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The following statements are key passages extracted from Barry Long's writings, published and unpublished.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 for love and truth. They want entertainment, excitement, information and change - satisfaction. So they read newspapers, magazines and 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. This delights and fulfills you. And slowly it brings you back to life.

To be enlightened is to be the living truth. I demonstrate the living truth to people who are ready to hear me and be with me. I change them. I awaken them. In my presence the deadening weight and repetition of the old, the past, begins to crumble. But please do not believe me. Words are not the truth. You must find out for yourself.

Living the divine life as an ordinary man or woman, simply means you are doing your best to be true - true to life, true to yourself.

To live the divine life you need a mirror. You need to see life as it is - not as others tell you it should be or as you wish it were. You need to see what you are doing with your life and what you are not doing with it.

I talk of life and living as it is. And you'll be amazed how often what I am speaking about describes exactly what's happening in your life now or something you're having to cope with.

Like any real mirror, I don't tell you what to do. When you see for yourself, you know what to do. And that ends confusion.

The key to paradise

Paradise is a walled garden. The word is from a Greek language description of the magnificent gardens of the ancient Persian kings. It was adopted to represent the Garden of Eden, the garden of the earth, the garden of life out of which man strayed into the thorns and thistles existence of living.

Man and woman strayed from the garden because they thought. They ate of the tree of knowledge of good and bad and started thinking. They lost their life, their mindfulness, in thoughtfulness. Gradually their thoughts formed an impenetrable wall around the garden. And they found themselves left outside - forever wondering or thinking what on earth had happened, or what had happened on earth.

I will show you the key to paradise - the way through the wall of the garden. And I'll keep you on the way even while you predictably try to stray back out again.

Know that I'm not undertaking to give you anything on behalf of God or some saviour. (I'm not a priest.)

Fear is unnatural

Only human beings fear. The natural creatures of the earth have no fear. Their sole concern is the joy and activity of physical survival. Human beings have dispensed with this. Their concern now is with the excitement and activity of emotional survival. Out of this arises fear.

Humans invented civilisation to take care of their physical survival. What they didn't perceive was that it also took care of their joy. Finding in their civilisation little of value to do, and not much joy in it, they discovered a substitute: the excitement of emotional survival. Losing or winning, depressed or happy made no difference to this perverse new sense of good or entertainment - it was all emotionally moving, all exciting with an enormous range of ups and downs. But the most intense excitement was fear. Fear became the human passion.

It is your fear that makes you feel unloved or lonely. It is your fear that makes you emotionally ugly, possessive, vindictive, doubting, self-conscious, jealous, troubled, Come with your fear and be rid of it. Fear lives and thrives in the dark of hiding. Bring the fear you know and I'll expose the root you have not perceived, deep inside your body or consciousness. Exposing it, so that you perceive it, is the end of it.

Your unhappiness is yours alone

You, alone, are responsible for it as your personal contribution to unhappiness on earth.

Unhappiness can be in you only for as long as you are sufficiently selfish, immature, and insensitive to put up with it. No one else can be rid of it for you. No one else wants your unhappiness, only you.

So why are you dishonest with yourself? Why, when you are unhappy, do you pretend and complain that you don't want to be unhappy? When it is you all the time doing it, holding on to it?

Life is not in yesterday or tomorrow.

Life is good.

Life is good now

- this moment and every moment.

Life is good because life is true.

And it is every moment

- once you surrender the right to be unhappy.

The key to fulfillment

is doing what you want - not getting what you want.

Most people don't know how to live 'doing what you want'.

They've learned to live trying to get what they want. The result is unaccountable anger and frustration. This rises in them intermittently and involuntarily and soon ruins the good.

When you get what you want you're already going to lose it or tire of it: disaster or discontent is on the way. But when you're doing what you want, it's always good, no problem.

You must learn to live doing only what you want. This is impossible for the person and society living by trying to get what they want. They will tell you so. And it is the truth for them; so there will be no change.

But if you are willing, we will now start ...

. . . 'doing the impossible'

In a world where everyone is trying to get what they want instead of doing what they want, and forever battling with the conflict this causes, in such an impossible world, it's possible -it makes sense - to ask a silly question: "How do you do what you want?"

Are you doing what you want right now? If not, why are you doing it? When you stop reading this, will you still be doing what you want? If not, why not?

Why do you ever do what you don't want to do? What's your excuse?

– "I've got to pay the rent."

Do you? If you don't want to pay the rent, don't pay it. You're not doing what you want.

- "But if I don't pay I'll be out in the cold."

So which do you want to do - pay the rent or be out in the cold? Be honest, straight with yourself. In paying the rent you're doing what you want.

It's what you're doing to obtain the rent that's probably the problem. You're working to get what you want; instead of working because the work is what you want to do. In trying to get what you want at the expense of doing what you want, you naturally make yourself unhappy.

The birds and trees are doing what they want. In doing what they want they get what they need.

Don't do any work unless it's what you want to do. Resign and get a job doing what you want. Go on the dole, but only if it means you're doing what you want - no feelings of failure or dissatisfaction, for that would mean you've fallen back into the old dishonesty of not doing what you want. Doing what you want is good, no problem. Start a business empire if that's what you want - but no complaining or being depressed or you won't be doing what you want. Be a saint (whatever that means) if it pleases you - but no more being fearful or doubtful or you won't be doing what you want.

Be with your partner or lover as long as it's doing what you want. If it's not, you won't be a good partner or a good lover; you'll be tired, habitual, indifferent, cranky, emotional and making excuses for your busy, loveless life of not doing what you want. No matter how cosy things seem, it will not be good between you. You'll recognise the lie you're living in the reassurance of yourself (and others) that under the circumstances you're making the best of things. In short, you'll be compromising your life like the politicians do; not getting things right, not doing what you know you want to do, not being honest to God or Good. You'll be saying you can't do it, it's impossible - and in that is the lie.

You won't be much good to the children either. Your example will teach them how to live the same divided and dishonest existence - as you were taught by your parents and they by theirs. You'll pronounce all the usual justifications for hanging on in there for the sake of the children. But it won't wash and it won't work. Your children will have already learned how to spoil the good for themselves - just like you did.

What do you want to do?

Most people don't know. They don't know because they like to imagine they want to do numerous things. That's delusion. You can't do two things at the same time. You can only do what you're doing now. When you see that (and see it whenever you are reminded) you'll be facing a major breakthrough.

Knowing what you're doing

Doing what you want is knowing what you're doing.

Few people on earth know what they're doing.

Fewer still know what they're doing on earth.

Take the first statement.

Do you know each day why you're doing what you're doing?

- Sometimes.

Why not all the time?

Because, when you don't know why you're doing what you're doing, you are really doing what you don't want to do.

Now the second statement.

Do you know why you are on earth? Do you know why you were born, why on earth you are here?

Not being able to answer the question only means you are not yet doing what you want with your whole life. If you knew what you were doing in being you, you'd be doing what you want in everything, in every way. That would be the end of frustration and anger for you. And the world would no longer suffer from your unhappy moods and confusion.

Knowing the impossible

Knowing why you are on earth is knowledge of the impossible.

It comes after doing the impossible.

It's the knowledge called gnosis. Gnosis is the ever-present self-knowledge of the earth's few living Masters.

Gnosis is potential in every body. Which means it can be realised when you are ready - in time - when the person who makes all the agonising decisions in your body, has had enough. Which is when you realise you've had enough time, or enough of time, or time's up.

Speaking gnostically, the Master is you simply being or being simple in a more enlightened time or body - like now.

Before any of that can be realised, actually lived in the flesh, you must learn to do what you want to do in the smaller things of your daily life - like washing up, or looking after the kids when you could have gone to a party. You do that by facing up: why are you washing up or baby sitting when it's not what you want to do? Because it's got to be done? Why are you unhappy about what has got to be done? Why not just do it? You might find it's what you want to do for now because it's what must be done.

A word of caution. If after reading this you decide to go for the big one - like breaking up with a partner or quitting your job - before you've dealt with the numerous minor dislikes in your life, you'll fall on your face. You won't have the authority to hold things together in the resulting chaos. You'll lack will. You'll falter, waver and doubt what you're doing. All involved will suffer needlessly, including you. In short, you'll be trying to get what you want, trying to grab what you want. And that's where we began.

Unless you are under the jailer's lock and key, which you're not, why should you ever be doing what you don't want to do?

As you answer that question now, listen to your excuses, your 'but, but, buts'; your blaming of someone or something else for your refusal to be responsible for what you do.

It's supposed to be your life. But how can it be, if you persistently drape it over others? That's a game the children play you drape a ghostly sheet over the other kid and frighten yourself to death. Well not quite, unfortunately. If you'd only die to playing such childish games with your life and get on with the purpose of it there'd be no problem.

Perhaps you'd like to know how it all happened, how you and the world got into this unhappy condition?

First, your society, parents, teachers, you and now your children distanced yourselves from guru, the knowledge, gnosis or presence of life in your physical body now. You learned from the world all about living or making the best of things - and forgot about life, which is the best of things.

As you and your teachers filled your head with information, you lost your knowledge - your self-knowledge, your divine gnosis. The more you remembered the more you forgot. The more you thought of what living's about, the more you forgot what life's about. It's the saddest story ever told.

Well, what is life about?

Is it about being frustrated, angry, sad, worried, discontented, a religious sinner, a self-made splinter here in the flesh? Or is it about the uninterrupted pleasure now this moment of being what you are - a living son or daughter of the earth - a conscious, joyous expression of the life that is in that physical body now?

In the absence of guru - the divine gnosis or teacher - you have been taught by the ignorance of the world. You have been taught to live from conclusion to conclusion, from this ending to that ending, from workday to weekend, from holiday to holiday, from this exciting event to the next, from today's News or TV programme to tomorrow's. You are either looking forward to some conclusion, to some end or beginning, or looking back. You are buried in past and future, lost.

Conclusions

Getting what you want is a conclusion. You can then sit back and celebrate. But not for long.

Conclusions - like death or yesterday - have no reality. There's not one conclusion in the whole of nature or existence. There are events which seem to cease or situations that seem to change, but nothing concludes.

The reason is this. All events and situations are observed by me, the being of the body reading these words now. There has never been an end or a conclusion of me - has there? Things come and go, change and seem different, but I who am me always remain. Like now: after all these years and all that has happened, I am still me, reading this.

Is that true?

If you say it's not, you've reached a conclusion. You've dammed (or damned) me, dammed or damned yourself again. And before long you'll well up and overflow once more with that old unaccountable anger or frustration - of not being true to life, not being true to me.

The locks and the keys

Once upon a time God had two big bags. One marked 'men' and filled with keys. The other 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'.

I speak to the most intimate part of your being - the part that longs for love.

The awful truth

is that man and woman have forgotten how to love sexually. Your bodies remember but you yourselves do not. If you look closely you will see that you are quite mystified by the sexual act: you know very little about it even while it is going on except that it gives pleasure and pain and produces babies. The real true purpose of physical lovemaking has been lost to human consciousness. Sex has become a drug, an opiate of self-forgetfulness for our loveless times - a dream state. Consequently like dreams, your sexual unions are no longer enduring in their own right and are held together mainly by fear, habit and a perverse sense of duty.

Let me tell you in love what the trouble is and what must be done. Your worldly experience is the trouble. It has infested you with the fear to love. You are terrified by what you think are the demands of love when what you are seeing in fact are the demands of your experience which was not love. As you are, you are lacking in right discrimination: you are unable to tell the difference between love and emotion. You invariably give yourself where there is no love or only partial love and it ends in disaster, or stalemate.

You must learn to give yourself totally only to love.

Where there is no love you must not compromise. You must not give in to a biological need without love. Love must come first - not you or your partner.

The greed of sex has taken over human love-making. You have become insensitive to the fine physical feeling of love you were born with. You have become attached to the emotional demand of sex which seeks satisfaction.

In true love there is no satisfaction, no peace, no rest. Love on earth is a simultaneous union of joy and pain; in its fullness, an ecstatic agony, a cosmic convulsion. To seek only the. joy in love or to feel only the pain, is to reject its rapture and its power.

Our emotional greed or sexual personality looks for satisfaction in the form of an end, an orgasm, and we are surprised when our loving and lovemaking also come to an end. If you set out to love by looking for a conclusion, a conclusion is what you will get.

Love, unlike emotion and personality, has no beginning and no end. If you want an orgasm go and masturbate. If you want love then make love - without end, by not looking for an orgasm before you start.

The man or woman who rediscovers how to love rises above the purely emotional demand of lovemaking. In love, orgasm looks after itself and needs no consideration. Premature ejaculation, impotence, frustration and frigidity are all due to fear caused by emotional expectation or lack of love.

Am I making sense?

Never allow a man or woman to hold your hand or embrace you unless you feel the gentle firmness of love in them. Let go the greedy grasp of sexual personality. Even when it appears in a beautiful body it is looking for an end - to get away from you as quickly as possible once it's gratified.

Be still. Learn to distinguish between the ease of love and the urgent demand of emotion. Love is inexhaustible, irresistible. It is not an urge, not a demand. An urge is a spasm like the urgent emotional spasm of orgasm. When it is spent, what is left? Nothing, without love. You must never again let someone love you for that, or like that. You must continue to love physically. But you should endeavour to give yourself only to love, never to a man or woman who is not yet love. If you can hold to this and be love yourself you will gradually raise your mate in love or draw a more loving man or woman to you.

True Love

The incredible fact the world has yet to realise is that the virgin man's 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.

You were right all along in your innocence. Now you have to return to that innocent simple state of love in your love-making.

The day you gained your first real experience of physical sex the man or woman involved knew what to do with

your body but not with your love, your self. On to the emotion generated in you that day, all your previous and subsequent hang-ups are focused. You wanted love and you got sex. You have never got over it. And you never will until you are truly loved.

Sexual ignorance and repression are behind all discontent and unhappiness. True love wipes them out.

Man and woman today are for the most part embarrassed or confused when confronted with true love. When I first speak of love there is often a feeling of strangeness, of hindrance, of some sort of threat. Worldly experience cannot comprehend love that does not seek to possess any body for itself. Worldly experience insists on there being an end to everything - whereas love has no end apart from making more love.

You are starved for love because you do not dare to love.

How can your deepest longing, which is to be completely consumed by love, ever be fulfilled if you hide behind the habit of self-protection.

What is it you are protecting anyway? What have you got to lose by surrendering to love?

When I say "I love you" - and I say it now - do you wonder, "What does he want from me?"

Such love as this takes only your confusion, your defences and pretences. If you allow the love, the truth I offer to enter you, you will start to feel again the sense of love you originally knew. And if you can surrender every barrier, every thought, every movement of your mind to love, you will realise that you are loved forever.

Where love is, the world is not.

Where love is no thorns and thistles grow.

When you are truly loved, you are back in Eden.

It is I, love, who speaks to you.

Where I go I leave no footprints, no stain, no residue of world or fear. I take nothing for myself. I seek only that you be you.

And what is that? You are love - as you were in the beginning and will be in the end.

This you can realise for yourself by rediscovering how to truly love.

Talking 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 aloofness to the pangs and joys of love?

Cheat on love and you cheat yourself.

Woman is love.

Man is love -

with something to do.

Happily married? Or is it that neither of you can tell the difference between comfort and love?

Be honest. Be straight with each other. In an argument, don't accuse. Ask each other - what's the problem? What are you trying to say? Ask - and listen to the answer. Keep the emotion out. To listen is love.

Your utterances of love at any time are real only in that moment. You cannot declare that you will love tomorrow any more than you can say you will delight in each other tomorrow.

Your love and joy in each other must be made new and fresh every moment, rediscovered day in and day out, and not just in the act of lovemaking. There is no continuity in love; only in our expectation of it. But if you are prepared to love ceaselessly your love is forever.

Everybody wants to make love

But everybody is afraid.

So everybody thinks about it, reads about it, watches movies about it, lies about it and is offended when anyone is real enough to utter such a simple divine truth as "I want to make love."

The question is: do you have enough love in you to be honest and make love?

Know that love is not demanding. Love does not hold on. Love is not afraid. Love is responsible in its actions. So love does not complain or blame when it is misunderstood.

Talk to your mate of God, truth, love, death and life. All those subjects are in truth one subject - love. Talk from your own spiritual experience, your self-knowledge. By doing that, you declare to each other that love is the most important thing for you. Only man and woman who can talk of love and truth can make love for love and discover love together instead of making emotion and pain. That is true mating.

If you do not have a mate, do not turn your back on love.

Get yourself right. Prepare yourself by being true and straight.

It is never too late in life to make love. Do not think you are too old. Never think you are finished.

Love is first a state of being within. Get yourself into that being. It is love - and love provides what you need.

How do you love God?

You start by getting to know yourself in the ways I teach and by learning to love another. This is the return to the garden.

All love comes through physical love. The celibate saint who loves God and who may feel incapable of physical love, came out of physical love.

It is here on earth where there is so little love, that love needs to be made. And if you can't make it - which means that your love-life is unhappy or you have turned your back on physical love - you have turned away from love on earth and from the deepest, most real part of yourself.

The key of pleasure

To learn to make love is to learn by practice to stay with the pleasure in making love. The ultimate pleasure, the ultimate ecstasy of love is what is called God. Thus orgasm, the highest pleasure available to all, is the god of existence. Every activity is the search for orgasmic pleasure or the avoidance of making love, because it is too hard for the self of the person to stay with the pleasure. The self, or person, lives off interludes - breaks, rests, holidays. This in lovemaking translates into thoughts, shifting moods, or self-considering self-love which breaks up the pleasure. Broken up pleasure leaves room for doubt, fear, disappointment, and the search for pleasure. The self lives in or off those breaks while enjoying (for a while) the pleasure. Thus the vicious cycle of self.

The cure, the death of self, is to stay with the pleasure in lovemaking. This is so simple. So real. So true. So obvious. So practical. But it is impossible for self.

Nevertheless, you are not self. You only think you are: or conversely, thought thinks it is you.

Whatever says 'but' is self.

Love is the service of love

Man has to be made worthy to serve love. And love is woman, woman who has largely disappeared from the face of the earth. Although woman is in the body of all women on the earth, she is very, very deep down, obscured by the enormous burden of emotion, just as man is obscured under the wrong ideas of what he exists for.

Man is never more authoritative, more rightly proud of himself as man, as his manliness, than when he is serving woman as his love. Nothing on earth gives him more feelings of power, of self-mastery and rightness than when he is able to love woman rightly, because when he has that power to love her, she starts to give up her impurity. And as she gives up her impurity, she gives him his authority.

Woman has to make herself pure. She knows she is not pure. She knows she yearns to be virginal, right, true, to return to the fundamental state of love within her.

But how do you return to it? To start with, you give up any thought of doubt or fear. Doubt and fear is the corruption of you. Doubt and fear are put into you by men. Men have manipulated you. Their job is to make you doubtful and fearful. Then they can use you and make a whore of you, and a beast of burden.

When men become man, he is noble, he is the warrior, he is worthy. But men are not worthy. They use woman, manipulate her for their sexual practices, and so she carries this awful burden of unhappiness in her.

Women, all your depressions come from men.

As you are impure woman, men can make you believe in your impurity, so that you are easily manipulated. They wed you, bed you and then neglect you. They say they love you and they'll stay with you for the sake of the children, and so they make you dependent.

The principle that is woman is the blessed earth, mother earth. You women represent mother. There are no other mothers, are there? All the homosexuals are trying to make it different but they can't, can they? There is only one mother and that is woman's body, that represents mother earth that gives forth life.

Mother earth is pure and you women have to purify yourself so that you start to give forth life and not problems and troubles. Pandora's box is filled with problems and man opens it and out they fly, all round the world. You purify yourself by giving up your doubts and fears. You can do it, woman, for you are more powerful than anything else on the earth at this time.

Man must be made worthy. Woman must be pure.

Now you men, you have to give up sexual excitement. It's an extraordinarily subtle thing. It's the need to do something. (But if you've got to do something, do it and never be unhappy about it. It's because you get unhappy about what you do that you become impure and unworthy.)

Man is unworthy because he is dishonest. He is fundamentally, utterly and completely dishonest. His dishonesty is his sexuality and his sexuality is his dishonesty. You can't trust him, woman. He is not trustworthy in anything he utters. He's got to make himself worthy by being honest, honest to himself. He cannot love you, woman, if he is not honest to himself. Because he is not honest to himself, you get emotional. You think about his dishonesty, become guilty about it, unhappy about it inside your body and now the emotion is a living thing inside you. He's put his dishonesty into you so that he can manipulate you and blame you for being emotional.

You women have got to get this right. You've got to keep asking questions of the men. If you don't feel that he loves you, you can't let him get away with it. You have got to make him honest because that will make him worthy.

Sexual dishonesty is not knowing what love is for.

Enlightenment is now

How can I teach you 'now'? Is not now the unarguable, self-evident, universally common experience of being? Can I teach water? Can I teach air?

Do you want me to mislead you and tell you it is something or somewhere else but now? Why does it escape you apparently, every moment?

Because you are not being honest with yourself.

The only thing I can teach you is how to be honest. But no one wants to be honest. They want something else like enlightenment, God, love, freedom or peace. But the truth is that only when you are honest with yourself do these five things come into being.

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. I teach them that if they do not know what honesty to yourself is, 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.

So where are you making the best of things in your life instead of getting them right by being honest with yourself and all concerned?

The most intense and flagrantly dishonest area of man and woman's life is their lovelife. So here, where dishonesty rules, heartbreak abounds. And along with it: the hardness of indifference to physical love due to fearful avoidance; the anger of suppression; the nervous anxieties of denial; the depressing guilt of unrequited desire; the intellectual rationalising of the need of love into an empty abstraction - all symptomatic of the refusal to face one's own sexuality honestly.

Be honest. Know what you want. And that's nothing to do with what you like or don't like. 'Knowing what you want' you can die for. Likes and dislikes you only argue over or get emotional about. Well, what do you want? Look in the area of your life that's disturbing you and doesn't go away- you'll find it there.

The World Teacher

I am the master of truth. Love is my medium. I know precisely what I am doing in truth and love in existence. This is possible because I am neither truth, love or existence. I am being.

Self is ignorance. There is no higher Self, or lower self - only more or less ignorance. And less ignorance is no less ignorant than more ignorance, as a cup of water is no less watery than a dam full.

The process is one of realising your own ignorance.

Living from the moment of birth to the beginning of self-realisation is the acquisition of ignorance. Ignorance is knowledge without the knowledge of death, that is, knowing without knowing. So self knows (so many things) but suffers because it doesn't know (the pre-eminence of death). In other words, every self or person knows everything they know but cannot find peace in their knowledge or their self because nothing that they know or are, is the truth. Self is an artificial, acquired structure of knowledge or knowing without any truth in it, which is erected around the living experience from birth. As living contains no experience of death which is the truth, it follows that self knowledge has no truth in it.

When a person ready for change comes before a master in earnest, the master or his teaching is not perceived as it is. The master and his teaching are from the pre-eminence of the knowledge of death. And the person or self, having only the experience of the death of others and no experience of the death of self, cannot relate to the point of what the master is saying or the reality of his being, which actually embodies the extraordinary energy of the death of self. The person, in the habit of self, erects a psychic structure or emotional image of the master and his teaching which has no resemblance whatever to truth or reality. It's a self-image. The person colours this, adds to it with his knowing ignorance, and suitably amends and repairs the image to compensate for the unperceived destruction of parts of his emotional self.

It is a measure of your ignorance that by reading this I add to your ignorance, your knowledge of yourself. You self-realise it and think you know it, but you don't. It will only be more of your ignorance you're perceiving. For I, being the master of truth, beyond self and self realisation, know beyond ignorance. And ignorance can never know what that means.

The extraordinary process of self realisation goes on for many years. It is the climacteric before being.

The world is self – yourself. More and more the ignorance of yourself is realised until finally you know yourself out of existence and vanish into the knowing of being or the being of being. You then teach the world, yourself, which you now know from the point of vanishment.

© Barry Long

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