Barry Long - Knowledge Quotes

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Your object is to see yourself exactly as you are. Self-knowledge is the discovery of the new: it looks beyond the world that has all the answers and no solutions.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
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.

Barry Long
When self-knowledge reveals the answer it will be a living fact in your own experience. At any time you wish to experience the answer it will be there, just as you can say 'It is night' or 'It is day'. You will know, while the rest of the world is arguing and speculating.

Barry Long
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.

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
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
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
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
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.

Barry Long
Okay, so you don't have drugs, alcohol and sex but you love someone, as a feeling. Then it won't be long before you'll be experiencing one or more of the painful feelings I've mentioned above - and thinking it's natural! Wait and see. Even in every day living you're continually interpreting experience via your emotions instead of being the experience direct. "This is good, that's bad," your feelings swing subtly to and fro all day long obscuring the reality, the sensational knowledge or gnosis that it's not bad at all; it's simply life as it is.

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
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
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