Barry Long Quotes

79 Sourced Quotes

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?

Barry Long
Human love is not love. Love is natural to every body but it becomes human love as the person learns from society to confuse love with sex.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

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

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
The truth is that once you discover something is false you lose interest in it. Man no longer treasures what he thought was genuine once he discovers it is false. In this way truth is its own solution. Self-knowledge is the discovery of the false. You do not have to find what is true: when the false is discarded truth is there. It always was. Just keep observing the fact and the change will come automatically and will he lasting.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
KNOWING YOURSELF means being able to separate the true from the false in yourself - love from emotion, joy from sentiment, Will from desire. No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.

Barry Long
To listen, to learn, your mind has to be still. Have you ever observed that you can have only one thought in your mind at a time?

Barry Long
We can rarely see things from the point of view of another person because we look at the facts through the screen of an impression or an interest which distorts our view; and then there are accusations, quarrels and misunderstanding.

Barry Long
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.

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

Barry Long
Each moment provides a challenge to you to become conscious. The game is to be waiting, and aware.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

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

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
The understanding of love comes with the knowledge that you are nothing. The greatest purity is nothing or nothingness - no thinking, no desiring, no imagining. You are then one with the moment and the great movement of life so nothing can happen that is not right. Every moment is perfect and everything that happens is eternally just.

Barry Long
Love is not a feeling; it's a sensation. Drinking water when you're thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when you're tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations don't need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational.

Barry Long