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 just someone else's jargon, is to actually experience what it stands for.
Being a practical and down-to-earth individual, I'm now going to demonstrate the effect of spirit in your own experience; so that you'll always be able to identify it for yourself and not have to depend on the vague notions and confusing beliefs of others.
You know how sometimes you long or yearn for love, truth or peace? How sometimes you long to be free, not really knowing what it is you want to be free of - and especially when you don't have a problem at the time?
You know what it's like to feel love you're just not able to express? Or a deep creative urge you can't express? That kind of longing - you know it, don't you?
That's the spirit in you. It makes you long and yearn for something you just can't give a concrete name to - because what you're longing for, what you've always longed for in this way, is not in the world. It's in you.
You are longing to be re-united with the spirit or truth of yourself within. I say re-united because you weren't always separated from it. That extraordinary spirit is truth, love, freedom and fulfilment - in one complete and astounding package. Once you find it and merge with it, all your doubts, fears, longing and incompleteness vanish - for all time. And, miraculously, so do all your worldly problems.
That is the truth. That is the truth of yourself. That is the focus of my teaching. You'll notice that it is not based on any formal religion, dogma or belief: it is simply self-knowledge.
The Barry Long Bulletin #2, 13 July 2012, "The Practical Truth"
The truth - all truth - is in you now, at this moment. But it's buried under all the years of emotional experience you've gathered, particularly your heartbreaks, disappointments, fears, and self-doubts.
You weren't born with these emotions. You acquired them. You were born free - and are free. That is the truth of yourself. But at birth you didn't have the mind to realise this. So you developed a mind. That's what you've been doing all these years. Now you have the mind, with its wonderful ability to realise the truth, but clinging to it and obscuring its natural clarity are all those burdensome and distracting emotions - which you mistake for yourself. I help you to get rid of that rubbish.
You live to find the truth. That's the purpose of living. Living is practical. So the truth must be practical.
People are practical in their jobs, or they wouldn't be able to do them. They're practical in the home, or the place would be in an awful mess. But they are not practical in the truth. So they do not find the truth, know the truth or live it.
How do I know that? - because the truth, being practical, solves the problems of yourself, all your unhappiness; and how many people do you know who are free of problems and unhappiness every moment of their lives? That's how many know the truth.
What I've just said is practical, isn't it? - getting right down to the nitty-gritty of what you're looking for and what life's about.
The truth works. The way of truth I teach is practical. You have to live it right from the start. That's why it works.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'The Way In'
The Barry Long Bulletin #3, 20 July 2012, "The Only Choice"
I say that the only thing man can do is to become conscious. I say - and you must not believe me - that his only choice is 'Will I become conscious?' If he does not realise this choice he remains unconscious. Anything that is unconscious obviously cannot have a choice - choice is synonymous with a conscious act. So man as he is does not have choice if what I say is true.
Let us keep going. Man lives his life in a state of unconsciousness. He is never aware of himself except for say a minute a day. An example of being conscious is when you suddenly become aware of yourself talking too much. You see yourself objectively as the others are seeing you and you realise you are making a fool of yourself. It is a brief, intense moment, filled with self-knowledge. You are conscious, and in that moment you stop talking. The fact of your observation of yourself brings about its own instantaneous result. You stop talking, you stop being mechanical. You do not choose. Choice is the deception of unconsciousness.
When you are conscious you are unable to behave in any way that is unacceptable to you. So how can you say you are conscious when you do things you later regret? You are either unconscious when you do them or unconscious when you regret them. So the only choice man has is to stay conscious or become conscious. There is no other choice. As unconsciousness is man's natural state, his only choice then is to leave it.
How do you make this choice? Is it a choice? Isn't it really just an act of remembering yourself, of observing yourself, of becoming conscious of your actions and your thinking every moment. Does it require choice?
No. There is no choice . . . only awareness. The deliberate way to become conscious is through the practice of self-observation. My teaching is that truth corrupted into method and system.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'Wisdom and where to find it' (pp 41-42)
The Barry Long Bulletin #4, 27 July 2012, "Love and Human Love"
The fact of human love is that man or woman desires to be with the loved one so that he or she can absorb the other entirely, possess them by knowing everything about them. This desire contains its own destruction.
The period of fulfilment, of knowing each other, does not usually last very long; because there is not much to know and not much worth knowing in men and women unless they love God or the truth. Truth and God are depthless and timeless and those who love them develop the same qualities.
But usually what you get to know is mostly personality; and personality is an act. You cannot act all the time. As each sees the truth of what the other is, the masks are left off more and more. The painted faces are brightly displayed for others to see; but there is little mystique between the former lovers. The partnership is mechanical and predictable.
To begin with, love is longing, the separation of a desire from its fulfilment - plus the brief period of fulfilment. Then it is sex, expectation, fear, compatibility, familiarity and habit. If the desires or interests of the two people are similar, their union usually results in a kind of oneness. If most desires can be fulfilled as a partnership reasonable peace remains; if not, there is conflict.
Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring.
When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it.
The understanding of love comes with the knowledge that you are nothing. The greatest purity is nothing or nothingness - no thinking, no desiring, no imagining. You are then one with the moment and the great movement of life so nothing can happen that is not right. Every moment is perfect and everything that happens is eternally just.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'Knowing Yourself' (pp 85-86)
The Barry Long Bulletin #5, 3 August 2012, "Abandoning Attitudes"
Attitudes and centres are ignorance; clots of self in the pure stream of perception and spontaneous action. They are dissolved by first seeing that they are there; and second, by examining their basis as they assert themselves in some form of reaction. When you discover the original false assumption on which each attitude is grounded you automatically discard the whole accumulation.
Man cannot usually do this, because he actually believes he is his centres or positions. So he says: 'I'm a Roman Catholic' or 'I'm a Socialist' and 'I believe in . . .' When man is so identified with his centres that he cannot dissolve them for himself, the death-force must do it for him. The result is the tension of argument, frustration, disappointment, disenchantment, doubt, boredom, unpleasantness - all signs of the slow attrition of some centre or position. For life knows that eventually enough pain will make even the most stupid person look for the cause in himself.
Man's reactivity produces all that is complicated, ugly and artificial. All that is worthwhile and beautiful is produced by the spontaneous, responsive life-force that drives into the world through man. The death-force is simply life's response when man tries to cling to anything as a position or centre in himself.
Man is not a doctor or thief any more than he is the father or the liar. He is all the things that he can do and be. But to be able to respond freely, competently and beautifully to whatever the moment demands he must be himself; that is, remain as nothing but the still, perceptive space between every action.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'Knowing Yourself' (pp 140-141)
The Barry Long Bulletin #6, 10 August 2012, "Being: Rest, or Beauty"
Your being knows only two states. One is the state of neutrality or rest, the other is beauty.
The harmony of beauty is in being. When you suddenly see something of beauty, and you like it immediately, without thinking, its beauty has struck the same note of beauty in your being.
There are no opposites in being; no liking or disliking. Neither beauty nor neutrality requires judgment. They are states, just as immersion in water is a state, and you do not have to judge or think to experience them.
Being either likes and loves (and in the absence of thought that is beauty), or being is neutral and life is spent in innocent indifference to most of the things around you.
Mind is busy all the time. It hates the state of neutrality, or being at rest without an interest to occupy it, because that threatens its mastery. When it encounters the state it rushes for a book or the television or someone to talk to.
Mind's desperate measures to fill every moment keep you from consciously being your immortal being. To consciously reach your being you have to resist the mind's constant demand for activity, and endure the restlessness, loneliness and discontent.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'Knowing Yourself' (pp 93)
The Barry Long Bulletin #7, 17 August 2012, "The Glorious Female Essence"
I teach that it is important for man, as soon as possible, to stay true to one woman and take her on. This helps to bring him to his senses and out of his imaginative sexual mind. The key is that he takes her on and together they practise honesty first in their relationship (as I have described) and discover how far they can go together into the mystery of love. If a man still wants other women, how can he take on one woman? He can't. He's not mature enough yet. Wanting other women, he will be restless and discontented, or he will dishonestly pretend that all is well and because it is not, emotional friction will arise between the couple - a common cause of disharmony in relationships.
It is imperative for a woman, once she is impersonally mature enough, to have her man's total focus. But he will not be able to give her this while she is still distracted by her emotions and the lure of the world of experience. Woman has been so disappointed, so wounded by man's itinerant and casual loving of her, that despite what man and woman think, she cannot yield her love - the essence of her body - to him completely until she knows that he truly loves her. When she realises that - it is a deep psychological subconscious place - she can give her extraordinary divine energies to him in their lovemaking. These rarely invoked energies are the God coming forward through the woman. But while he is half-hearted in his love he cannot bring her or himself to the consciousness of this God within her.
The purpose of physical love between man and woman (who are the dual embodiment of God in existence) is for her to give him what he can never have on his own - the glorious female essence that lures him all his life. This divine energy purifies him immensely of his restlessness and negativity, as it does her.
Extract from the Barry Long book title: 'To Man In Truth' (pp 10-11)
CERN Revisited