Barry Long Quotes

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.

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.

Absorb what is said as you read but endeavor not to hold on to it or think about it. Read in the moment and each step will take you closer to complete self-knowledge.

When the robot mind is mastered, undisciplined thinking ceases and is replaced by awareness. Awareness can know love. You can only experience the new when you are aware, when you are without thought.

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.

Action will happen in its own time. Action taken on strength of feelings inevitably leads to more feelings to correct the action previously taken - and so the feelings of discontent and conflict, and corrective actions go on and on repeating themselves.

Reason is a mighty faculty but it is still below the state of awareness, of pure experiencing, which is the state you are in when you know 'I exist' or 'I am'.

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?'

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 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.

There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.

I suppose the most radical part of my teaching at present is that love is not a feeling. Everybody suffers from love, or the fear of it, or the lack of it. Why? Why is love so universally and inevitably heart-breaking, whether it be through the end of a love affair, the death of a loved one or being locked in with the habitual casualness or grim indifference of a partner? The answer is because we've been taught and conditioned by the world to believe that love is a feeling.

IF YOU LOOK at life's totality you will notice that every living thing exists for something else. The failure to give and receive is followed first by unconsciousness and then death.

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

By disidentifying with your feelings you break your attachment to them. When that is done sufficiently you're back at the beginning, in pure sensation or unconditioned knowledge. You've been beating your head against the wall to get some feelings and all you've got to do is break the habit and get used to living anew without pain and conflict. But that's a mighty realisation, and a mighty simple one which few are going to accept - they'll be too busy defending their feelings! So, I guess I'll still be demonstrating this the day I die.