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 interview one of his tantric consorts in order to have first-hand account of what it is like to practice sexual union with a living tantric master. . The power of his teaching speaks for itself in their words.

Sally and Jade

Sally is one of the women Barry Long speaks about in his interview. She was in an intimate association with Barry for five years and at the time of this interview she was thirty-seven.

Sally: First, I would say I was never in relationship with a tantric master, although we were together many times as people in relationship are. Relationship is sought so individuals can be secure with each other, where I as an individual can live in a state of security and relative ignorance, where you give me what I want both sexually and psychologically, and for that I stay with you.

Being with a tantric master is going beyond my want of relationship and becomes a process of self-knowledge, self-annihilation and absence as I become more one with the divine consciousness he is. Fundamentally, through the physical making of love-the most dangerous thing on earth-all personal love and attachment, sexual want, insecurity, jealousy and possessiveness will be faced.

This can never truly be faced sufficiently in conventional romantic love. Tantric love is love of God, the unknown, love of Nothing, not love of the individual man or woman.

My name is Jade, and I am one of the five women Barry speaks about in his interview. I had an intimate spiritual and physical association with Barry for about seven years which started when I was thirty-two; I am now forty."

Jade: To start with, I would like to define "tantric" because there's a lot of nonsense spoken about it. In my experience, tantra is the power to bring a woman more deeply into the love of God within and through the act of making love. A tantric master has that God-given power.

I could not describe my association with Barry as a relationship in any conventional sense. A conventional romantic relationship is more of an apparently random, haphazard process usually entered into with minimal, if any, sense of purpose. With Barry the association was entered into consciously, as a process of purification for me, so there was purpose in it. This was known by me and stated by Barry right from the beginning. The association was always only about returning me to a deeper sense of God, impersonal love or truth; this was why Barry had taken me on. I was told I would be taken through love and in that process purified—the degree of purification was in God's hands. And that is what was done.

In a conventional relationship there are usually emotional needs, expectations, wantings and dependencies on both sides—in other words, the love is selfish or personal. This was not the case in my association with Barry. The love in Barry was impersonal and profound, an intelligence that wanted nothing for itself out of the association. It or he was not true to the person I was but was only uncompromisingly true to the divine will or what was right—the purpose, which was to bring me closer to God. How did I know he was true? First, the power of such love was able to communicate to the depths of me, in a place outside time and space.

This was quite extraordinary and at the same time quite natural. And second, over many years I saw Barry consistently demonstrate selfless love and service; in fact his entire life was about bringing others to a greater sense of God. It was that which he served. So it was always clear to me that Barry was a God-man or realized consciousness and therefore provided a true reflection that would help to purify me.

QUESTION: In your experience with your teacher, what are the components of tantric lovemaking that make it distinct from conventional lovemaking?

Sally: Tantric lovemaking is used as a vehicle to become more nothing, more absent, more love, and in this way it is distinct from conventional lovemaking. There is no excitement—yet there is profound passion.

No movement of the sexual imaginative mind~but great stillness where I love from my being. It is an absence of my self, of all feeling of love, but it is an immediate communication of love and beauty between two bodies.

Jade: Conventional lovemaking is largely selfish and self-satisfying. In making love with a tantric master, Barry, a quality of love was communicated through his body and the action of making love that I had never known before. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was being loved by true love, with no stain of selfishness in it.

This love was also so utterly devoid of sentimentality or emotionality that it could almost be said to be cold by anyone looking for the comforting warmth of an ordinary love affair. But this coldness had a cosmic pristine purity and beauty which I knew to be divine.

It was also profound and communicated stillness and joy. Its effects were long-lasting and intensified the love of God or purity within. Although it is several years later, that love is still in me now as I write; it has never left me and never will because it is timeless, profound. Once made, this love is made forever.

QUESTION: Were there any prerequisites for you to become Barry Long's consort? Did you have to prepare in any way in order to begin this practice?

Sally: The only prerequisite to becoming Barry Long's consort, which was given to me by the grace of God, was my commitment, the absolute giving of my life to love, to God, to the divine consciousness he is. Love cannot be thought about, cannot be practiced.

Any practice is still within the mind. So outside of this there are no prerequisites, no preparation, as there is no practice—no doing—no becoming.

Only my being true to life itself and the divine will that brought me to him.

Jade: As far as I know, the only prerequisite was a love of truth and the master and a willingness to participate in the process. My only preparation was a love of the teaching, which I had been putting into practice as much as I was able.

But fundamentally, to be given such an opportunity was an unearned grace.

QUESTION: What for you was most challenging about doing this practice?

Sally: What for me was most challenging in being with a tantric master as one of five women was facing my sexuality—the force that would keep me separate from love and from which all problems arise. I had to face the hell of my self, all need to be "the one," to be special, to have relationship, to have the man for myself, all want of love.

I had to give to my sisters—the four other women—and the master, whilst facing all fear, self-doubt, jealousy or any emotion that would arise from this process, so that in time the sexual energy could return to the power of love.

Jade: Giving up my need for a personal relationship with the master. Dying to my wanting of his exclusive sexual love and attention, my possessiveness, my jealousy, my comparisons with other women, my need to be the one and only woman. In other words, the awful burning out of my personal, selfish feelings of love and romantic attachment and self-importance.

Having to give up my deeply held unconscious notions of what I thought love was and having no room to move away from the ongoing confrontation with my selfishness. It was awful and wondrous to eventually be made to be responsible by the master's lack of compromise.

By that I mean that, in his refusal to be manipulated by any emotionality or negativity in me, Barry made me responsible for the lack of love in me. It could then by grace be given up.

But in the process before that point was reached, there was great suffering as my self fought.

QUESTION: Now that you have "graduated," are you a tantric master in your own right? How are you carrying forth the transmission of the teachings?

Sally: "No, I am not a tantric master. I am purely a woman who has realized love and continues to go deeper into the knowledge of love as being nothing. Woman is not a master, not a teacher. If she thinks she is, in that alone, she is not. That would be the sexuality in her—the want to exist as something.

Woman in her purest form is still and non-projective. Only from this place as a reflection of love can I communicate what I have received from this teaching."

Jade: Again I wouldn't say I had "graduated." Life moved on, and it was no longer possible to be intimately associated with Barry. No, I am not a tantric master in my own right.

A tantric master has a God-given power to awaken and I am an ordinary woman who loves God. Nor am I carrying forth any transmission of the teachings. But there has been much that I have absorbed in my years of exposure to the master, and this I communicate as it arises. And, particularly to my current partner in all the circumstances of our life together.

QUESTION: Are you in a tantric relationship now? If yes, what have you found to be the difference between your intimate association with a tantric master and your relationship with a tantric partner who is not a master?

Sally: "There is no tantric partner; there is only the tantric master as the utter realization of love, both in and out of existence. This is the tantric power. In being with a tantric master, this power of love-the rarest thing on earth—is always present, constant, immediate in the body, transformative in its divine beauty, fundamentally in the making of love.

I am currently in partnership with a man and although we are engaged in living a divine love together, this power, this consciousness is rarely seen in the man due to the ignorance of love. I, through my experience and knowledge of love that have come only from having been with a tantric master—the greatest privilege on earth—endeavor to communicate that which I have received, both in the making of love and our being together.

In this is a great responsibility to love as I endeavor to align him with one love ~God, through the love of woman."

Jade: "Yes, I am in partnership with a man. I wouldn't name it as a tantric relationship, but my endeavor is always to communicate something of the divine love I have known or have the knowledge of within me.

This is choiceless on my part because it is that which I love. I am not motivated by the desire to have a personal relationship but only by the endeavor to live the truth of love together, which is always going toward a greater impersonality in both of us. It is the virtue, rightness and profundity, in other words the God, that I love in the man—not his person or personality. It is my joy that my partner manifest more love of God and consciousness within himself.

As this is my partner's desire also, in this sense the relationship could be described as tantric. There is really no comparison between the association with the tantric master and an association with a man who is not a master. One is cosmic man and the other is earth man.

The consciousness is entirely different. The master is a realized power who provides a communication of God-consciousness, presence or love at all times. In himself he is nothing, he doesn't exist. So it doesn't matter what he is doing, his presence just communicates something of the divine, which is quite natural.

This is a very inspiring energy to be around and gives one a conscious reflection that is always pushing one beyond one's self in some way or another. Away from this reflection, I have to be more responsible. It is up to me to reach into my inner depths and live what has been imparted."

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