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 a source of original knowledge and a God-realised man who speaks the truth.

WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

The truth is the reality behind existence or the sense-perceived world. To speak the truth is to be able to speak from this place and reveal the meaning and purpose of life in existence.

'I speak and write only of love and truth.'
'Most people are not ready for love and truth. They want entertainment, excitement, information and change - satisfaction. So they read newspapers, magazines, novels, watch television, listen to the radio and have interesting debates and discussions.

We all enjoy these things to a degree. But when they are the main focus of our lives, or of the people around us, we start to die inside. We dry up. And often we don't know what's happening. We begin to think there's something wrong with us.

What's happened is that we've tired of the endless search for satisfaction that never satisfies. We've started to mature. We now want fulfilment, something lasting. We long for love and truth.

Love and truth are not information. Information is what is added to you, like all the data stored in your memory.

Love and truth are knowledge - self knowledge, original knowledge, the knowledge of the depths of your being. So when I speak to you of love and truth I don't really tell you anything new. I merely reflect the knowledge of what you are - buried in your memory under all the information of what you think you are.'

WHY READ OR LISTEN TO BARRY LONG?

The function of a spiritual master is to help other people reach and realise a greater depth inside them so that they become freer and more fulfilled in their lives. The spiritual master has the God-given ability to do this through the transforming power of his realised consciousness.

'I reflect to you the God-consciousness in your body.'
'When a man realises the master consciousness, he realises God. To realise God is to realise the power of the universe, the power behind it all. And then you have realised the Most High, although the realisation of God never ends. It goes on. But it is a consciousness, not an awareness. For awareness is of the senses, of the body. We're aware of the flowers. We're aware of each other. But that's not consciousness. Consciousness is the knowledge of something that is invisible and right and true. It is the same for woman. But she realises, becomes, the consciousness of love. She realises love - and that is God for her.

To realise God or the master consciousness there has to be an absence of self in you, an absence of selfishness. While you don't give and give and give and love and love and love, you can't realise God. And that's why giving and love are so important in my teaching. In giving we tend to hold back a little. But you can't hold back and realise God.

All I can do is reflect that state of consciousness to you. But you have to be able to receive it along with my words of truth which describe life, death, love and God. That's the master consciousness - originality. Not having to quote anyone. Not having to quote any tradition. Utter and complete originality, coming every moment from the being.'

'A certain depth of perception is needed to hear the master.'
'You don't hear about masters or they're criticised in the newspapers and the media because the people who write those things wouldn't know a master if they fell over one. A certain depth of perception is needed to hear the master. Either you hear or you don't. Either you see or you don't. I stop your thinking, problematical mind by you being with me. Your consciousness can then start to affirm a greater knowledge of God and truth which is in your body now - this very moment.'

WHAT DOES BARRY LONG TEACH?

The essence of this teaching is freedom from unhappiness for the individual. Barry Long defines unhappiness as the normal human condition of happy today, unhappy tomorrow. In the following ways the individual is helped to leave the human condition behind.

Through audio and video recordings and his books Barry Long introduces people to the stillness of their own being within, which is the aim of all true meditative practice. As they live the teaching, they are able increasingly to go about their day-to-day living without losing touch with this inner place.

Barry Long helps people get their circumstantial lives right. He tells you the truth about life as it is and he makes the truth practical by demonstrating it in your own experience. By listening to the truth you start to face where your life is not right - that is where you are disturbed. You are then shown how to eradicate that disturbance by seeing the cause and doing something about it. You are made honest in your relationships with the people and events outside you. As these things become more right in your life you find you are becoming stiller. This is living the spiritual life as Barry Long teaches it. There is no need to go to any ashram; the circumstances of your ordinary life are your own God-designed 'spiritual practice'.

Importantly for most people, Barry Long addresses the love between man and woman as the means to realising God in existence. He teaches the difference between love and sex and shows couples how to get their love lives honest so that they may start the journey into impersonal or unselfish love together.

The cosmic and mythical aspect to his teaching demonstrates how the external cosmos corresponds with the inner life, and how we can get back within ourselves to the beginning before time began.

GETTING YOUR LIFE RIGHT

'Where are you making the best of things instead of getting them right?'
'I teach man and woman to be honest with themselves in every department of their lives - in their jobs, in their homes, with their children, with their parents and in their relationships. There is one unmistakable pointer to where and when you are being dishonest in your life: you will feel unhappy, worried or disturbed by a person or a situation. It is not the person or the situation that is dishonest or to blame. It is you who are avoiding addressing the problem.'

MAN AND WOMAN

'Love is innocent'

'The world has yet to realise that the virgin man and woman's innocent fantasies of love, physical and all, are the truth of love. Love is that. Not just like that. Love is that - which the world told you was naive. In your innocence you were right all along. Now you have to return to that innocent simple state of love in your lovemaking.'

'Man and woman are together to enjoy being together.'

'What is the situation between man and woman? We come together to enjoy being with one another, to enjoy our lives together. Isn't that how we all start off, enjoying being together? But the very first moment it is not a joy - when one of us is unhappy, that moment has to be seized on and the question asked: 'What is wrong? Why are you unhappy with me? How am I not loving you? What have I done that is not pleasing you?' That is the moment of truth and it must not be swept under the carpet like our mothers and fathers did and like we are tempted to do, 'Oh, it'll be alright you know, it's just a passing thing'. It is not a passing thing. It is going to accumulate. Every bit of lack of love and honesty between us is going to accumulate as emotion. And eventually it will put a blockage in my system and I will be afraid to speak. Fear will gather in me or I'll feel I can't be bothered.

And then you won't be able to communicate with me and we will live together, growing further and further apart.'

'There is only one man and one woman.'
'Man and Woman are two principles out of existence, deep down inside every body.

In every woman's body is this extraordinary unimaginable power of She who is the woman, the divine woman, behind all her daily thoughts and longings. Every woman on earth is endeavouring to manifest her divine feminine qualities.

It is the same for man. Deep inside every man's psyche is the divinely noble principle of Man. It too is endeavouring to manifest, to push up through two thousand million years of past into the brain and the senses, and express its divine male qualities.

The divine pair's ceaseless effort to come into existence together and be united here as they are there, is the explanation of the pain and joy of life and love on earth. All else is secondary to this great stirring movement.

And so every woman feels the extraordinary need to do or be better, to find out what love is, to be more real, to be more beautiful. Yes, particularly to be more beautiful, but inside, not just in appearance for that only gives passing satisfaction like a beauty on a magazine cover. Beauty inside is divine freedom.

Every man feels the same divine pressure inside of him, the need to be noble, courageous, honest, truthful and to truly love and be loved by woman. Only through the love of each other can they ever be united here. And that means giving up their selfishness and negativity.'

'There is no escape from love in existence.'
'The task of life on earth is to return to the undivided divine consciousness behind the brain, behind the male and female forms. That is called God realisation, the conscious re-entry or reunion with pure formless life within. This can only be done completely through the love of man and woman outside. The two apparent divisions of she and he must be eliminated in the consciousness of the union of love.'

THE COSMIC TRUTH

'The whole appearance of the starry night is a representation of the divine mind.'

'Look into the blue sky or into the space between the stars and there is nothing. As without, so within. The blue sky, or the magnificence of the black night between the stars, is the representation of the truth of nothing. The whole appearance of the starry night, right around the whole dome of the heavens and all the stars, is a representation of the divine mind. Go out on a cloudless clear night and look at the whole of it. Look through the stars, not at them like the scientist, or you will miss the beauty. Look at the whole. See the pristine beauty of it, the wondrous, stark singleness of it. Then you will get a perception of what God's mind is, represented in space and time through the sense mechanism of the human brain. For what you see out there is purely a representation of the energetic reality of everything inside of you.'

'The sensory universe is a speck in nothing.'

'The sensory universe and our entire existence is like a single cloud in a void, a speck in nothing. The void is timeless and the speck is time. The void is the divine mind, God's mind. The speck in it is the existence of the human brain and its reflection, the human mind. You don't have to try to understand this because it's a description of the reality of every body in existence. Every body consists of this vast nothingness underneath the restless and ever-moving mind. On those occasions when the mind stops, we feel the incredible stillness or peace of the void. Or if we are very much attached to existence, then in moments of the void the mind will feel disturbed, fearful and insecure.'

'What we are is utterly magnificent.'

'Energetically we are all life that has ever been on earth, all the trees and the flowers are energetically inside of us. What we are is utterly magnificent. If we can only make the journey back, instead of going out and out . . . instead of measuring how wide the universe is out there, go back. Go inside, where it all comes from. And once you get through all the impeding structures, when you no longer cry out, 'Oh God what's it all about?' or, 'What am I doing?' then the miracle and the mystery of life is revealed. It's a great romance, isn't it?'

HOW DID BARRY LONG GET HIS KNOWLEDGE? DID HE BELONG TO ANY SPIRITUAL TRADITION?

Barry Long did not belong to any spiritual tradition. He was free from unhappiness and in his own life overcame fear, conflict and doubt. His knowledge came from his own spiritual process and realisations. He lived the truth he spoke which makes his teaching very powerful. The love of God and knowledge of truth spontaneously began to arise within him at the age of 31. This led him through an intense spiritual catharsis and then to the divine revelation which continued to unfold and inform his teaching.

'God converted my intelligence and it was directed in.'

'Your awareness is of the senses. You start off aware of all the external world, like I was for thirty years. I lived in the external world and did everything externally. And then suddenly I was converted. The spirit converted me. God converted my intelligence and it was directed in. I started to go in, leaving behind the awareness. The body still functioned. Everything still went on. But my intelligence started to go down, down, down, deeper and deeper towards God or being. And as it did so, I became more conscious. My mind started to slow down. Because when you're more conscious the mind doesn't have the same support of the self. So I became more conscious until I reached consciousness, which is a state of utter stillness - free of doubts, fears and uncertainty.'

WHAT HAPPENS AT A BARRY LONG VIDEO SHOWING?

During the video showing participants sit on chairs in a room while videos of Barry Long speaking at one of his meetings are shown. Barry Long speaks spontaneously from the truth inside him and this has the effect of taking the participants into a place of stillness. At times Barry Long directs the people's attention into their own being, to the place he calls 'me' in every body. He also answers questions from the participants about anything that is concerning them.

IF I CAME TO A BARRY LONG VIDEO SHOWING WOULD IT BE LIKE JOINING A GROUP OR A CULT?

No. One of the first principles of Barry Long's teaching is that nothing is true unless it can be demonstrated in your own experience. Barry Long didn't want followers. He had no ashram or group around him. His message is that you have to live the truth where you are in the circumstances of your particular life, and he gives you the practical tools to help you do this. But it is up to you. You have to live it, then you make the truth real and it is yours.

'The master speaks alone to you.'

'There's no community in my teaching because people get to depend on the 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 play my tapes and answer questions. I'm sure there'd be no trouble doing that! But to me that is creating high priests who cannot speak for the master, ever. They can only speak for themselves. And it's not within my teaching that anyone should speak to you on my behalf. The master speaks alone to you.

When you form communities, people like to have talks and discussions. And that's another thing I can't support - discussions - because discussions breed words. And words lead further and further away from the state of being. All you've got to do is be alone in your being. That then directs you where to go. But in communities and ashrams there's a great club formed where you become a follower of someone. You're no longer a follower of your own being. You've given that up to follow someone - and it doesn't matter who the master is - there's a corruption which happens in doing that.

People in communities get very comfortable. They have company and are united like captive birds in a cage. They're able to chat about God and life and truth and have a nice time, having coffee or tea together. All communities are distractions from living the truth. The only truth is in being. You do not need to talk to anyone about being because it is a state inside you.

Being is now. You practise being now. And the more that you serve and give to others in your ordinary life the deeper you descend into this fathomless being.'

THE ESSENCE OF THIS TEACHING

Barry Long has a unique gift and expresses the state of enlightenment with extraordinary clarity and simplicity. Through his books, tapes and videos he demonstrates to men and women what love really is and his revelation of the truth changes their lives.

The aim of this teaching is for the individual to be free of unhappiness. Barry Long recognised that it is the problematical love life between man and woman which is the cause of most of the unhappiness on earth. What makes the teaching so irresistibly beautiful or disturbing, is his communication that the love between man and woman is in reality divine. Whereas most teachings and religions ignore the love life, Barry addresses it with inspired authority and practicality as the way to God and truth. His revelations of the divine nature of man and woman's love sprang directly from the experiences of a lifetime of living that love with woman. His great love of the principle of woman ensured that he has always had a spiritual woman by his side who loved and served him and by her presence contributed to the teaching.

'Since the truth, the pure intelligence of the universe, began to enter my body at the age of 31, my life of truth has been intimately connected with the love of woman. My first woman, whom I've described as the first bhagavati, meaning God in female form, revealed herself in a vision to be just that, when I was about 36. She, by leaving me, caused me such pain and suffering that I realised immortality. I passed through the level of death in the psyche and entered that realm of consciousness where the bodies of man and woman are one with the nature of the earth.

It was only later I discovered that every significant woman in my life since the first bhagavati was an aspect of the same divine woman, the one divine female principle that is present in every woman's body, more or less. It can be said that I have been taught by the divine principle of woman, I have been led by her, I have been crucified by her and most certainly I am loved by her. I am the product of that love, as is my teaching.'

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