Barry Long Quotes

All love - love of children, love of parents, love of God or life - comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.

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.

All feelings are false and deceptive. [...] Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the pure sensation of divine being. And that pretty well sums up the whole spiritual process. But the spiritual process is so little understood that people don't realise their feelings are personal and false and have been misleading them all their life. If that's not true, why is humanity still unenlightened and basically unhappy after all this time - when enlightenment is the completely natural, sensational state of being every moment?

Reason does not need thinking. If you observe yourself making a plan you will notice that having fixed the object, the facts just keep coming, linking up into a chain of proposed action. Awareness is experiencing from moment to moment. Reason acts quickly in awareness, a thousand times faster than thought, and you do not even notice it is operating.

You will become more conscious if you use the moment of being rebuked or blamed to observe your reaction. You will observe yourself making an excuse, giving a reason.

The fact is that unless you experience something for yourself it does not exist for you. If God exists you must have the experience of God in the moment; otherwise you are absent and God cannot exist for you.

But in our ignorance we emotionalise joy, beauty and love. We make feelings of them, personal interpretations based on our old emotions. We put our personal past on the present with the result that joy, beauty and love don't seem to last. But it's our emotional substitutes that don't last and we become bored, discontented and unhappy again. The sensation or knowledge of joy, beauty and love is of course still there but it's overwhelmed by these coarser feelings.

Have you learned yet that you only suffer when you think about events or feel about them, that you don't suffer from events themselves? Have you learned yet that every thought about yourself is a thought of the past, that worry is thinking and that all thinking eventually leads to worry, fear and insecurity? If so, each time you go to think, or catch the thinker thinking even about "good" things like last night's movie, don't; stop. Not because Barry Long says so but because you've realised the truth of thinking in your own experience. It's what you've learned from life, not from someone else's experience. Therefore it is the truth for you now and every moment. Otherwise you must go on thinking and go on suffering. One day, when you've had enough of the pain, you'll come to your senses. Have you learned yet that every feeling is a feeling of the past and that every "good" feeling soon changes and eventually becomes the feeling of doubt, confusion, boredom or sorrow? If so, stop believing your feelings; don't act on them; wait.

You are either ready to discover yourself or you are not. Ready means you have been knowingly or unknowingly practicing self-observation.

To be conscious is to be consciousness: Consciousness, the knower in you, cannot be known, although it can be experienced. You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.

Feelings, even the best of them, turn to negativity - disappointment, anger, discontent, resentment, jealousy, guilt, etc. A good feeling starts off being elevating, exciting, like taking a drug substance, alcohol or having sex. But what goes up must come down and feelings are no exception. So in a couple of hours or days the down side starts and you perhaps wonder why you feel moody, depressed, suicidal or just plain unhappy. You're paying the piper for yesterday's music. And between the upside and the downside is the no-man's and no-woman's land of boredom, indifference, inertia, weariness and pointlessness.

If in your own experience you haven't yet learned the truth of the deception of feelings, then you just have to go on believing and thinking, having faith in the past and hope in the future, being happy today and unhappy tomorrow, but never being in command of your own life for long.

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

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.

You must not believe me. You must realize it in yourself know it, for it is beyond words and thinking. And it has to be experienced without recourse to drugs or insanity.