The Barry Long Bulletin

Extracts from the Works of Barry Long Australian Spiritual Teacher (1926-2003)

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I Am God-Mad

I’m God-mad . . . God-mad in a vast, vast way. When I go out on the veranda at home and I look at the whole scene, I say, ‘Wonderful, God! Wonderful!’ Or I wake up in the morning and I walk outside and I see the nature all around me: ‘Wonderful, God. Great work! Good morning, God. Good morning!' And I say that in the kitchen, in the bathroom, anywhere . . . because I’m God-mad, you see. But what do I mean by this God? If you objectify God, you’re going to miss the point. If you make a thought of God, you’re going to miss the point, because the thought is an object. This God is everything put together – nothing in particular, although I say to the birds, ‘That’s God being a bird. Hello, God!’ The clouds are God: ‘A lovely, lovely bit of artistry, God.’ I’m talking to God all day. What do you talk to all day? You talk to yourself. You must be, if you’re thinking all day, because your thoughts are yourself. In God-madness there’s no thought. There’s just an embracement of the entire. The whole scene is purely a convex thing that reflects everything back to this body, here, within, and the acknowledgement, the recognition of the whole, all comes back as the power of love. It all comes back and it delights you because it resonates with the God inside of you. ~ Barry Long

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By the Grace of God

Everything is done by grace. Finally, you will realise that this whole existence, and everything that I am, is run by God. 

'God' is the best word for it. 'God' means nothing. But we’ve acquired images of God through religions. God has no image, no form. Or God is every single thing, every single moment, including you and me. Everything is God. It is the enormous intelligence behind the intelligence that we see holding this whole world together.  

One of the ‘God realisations’ is that I am nothing - that I can of my own self do nothing. 'It is the Heavenly Father within me that doeth the work'. In other words, I am obliterated, annihilated, as anything that can have any effect except what is done through me, by grace, by the Father or the Most High, the Most Deep.

~ Barry Long

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Shed every notion about yourself. Shed every belief. Shed every notion about love. Shed it all, as quickly as possible. Go back to being innocent. Then there’s no need to know anything; you will be informed of anything you need to know.

BARRY LONG 

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What I have made in my ignorance, I must face in my consciousness. That’s justice, isn’t it? It is a long process of dying – to my self, to my false notions, to my ignorance. But, please don't lose heart. Don’t judge yourself.

BARRY LONG

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We mustn’t judge the way things are. The way things are is the way things are.

BARRY LONG

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Physical - Mental - Vital

The physical is external reality. The mental is our thought process - an intermediate reality.  And the vital is the reality behind both. 

We have created a world of thought between the nothing and the something. That’s the intermediate world. And more and more we are spending our time there rather than the physical world. It is taking us over. We are losing what is real, to have what is unreal. 

If you go around thinking, working things out intellectually, you’re in the intermediate world. It's a never-ending world. There’s no end to its seduction. And, of course, the mental world generates emotions and blockages because as soon as we think of our ex-lover, or the job we got sacked from, it stirs a psychic prisoner in us - a resentment against someone or something. The mental will always stir a blockage in us if it can.

The mental, intermediate world doesn’t achieve anything except to entertain us. We’re so compulsively habituated to the love of being entertained that we go for the closest bit of entertainment there is in what appears to be a very dull, physical world. That entertainment, in the first instance, is our imagination.

We invented our mentality, like we invented the internet, which is the result of all our thought-processes, in a sort of halo around the earth - a band of information surrounding the world that all our computers tap into. This vast network of information in the intermediate world is useless entertainment – information presented as worthwhile and having some meaning. We are all compelled, through our business or busy-ness, to go into it. And now we are stuck with it.

But the wonderful thing is that in the vital, which I am, I am free. I am beyond all thought. I am beyond the intermediate. I am beyond the death of this physical body. I am deeper than that. The vital is my reality.

~ Barry Long

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Just Do What You Do

You don’t have to make any decisions about what you’re going to do. You only think you do. 

You only have to do what you’re doing, like sitting on your chair now. You’re just doing what you’re doing, aren’t you? Where are all the big decisions? They’re all in your mind. 

Do what you have to do, because it is what you have to do. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it.

You will do what you do. You will die the very moment it is right for you to die. 

Everything will happen - the apparently useless and the apparently effective. Everything that happens has to happen. But do you need to be attached to it? No. 

Pause. Wait. Stop. Listen. Be still. That is the cleansing process. And then do what you do.

~ Barry Long

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To Love a Woman

Man wants something out of woman. But all you’re ever going to get, man, is nothing - because nothing is the state of being. 

Just love her. Then you’ll receive back something extraordinary. 

Woman’s nature is to give, to love. She’s not going to give to that which is demanding. When man drops his demands of her, woman automatically loves and gives.

~ Barry Long 

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Woman is 100% love. Man is 90% love with ten percent something to do.

BARRY LONG

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Love needs no thought. Any thought at all about love and you have polluted it. For in love's communication there is no thought.

BARRY LONG

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What Love Wants

Pure love doesn’t want to get anything. It just wants to give.

The next time you find yourself in any situation where you feel a contraction in you; where you feel, ‘I don’t want to do this’; where you feel, ‘This is impossible’, then give. Either give it up or give, actually give. 

‘What do you want? What are you asking me to do?’ 

Give.

~ Barry Long

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There is no person in love. For love seeks nothing for itself. Your person wants something for itself. The love you are seeks nothing for itself - because it has no self.

BARRY LONG

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Intelligent?

The whole purpose of your life is to speed up your intelligence. That’s all it’s about - to be more intelligent than in the last moment. But nobody’s ever told us how to be intelligent, have they? We’re in the hands of the scientists and the university professors . . .

I can only be more intelligent as I release my holding on to the past - to the last moment, to yesterday. I slow my intelligence down if I want something I knew in the past or want in the future. That’s unintelligent. If you want something, stop wanting it and go and do it. If you can’t do it, then stop wanting. That’s intelligent, isn’t it?  

~ Barry Long

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Everything has served you. No matter what anybody has done to you, it has served you. And it has served you right.

BARRY LONG

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Meditating in the Moment

Meditation is purely being in the body in a continuous state of surrender, the surrender of yourself. Starting with the body, we might see it as a well and we are inside it, holding on to the sides of the well with grim determination, evidenced by the strain or tension in the body. As a rule we are not aware of this tension unless we have a pain or headache. Because we don't look inwardly, we depend on pain to tell us we are holding on; or depend on some other manifestation of our clinging to the body. But as we start to meditate we look inside to see where we're holding on and then remember to surrender.

This surrender has to be done now. The only time that it can ever be done is now. But the self, or emotion or past, sweeps over you and removes you from that moment of surrender; and it takes time to get to the state of purely being in the body, in the senses, self-surrendered. So the idea is to gradually reduce the intervals between each moment of being the awareness of now.

We have to get into our senses. That doesn't mean that to be really alive we have to run around being super-sensitive, which is the impression I got from the Gurdjieff teaching. That's admirable at the stage of getting your attention into your body so that you are aware of your existence without slipping away from the now. But to get back into your senses you only have to remember to self-surrender.

You surrender in the now but to be self-surrendered is be in the moment. To get into this moment, which is more present than 'the now', is to know you are self-surrendered. Being in 'the now' is being in the senses, able to see yourself walking up the road or doing anything. To be in the moment the mind has to become stiller than that.

In right meditation you are endeavouring to reach the pure sensation of yourself in the moment. And in that moment the sensation of yourself moves at the same speed as the mind until they are one, a 360 degree unity. You are then surrendered without any conscious effort whatsoever. You are just consciousness.

~ Barry Long

Speaking to the Highgate Meditation Group, London, 5 August 1981

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Why Come to Me?

The purpose of intelligent life on Earth is for man and woman to reach cosmic consciousness. I lead you further toward that possibility. I reveal new energy in your body and deepen your awareness of life and love. A radical speeding up of perception is required. I will speed you up in love and consciousness.

~ Barry Long

Announcing two seminars on ‘The Truth of Life’ and ‘The Truth of Love’ 19 & 20 October, in Mill Valley, California, on his first visit to teach in the USA. 

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BARRY LONG IN 1991 AS HE SET OFF ON HIS FIRST INTERNATIONAL TEACHING TOUR.