Barry Long Quotes

WE HAVE SEEN that hunger and breathing are desires of the body. There are other desires that are not of the body, but again man seldom pauses to observe these desires in himself. For us who are observers of ourselves there can never be a hidden desire or hidden motivation. If we are always observing ourselves nothing hidden can come in without being spotted, and nothing hidden can get done, because we (the master) are always there.

This process of self-discovery is scientific and the invariable rule of science has to be applied - experiment and observe. The experiment is to ask the question; the observation is to look at yourself and see what happens. Being a science the law cannot vary. Any apparent variation is in you: you will have stepped off the way of facts into conclusions. The sun is either shining or it is not. You do not have to conclude; you just look.

Nothing is true unless it is true in your own experience. This is your protection against being duped or misled.

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

The man-machine will crucify any conscious man who tries to help him; and convert his wisdom into an empty, mechanical dogma that suits his own understanding.

Many mystics have said, and it is true, that anything you see is not God. Anything you think is not God, neither are visions, lights, moving objects or anything else. Any sensation or feeling is not God. They are all the products of the creation or your imagination.

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.

Enlightenment is enlightenment. And that's that. It's an unalterable, unwavering state of knowledge and being beyond doubt, a completion every moment by grace of the Most High, the unspeakable one, God. That's the ultimate; the absolute being beyond any description. But the ultimate, the enlightenment of man, must translate into his living life. And to me and my teaching that means an enlightened man is liberated from unhappiness. Being and living free of unhappiness is the natural and simple state of all life on earth - except man. He has been misled away from it by spiritual lures and glamour and the result is the conflict and pain, the fluctuating unhappiness, of his short life.

Do you know what humanity is, what the word "human" means? The word human where I come from - which is the enlightened state - means suffering. So when you say you're a human being, you're saying you're a suffering being. And I say you have to get rid of your suffering and then be being. Enlightenment is the state of being which I am, this moment and every moment. So I'm not suffering. But humanity loves to suffer. People love to suffer because they love to get excited with their feelings. All you've got to do is get rid of your feelings, which are always negative. Why not get rid of the whole lot of it, now? That means you don't know feelings and then you don't know negativity, and then you'd be in love, and then you would love everybody by not loving anybody in particular as a feeling. That's the state of enlightenment.

Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.

On the way to God you have to pass through beauty, pure beauty. If you do not pass through beauty it is not God that you find. Beauty stands at the gate of the kingdom of heaven. It is of the Creator, but not the Creator; and it is all-mighty.

Love is the state of enlightenment and enlightenment is the state of love. You can't make any separation between them. Enlightenment is the state of no feelings and pure knowledge and so is love.

You don't gather knowledge when you are getting to know yourself; you lose it. Many of your firmest ideas go out the window. You may feel naked, vulnerable, threatened, argumentative, angry.

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

The love of man and woman is the beginning of the love of God. You can realise God within like many men have done. It's one of the rarest things on earth to realise God, but everybody seems to think that that's the end. Where I come from, realising God was the easy part of it. That God of love which is already here anyway - who wouldn't be able to realise it? The difficult part is to bring that God into this world where God or love is not, into that body listening to these words and this body speaking them. That's the task.