Barry Long Quotes

At the top of the ladder is awareness, or pure experience - the edge of yourself, and possibly the beginning of God.

To go beyond reason we have to climb up the ladder of reason and go to the top of it. This will not upset reason as it is interested only in assembling the facts, whatever they might be. Reason is an ever-loyal tool; imagination an ever-failing fool.

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.

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'.

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

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

Before you can escape from your burrow you must know you are trapped. Then there's a chance.

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.

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.

You think: you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost. The highest knowledge man can possess is that which is true in his own experience. If his experience is limited, so is his knowledge and he behaves accordingly.

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.

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.

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.

One of the greatest steps in self-discovery is to see that you are a machine. Only the few who have real knowledge will admit to being machines.

You can predict exactly what a machine will do if you have sufficient knowledge of it. A machine cannot go beyond the limitations of its design. The man-machine fears death because a machine cannot see beyond its own destruction.