Barry Long quotes - page 3

It is the conscious man or woman who finds the secret of happiness and contentment; and that, surely, is the ultimate success. (Barry Long)
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. View quote
Barry Long
You are either ready to discover yourself or you are not. Ready means you have been knowingly or unknowingly practicing self-observation. View quote
Barry Long
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long
Sex is excitement, seeks satisfaction and soon loses interest - selfishness. Making love is passionate, fulfilling and does not look for an end - selflessness. View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long
If God exists, God can be experienced; but only by you. View quote
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? View quote
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. View quote
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)
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long
Yes, well I noticed that in your last issues' interviews with those Eastern teachers ["From light to Light," Jan. 1995], emptiness was mentioned a lot. I find that a wrong word. Because in God realisation and being one with God the Most High, the unspeakable one, there's no sense whatsoever of ever having done anything yourself. It is all done for you. It's by grace. And so it's not being empty, it's being emptied. There's a different emphasis or a different connotation to that. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long
Before you can escape from your burrow you must know you are trapped. Then there's a chance. View quote
Barry Long
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'. View quote
Barry Long
The Creator has to be experienced beyond the five senses and the only instrument that can experience in this way, for you, is yourself - in the state of thoughtless awareness in which you declare 'I am' and hold it. (Barry Long)
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? View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barry Long