, and start making changes. Every man has inside his body...

Love is not a feeling – interview

Barry Long was interviewed about Love is Not a Feeling by Hal Blacker, editor of What is Enlightenment magazine. This interview was published alongside the article in What is Enlightenment Volume 4, Number 2, Summer 1995. Reprinted here with permission from 'What is Enlightenment'. WIE: In your article you make...

Facing life as it is

THE BRAIN IS ENLIGHTENED by realizing ‘I’ ­as you’ve heard all the eastern masters try to describe. I am the intelligence behind every activity of the brain. The brain has no intelligence of its own. I am consciousness, not the brain. The brain thinks it is the master, but I...

Being present

Let me demonstrate what it is to be totally present Usually, when two people have a conversation in this world, neither of them is 100% present. They can be in very concentrated conversation and yet not be present, because they are always either thinking of the next thing they are...

Woman and love

A woman wrote to Barry Long: She had been deeply moved by Barry Long’s teaching, particularly with regard to love. Now she was with another master, a man who clearly loved God, but his teaching appeared to contradict much of what had been revealed to her by Barry Long about...

Everybody's burden

Everybody is psychological, some intellectual and mental as well. The intellectual and mental includes ideas, concepts, interpretations, images, rational or logical reasoning, and worry. It can be pretty much circumvented. But the psychological is there until death. By psychological is meant any reflection of existence in inner space. All of...