Barry Long Quotes

When you observe yourself you must not condemn or approve what you see. If you tell a lie there is no need to judge your-self. The judge cannot be the judged, and even to accept is to judge.

Man conscious is man immortal. Man conscious gives to the creation as no other thing can give and is beyond death. But it is no use my just saying this. You must discover it, realize it for yourself.

The moment is your only duty. Your duty at any time in your life is to do what you have to do from moment to moment. What you have to do is what you cannot avoid doing. What you cannot avoid doing is what you do.

Truth does not need argument, agreement, theories or beliefs. There is only one test for it and that is to ask yourself 'Is the statement true or false in my experience?'

It is only because you are a machine that you suffer; and the purpose of suffering is to wake you up.

In the beginning the entire creation seems to hinder, obstruct and try to keep you away from experiencing the Creator. It is the way of things that only the unrelenting, indomitable individual can escape and experience God. The curious masses always fail. Later on, all things help, not hinder, the valiant ones.

YOU ARE WHAT you believe you are. You live, enjoy life and suffer according to that belief. What you believe, you live; or you do not believe it.

In other words, to be enlightened of the acquired burden every spiritual belief and notion has to be abandoned, every reference to what any spiritual teacher or master has ever said must be set aside. What does that leave? Your own experience. Not your historical or memorable experience, for that's the problem. Your own experience is your self-knowledge of life. Let's establish once and for all what this means now. Forget everything I've said in this article except this question: Do I want to suffer or not suffer NOW? That's the only truth for you. There's no tradition, no past, no discussion in it. It's all you need. Keep it with you and at the next temptation to suffer it will prevent you suffering. But only if you've learned in your own experience what causes you to suffer. If you haven't learned that, you're still attached to suffering and will unwittingly embrace it. In that case you have to read on, take more time and ask yourself more questions.

Reasonable acceptance, our way of living, is imperfect. But God, if God exists, must be perfect and beyond reason.

Truth cannot be taught but it is quickly recognized by the person ready to discover it.

If God exists, God can be experienced; but only by you.

The Creator has to be experienced beyond the five senses and the only instrument that can experience in this way, for you, is yourself - in the state of thoughtless awareness in which you declare 'I am' and hold it.

The fact is always simple. The difficulty is in seeing it through the mind which always takes the imaginative way - until it is stilled. The mind knows it is the master in imagination and the slave of the fact. It will fight you all the way to self-knowledge. And why not? It is the only enemy.

To believe what another says about you is unconscious, robot thinking. Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind.

Enlightenment can't be pursued or sought after. [...] Truth is here now; no past, no future. People are unenlightened only because they believe in the truth of the past and therefore must look to the rewards of the future. To be enlightened, to return to the original state of life on earth, requires action now in the present with no reference to the past. What has to be done is to kill the old priest in you, starve out the traditionalist, the follower, the believer.