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 are the writer’s own.

THE CONTROVERSY

For many years, there has been online discussion concerning the links between Barry Long and the renowned spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle. Some have speculated about the extent to which Tolle’s teaching may have been influenced by Barry Long’s books published in the 1980s, many years before Tolle’s seminal work, The Power of Now.

What follows is an attempt to set the record straight and hopefully to clear up some of the misunderstandings that have arisen over time regarding the relationship between Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle and the influence which Barry Long’s work had on the development of Tolle’s teaching.

‘ECKHART’S AUSSIE MATE’

Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Aussie Mate’ was how Australian TV Channel Seven described Sydney-born Barry Long, when Tolle appeared on the channel’s news magazine show in March 2009 to promote his speaking tour that year in Australia. The clip of the show can be found on YouTube.

Tolle had been invited into the TV studio as someone who enjoyed celebrity status. Widely acclaimed as the world’s best-known contemporary spiritual teacher, he had racked up huge sales with the phenomenal success of The Power of Now, first published in 1997, having been championed for years by the U.S. chat show icon Oprah Winfrey.

So, what is the connection between Eckhart Tolle and Barry Long? Why did Tolle say in that Australian TV programme that he loved Long’s teaching and regarded him as ‘a powerful teacher’? And has Barry Long had a deeper, more formative influence on the German spiritual teacher than has been commonly recognised? Many of Barry Long’s audience have said so. In fact, it has been claimed by some that The Power of Now bears more than a passing similarity to one of Long’s books and, indeed, that certain passages amount to a form of plagiarism.

As far as I’m aware, before being interviewed on Channel Seven, Tolle’s public acknowledgement of his early links with Barry Long had been few and far between. In an interview published in John W. Parker’s book, Dialogues with Emerging Spiritual Teachers (2009), he had mentioned some teachers who had helped him understand his own state in the early days of his spiritual development. After referring to the initial formative influence of a Western-born Buddhist monk by the name of Achan Sumedo, he made the following somewhat cursory reference to Barry Long: ‘And in London I spent some time with Barry Long. I also understood things more deeply, simply through listening and having some conversations with him.’ Continuing, he referred to ‘other teachers who were just as meaningful whom I never met in person’, citing Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi: ‘And I feel actually that the work I do is a coming together of the teaching 'stream', if you want to call it that, of Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi’.

The impression of a relatively slight connection with Barry Long has also been reflected in Tolle’s response to occasional enquiries about the subject from the audience at his seminars. Responding to one questioner he says Barry Long ‘lived in London when I was also living in London at a time when I was still trying to find some answers to my inner transformation.’ After mentioning having visited Buddhist monasteries where he says he ‘got some answers’, he comments, ‘and then I discovered Barry Long and talked to him a few times and went to some of his talks in Highgate, London.’ And while he refers to, or quotes from, a number of spiritual teachers or sages in The Power of Now, (for example, Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha, Marcus Aurelius) Barry Long receives no mention. So what was the connection between the two men? When did it begin? And was Barry Long’s influence on Tolle significant or not?

THE STORY BEGINS IN 1984

Some years after Tolle’s breakthrough realisation, which he describes graphically in the introduction to The Power of Now, a quiet, earnest and softly-spoken man first appeared at Barry Long’s weekly meetings in London. Leonard Tolle (as he was then known) sat in the audience of forty to fifty people to hear the powerful, impassioned words that the Australian delivered in weekly talks at The Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, a distinguished Victorian building on a hill in north London, overlooking Hampstead Heath and the sprawling metropolis below.

Barry Long’s inspirational talks were fired by the realisations he’d had in India after leaving behind job, home, wife and family in his native land. He was determined to find the truth and to live it, come what may. Now he was talking truth to anyone who would listen. He ranged over a vast canvas of subjects, but the main themes in the Highgate talks were stillness, what ‘now’ is, and how individuals can rid themselves of unhappiness – be free of ‘the unhappy body’ inside each one of us.

Leonard Tolle was a regular attendee at these talks and occasional weekend meetings in the period 1984-85. The series of meetings came to an end in February 1986. I first saw Barry Long speak in the following year and was not present at any of those events, but I have spoken to somebody who was, who knew Tolle personally, and who worked for The Barry Long Centre. He recalls that Tolle appeared a somewhat quiet, reserved man who made no special reference to his own spiritual realisation. Some accounts suggest that he was destitute in London, but by the time he was attending these meetings, he was living in a flat in Primrose Hill, a well-to-do area of the city, and was trying to set himself up as an art dealer.

On the question of whether Eckhart Tolle ever spoke to Barry Long, who invited questions at every meeting he held, apparently it is not known or recorded that Tolle asked any questions in public or that they spoke privately together. However, the latter is certainly possible, because sometimes Barry Long did draw someone aside at the end of a meeting, to speak to for a few minutes.

There is no doubt that during this period of regularly attending Barry Long’s meetings, Tolle absorbed Long’s teaching and heard the truth of it. Indeed his enthusiasm for the Australian’s teaching prompted him to volunteer to help The Barry Long Centre. One thing mentioned was an offer to translate into his native German one of Long’s early books (Knowing Yourself).

It is not clear whether Tolle continued to attend any of Barry Long’s meetings after those held at Highgate came to an end in 1986, or indeed the extent to which he may have continued to absorb Long’s teaching. However, in his response to the questioner at the seminar referred to above, Tolle was clearly aware of Barry Long’s audio tape, How to Stop Thinking, which was published in 1987. Referring to it in light-hearted mode, he says, ‘I didn’t need that tape anymore because I had already stopped [thinking]’.

It’s possible, though, that Tolle had at some point listened to the tape, since there are a number of similarities in the way he addresses stopping thinking in The Power of Now. For example, Barry Long’s tape starts with him making the unusual observation that ‘Thinking is a psychological disease . . .’ whilst its concluding statement begins, ‘Your intelligence has got to be there watching the emotion like your cat watching a mouse hole. That way, the mouse - the thought - can’t come out’.

In The Power of Now, Tolle also refers to thinking as ‘a disease’ (p.13) and deploys the same illustrative device as in Long’s tape published ten years earlier: ‘. . . become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole?’ (p.77)

It would, of course, be easy to dismiss as simple coincidence these similarities in addressing the subject of stopping thinking if it were not for many other such similarities on different topics, which those familiar with Barry Long’s teaching could hardly fail to notice upon reading The Power of Now. One subject - emotional unhappiness – serves to illustrate this, as we’ll come to later on.

INFLUENCE AND SIMILARITIES

By the way of things, every spiritual teacher is influenced by the total environment in which they are born and raised. And at certain points in their spiritual process they almost invariably come within the immediate orbit of, or absorb the influence of, one or more spiritual teachers whose knowledge at that time is greater than theirs. This serves to mould, sometimes decisively, their own particular vision before they themselves emerge into the public arena to start teaching in their own right.

Over the years on the internet many references have built up to perceived similarities between the teachings of Barry Long and Eckhart Tolle. Some observers have identified general areas of overlap or consensus between the two. Others have been quite blunt, accusing Tolle – writing a decade or so after Long’s books were first published – of appropriating and popularising some of Long’s key teachings. However, the fact is that the similarities between many elements of Long’s and Tolle’s writings are likely to be obvious to even a casual observer.

Comparing The Power of Now (1997) and parts of Tolle’s acclaimed follow-up book, A New Earth (2005) with Long’s output from the 1980s, one is struck again and again by similarities in the overarching themes, individual subjects and their presentation. In particular, the following key themes from The Power of Now reflect the landscape explored and charted a decade or so earlier in Long’s teachings:

• The nature and cause of emotional pain and how to deal with it;

• Entering the body in meditation – focusing on feeling the inner sensation of the body, using the conscious attention;

• Detaching from the mind – observing the arising and operation of thought; stilling the chattering mind;

• The state of presence – being present in the moment, now, and experiencing the joy of being.

Barry Long’s most powerful and far-reaching book, The Origins of Man and the Universe (Routledge Kegan Paul, 1984) can be seen as a study of the power represented by the word ‘now’, and of what that power has produced right from the Big Bang and throughout the evolution of consciousness. It is not plausible to discount the influence that this book and its revelations would have had on Tolle.

The following short extracts illustrate the centrality of ‘now’ to the grand canvas painted in the ‘Origins’ book:

‘I have just described eternity as an energetic representation of all that has ever happened or can happen in actuality. That means it is perceivable, but how? It is perceived as the now. The moment of truth, the moment of eternity, is now.’ (p.198)

‘Now is the one and only perpetual instant from which the world continuously - or rather discontinuously - begins afresh every moment by having no past.’ (p.198)

‘Now and the universe are cosmically identical: the universe is now, and now is the universe. The one self-evident quality of now is that it never changes; it is always original, always the beginning of everything.’ (p.224)

NOW, THE TRUTH

‘The way of the spirit is really no way at all, because it is always now. The spirit is now. Life is now. Now is timeless. The truth of the spirit eliminates all time. Surrender all your yesterdays, every attachment to the whole lot, NOW, not tomorrow, not gradually.’

Barry Long wrote those words in a pamphlet that was freely distributed in 1987 and illustrates the emphasis on now, and on living now, throughout Barry Long’s teachings.

The Origins of Man and the Universe, with its focus on now and the beginning of time, had been published in 1984 when Eckhart Tolle was attending the meetings in Highgate, and the subject of ‘now’ continued to be addressed. After Barry moved back to his homeland in 1986 he recorded monthly half-hour talks from his new home on Mount Tamborine in Queensland. Here are three extracts from those talks, to illustrate the continuing importance of the theme:

‘The most difficult thing for anyone endeavouring to find God or the truth now, is to eliminate the mind's almost essential reference to the past and the future as some sort of reflection of 'the now'. Your job is to be able to see it all NOW.’ (From Tamborine Talk, December 1987)

‘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?

Do you have to look forward to life? Or can you feel your life now?

Life is now.

Looking forward is a drug, an addiction.

Be where you are now - in your body.’

(From Tamborine Talk, January 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 what I am saying (instead of listening, receiving) is going to make time.

‘What is the truth of life now? It is now, without any intellectual activity whatever. Does that make any difference to your existence? No, it doesn't. But now you are with your existence; now you have eliminated the distance between your existence and yourself. You have brought them together. There is now no time. But there is action, the passage of events. And action is timeless. If you look around you see movement of the wind, the trees; you see the people come into the room, or the movement of your own hands; you hear your own voice or the voices of others. That is all movement, all action - all timeless. It never ceases.’ (From Tamborine Talk, August 1988)

THE UNHAPPY/PAIN-BODY

It is in Barry Long’s book, Only Fear Dies that the most obvious comparisons with Tolle’s output many years later are to be found. This book was written and published in shorter form (as Ridding Yourself of Unhappiness) in 1984, the same year as The Origins of Man and the Universe. The following extracts in relation to just one subject – the nature of emotional unhappiness – from Barry Long’s book are followed in each case by an italicised extract from The Power of Now. 

‘Each hurt, which in your ignorance you thought was over, that you'd got over, every disappointment and heartbreak joins your residual emotional body.’ (Long, p.36)

Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. (Tolle, p.29)

‘You may think you get pleasure out of your emotions. But it's a fickle pleasure, an emotional high that never lasts because its opposite pole is a fickle pain, an emotional low.’ (p.30)

And every pleasure or emotional high contains within itself the seed of pain: its inseparable opposite, which will manifest in time. (p.26)

‘Any unhappiness you remember and grieve over is already past and resident in you, so that is not the unhappiness that begins now.’ (p.37)

There are two levels to your pain: the pain that you create now, and the pain from the past that still lives on in your mind and body. (p.26)

‘When you, your natural being, are buoyant, the emotional body is dormant. When the emotional body is buoyant, you are dormant.’ (p.32)

...the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active.  

When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you can activate it. (p.30)

‘The emotional body is a living thing, living off you like a parasite, and it does not want to die (p.45) . . . the emotional body is as alive and intelligent as you are. It does not want to be found out and seen as separate from you. So it will try to distract you, and it usually succeeds. One way it does this is by affecting other parts of the body with aches and pains. These are not lasting . . . You must understand that due to your neglect and ignorance, the unhappy emotional body has taken charge of much of your inner self, your subconscious. It will not surrender. You have to get in there and root it out, consciously, energetically.’ (p.42-3)

The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It can then rise up, take you over, ‘become you’, and live through you. It needs to gets its ‘food’ through you. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form . . . (p.30)

The pain-body ... is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don’t face it . . . you will be forced to relive it again and again. (p.31)

Incidentally, other comparisons are made by the author Jack Dawes on his website, Creation of Now. In his article, The Hidden History of Eckhart Tolle’s ‘Pain-Body’, the influence that Barry Long and Fourth Way teacher, Maurice Nicoll had on Tolle in relation to the idea of an 'emotional pain body' is explored at length.

WHAT REALLY MATTERS?

Every spiritual teacher naturally attracts to them those potentially able to appreciate and absorb their particular level of self-knowledge. While for some aspirants the words of the teacher, or spiritual master, might make little or no sense, for others they seem like the proverbial manna from heaven. In the vaster scheme of things, the originality of a particular teaching – or ‘who influenced who’ – is of no real significance. What really matters is that a greater knowledge is able to be imparted to individuals as a contribution to the continuing enlightenment of the global human psyche. Not all teachers choose to acknowledge the extent to which they are indebted to another in contributing to their own vision, and certainly Barry Long wasn’t a man to be bothered by such matters.

A few years before his death in 2003, I was at one of the fortnight-long ‘Master Sessions’ held annually in the coastal Bush of Northern New South Wales, when Barry Long was presented with a copy of The Power of Now. He appeared at the start of one session with a copy of the book in hand. Seating himself in front of his 300-strong audience, he glanced through the pages for a short while, seemingly bemused by the book’s contents, before remarking, ‘Well, I thought I’d picked up one of my old books!’ On another occasion he was asked if he could remember anything about meeting Tolle. The answer was no.

He’d spoken years before on an audio tape about the ‘clones of Barry Long’: teachers who were quite obviously adopting or appropriating significant parts of his teaching to present as their own. At the time, he’d seemed resigned to the fact – and years later, leafing through The Power of Now in the flickering sunlight at the Australian seminar, he appeared equally nonplussed. For Barry Long, as for Eckhart Tolle (to quote a seminal aphorism from Long’s early promotional material), ‘Only Now Is Real’.

POSTSCRIPT

In spiritual circles, reference is sometimes made to the role and value of ‘right acknowledgment’. In this context, it is perhaps relevant finally to note the following statement from Barry Long’s From Here to Reality – The Final Essays, written in the months before his death in 2003. Although there is no reason to suspect that he had any particular individual in mind, he had this to say (referring to one of his own influences, an enlightened teacher he called ‘The Blessed John’, who taught him for a short period in the late 1960s):

‘Now and again spiritual thrusters with more zeal than realisation throw my teaching back at me in books and letters as their own inspiration, sometimes plagiarising whole phrases and sentences. Given the chance and inclination I endeavour to inform them of what the Blessed John once taught me, “Always be true to the source of your inspiration”. This, when you’re lifting stuff from a realised master, means clearly acknowledging that source.’

FOOTNOTE

References from Only Fear Dies are from the edition published in 1994. References from The Origins of Man and the Universe are from the revised edition published in 1998. References from The Power of Now are from the edition published in 2011.

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