Barry Long
BARRY LONG was born in Sydney in 1926 and spent his first 38 years in Australia. His early career was in newspapers, starting as an office boy and ending as editor of a Sydney Sunday paper. An ambitious young man, he thrived in the world of competition and materialism. At one time he was press secretary to the Opposition leader in the New South Wales parliament. He got married and became a father. But the career of the thrusting executive and devoted family man was short-lived.
Around the age of 31 something in him changed. Inexplicably the knowledge and love of God started to rise in him. And with it came the awful suffering of dying to his self and the dawning of an unshakeable perception of truth. Looking for some reality in the world, he read and talked and questioned - and tested against his own experience - everything that was presented as the truth.
He pursued his new found purpose with passionate intelligence, and his one-pointed zeal brought him to a point of crisis. The unendurable longing for something real manifested as the consuming love of a woman. He abandoned his career, left his family and homeland, and with her he set out for India, landed in Madras (Chennai) and drove to the Himalayas.
He would have sat at the feet of a guru if he'd been able to find one. But Meher Baba had just gone into seclusion, and when he saw J.Krishnamurti privately, there was nothing to say.
The woman returned to Australia and finished with him. In a bungalow in Almora in the foothills of the Himalayas, alone and rapt in desolation, he faced the truth of himself, passed through the illusion of death and entered what he called the realisation of immortality.
Up in the hills, in meditation, he discovered many things and being a writer he wrote some of them down. He thought he might get them published if he went to London so he travelled to England. Nobody was interested in his manuscripts at this time, but he got work as a sub-editor in London's Fleet Street.
Whenever Barry wasn't busy at work he was busy writing and talking to a small group of people who'd gathered around him. He was developing the ability to talk on any subject and demonstrate the truth of it in the listener's experience.
He was continually put to the test as his self-knowledge continued to deepen. For a few weeks one of his 'students' actually became his teacher and pushed him to a new point of realisation - what he calls the transcendental realisation.
Throughout the 1970s he earned his living by writing. Working at home he was able to devote more of his life to the truth.
In the early 1980s the people who had been meeting with Barry regularly undertook to introduce him to a wider public. He began to give open meetings and meditation classes in London, and these attracted increasing numbers. His work at this time was gnostic in character and his insights and perceptions were set down in a revelatory book ‘The Origins of Man and the Universe’ first published in 1984 by Routledge & Kegan Paul.
By 1985 The Barry Long Foundation was established in England as a registered educational charity arranging public meetings and seminars and publishing a series of books and audio teaching tapes. The next year Barry moved to Australia and set about making his teaching known in his own country from which he had been absent for twenty years. From his home on Tamborine Mountain on the Gold Coast of Queensland he established the Barry Long Centre, held seminars in most of the major cities in Australia, and also went to New Zealand.
Over the next few years as well as teaching widely in Australia, Barry often returned to England and there were extensive tours of Europe, Scandinavia and North America. He presented The Course in Being all over the world from Santa Fe in New Mexico to St Petersburg in Russia, from Sydney to Copenhagen, and from Vancouver to Jamaica.
In 1993 he introduced The Master Session, an annual 16-day teaching event held in late October at Cabarita Beach in northern New South Wales, Australia.
In 1994 Barry Long Books (the publishing arm of The Barry Long Foundation) began releasing new editions of his written works. These are distributed through the book trade in America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Many of the books are also published in foreign language editions by other publishers. Currently Barry Long's work has been published in 11 languages.
In 1996 The Barry Long Foundation International, based in Australia, took over the worldwide organisation of Barry Long's work. The Foundation was responsible for arranging all his public meetings and offered a mail-order service for his expanding range of books, audio and video recordings.
In 1998 Barry Long held his last meeting in Europe, The European Session, a nine-day event with in excess of 600 participants. From that time Barry only taught in Australia. The annual Australian Master Session continued to attract 300 - 500 people from around the world.
Barry gave his last public teaching at the 14-day Master Session on the Gold Coast, Queensland, in November 2002. In the last year of his life he continued to write.
Barry Long died on 6 December 2003, at the age of 77. It was his wish that his books and tapes should continue to be published and be made available by The Barry Long Foundation International.
BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTARY
This is Barry Long’s story, told in his own words, using a montage of film and video footage, still photos and archive materials.
Barry Long’s autobiography, My Life of Love and Truth, was published ten years after his death. This film complements the book with a visual record and a fascinating personal interview in which he accounts for the source of his teachings about life, death, truth and love.
View ‘My Life of Love and Truth’ in the store
Listen to a BBC interview with Barry Long from ’84
NEED A RECOMMENDATION ON WHERE TO START READING?
Barry Long wrote a remarkable article while he was dying:
What it is to die
OBITUARY
Long, Barry (1926–2003)
By Clive Tempest
Australia is not famous for its gurus, but among spiritual seekers around the world, Barry Long was known as the Australian voice of a new kind of spirituality, one that doesn’t rely on tradition or belief but makes the individual alone responsible for his or her own salvation.
In fact, he used to caution his audiences: ‘Don’t believe a word I say. I might be a liar or a fool’. Like all great teachers, he wanted people to listen for the ring of truth and test everything he said against their own experience.
He was very evidently neither a liar nor a fool. Long’s extraordinary intelligence was always on display in his seminars and public meetings. He could speak for hours on end, answering any question fired at him and his audiences would listen intently, sitting perfectly still. The words flowed out of him, as long as he was speaking of his stated subjects: life, love, truth, death and God. And he always made it practical, related to everyday life.
Read moreLong made a point of telling it like it is, with no concessions to politeness or convention. He was never willing to compromise. Honesty was characteristic of both the man and his teaching. He wanted his audiences to see life exactly as it is and not be deluded by false beliefs, hopes and promises.
His purpose was to get rid of unhappiness and, to him, the greatest cause of unhappiness on earth is that men and women have forgotten how to love one another. And he meant sexual love. "I get right down to the nitty-gritty of your life, here on earth, where love is made."
Others before him had made the same point. What was new was that Long brought God into it. He was not a therapist; he was aiming to teach people how to love God, in all kinds of ways, including through the act of sexual union. Some people, mostly men, found it hard to take. The villain, according to Long, was the sexually predatory male. Long was a romantic at heart and women generally loved him for it.
He was probably better known overseas. People came from many countries to his "Master Sessions" and seminars on the Gold Coast. He had spoken in places as far afield as Jamaica and Russia, crisscrossed the United States many times and had a large following in Britain, Germany, Netherlands and Scandinavia.
All this from a man who was raised in Sydney in the 1930s, with few advantages. But he was never a slouch. He left school, got himself a job as a copy boy in newspapers and soon after was a crime reporter. His talent was spotted by Eric Baume, who appointed him editor of Truth (later the Sunday Mirror). He went on to work at Parliament House as press secretary to Sir Robert Askin.
But a life of conventional success was not for him. It produced no fulfilment. Eventually he was thrown into a classic crisis of the spirit. His mother, to whom he was devoted, pleaded with him to see a psychiatrist. Instead he abandoned everything and headed for India. There, in 1965, he finally went through what he called "the mystic death" and there was no turning back.
He had begun to write books and took the manuscripts to London to get them published. No one was interested. It wasn't until the early '80s that a wider public was ready to hear what he had to say. His Meditation: A Foundation Course is now a bestseller, in seven languages.
In 1984 Routledge published his Origins of Man and the Universe but it was still ahead of its time. Among its many prophetic insights is a forecast of the terrorism that we are so familiar with post-September 11.
Long returned from England in 1986 to live on Tamborine Mountain, Queensland, and later near Mullumbimby. He loved his native land and took great enjoyment from life. He was married three times and had two long-term partners.
For the last eight years he had been living with prostate cancer but continued working until the last months. He died in Coolangatta. He asked for no memorial and wanted to leave nothing behind him except his books and recorded words.
