Barry Long Quotes

This is an unofficial tumblr devoted to the spiritual master Barry Long. Barry Long was a highly influential and original spiritual teacher born in Australia in 1926. He spoke about truth, love, life, death and God to many thousands of people worldwide for over 25 years. He died in 2003, aged 77. Please visit the official Barry Long Foundation websites and tumblr to help support their work.

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The Barry Long Foundation has launched a new website.

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Me

There is only one ‘me’. And it is the same intimate presence of being that each one refers to as 'me’ - not my self, not my unhappiness, not the world in me, but the living reality of every body.

~ Barry Long

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Barry Long teaching in the tent at Camp Wollumbin during a Master Session.

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True Love

True love is the knowledge ‘I love her’ and, although I truly love her, it is not the woman I truly love … Finally it is the principle that demonstrates itself in her. I don’t love anything else. I just love loving her.

Man, do you love loving her? I don’t mean having sex with her, which is a very beautiful thing, but do you enjoy just loving her? Do you enjoy just having breakfast with her? Do you enjoy just being alone with her? Do you enjoy waking up in the morning and putting your arms around her, knowing how blessed you are to have her there beside you? The human race doesn’t love like that, but the individual can.

The human race doesn’t love like that because there are too many distractions, too many other loves. Like your new car. Or surfing. Or going to the pub at night and having a sing-a-long … So many other things to love. But finally, if you love God, all the distractions disappear. You just love loving. That’s all. Amazing, isn’t it? It comes down to the love of God, because the principle of man and woman, of Adam and Eve, is the principle of God.

~ Barry Long Edited extract from one of Barry’s last seminars - August 2002.

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All unhappiness on earth is due to not being practical in fact and truth.

Barry Long (via barrylongbulletin)

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The Time It Takes

People always want time …  And then complain about the time it takes.

You do not need time to be honest. You do not need time to see.

The only time involved is the time it takes to see the truth of the lie you’re living and take action to resolve it - the time it takes to get your life right.

~ Barry Long

From the Tamborine Talk November 1990

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We try to avoid old pain and frequently won’t admit that a situation or partnership is making us unhappy - even though it’s obvious to others around us that it is.

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Go for the Good

Always go for the good. Endeavour to feel the good, the peace … If you can’t feel the good, then feel the sensation that’s neither good nor bad, just steady; a little drumming, a graininess. Only when you can feel the good or the sensation, do you become aware of the disturbance, the fear, the anxiety. Always perceive those negative emotions after you are in the good or have made contact with the sensation.

Don’t just go to the problem, the bad, the disturbance, the anxiety in you, for it’s like a magnet. If you go straight to that, it will suck you in and before long you’ll become depressed and emotional. Your brain won’t be any help, because it loves to think, to get experience. And the best experience the brain can get is from anxiety and fear. For then it races around and around in useless thought. And then it’s no good trying to make contact with the good or the sensation. No matter how hard you try, the negative emotions are too strong.​ ​ So always go to the good in the first instance. If you can’t reach the good, get to the sensation. And from that point be aware that there is fear or disturbance inside of you. But don’t linger there. Stay with the sensation or the good and that will gradually dissolve the other.

~ Barry Long

Edited from the Tamborine Talk October 1990

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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  (via barrylongbulletin)

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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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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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I shall take you apart in your own perception and put you together again. I shall make you whole. This is the great yoga, the great union.

BARRY LONG

[Announcing a talk on ‘The Enabling Power of Freedom - the Power of Being Free’. City University London 1989]

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Two keys to being responsible: I must not judge myself and I must do what I know to be right and not avoid it.

Barry Long

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“No memory: No problem.”

— Barry Long

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What Perfection Is

Perfection is eighty per cent good and twenty per cent not so good. The brain, of course, thinks that perfection is one hundred per cent good. But that only shows how unreal the brain is. There is nothing that is one hundred per cent good.  

Perfection is all around you … Is everything now. And everything has a blemish, although the greater part is always good or the truth. Take your life at any time, or your body, or your home … Eighty per cent, the greater part, is good, and twenty per cent not so good.

But don’t see either the greater or the lesser in isolation. See the two as the union of ‘one hundred per cent’. When it’s not so good, or you see something that’s not so good, have a look and see that there is still the eighty per cent that’s all right.

When you look upon the world and see something that doesn’t work, or is just so stupid you can’t believe how it happens, will you please see it as the twenty per cent - a part of the perfection. The whole of existence is the eighty and the twenty. That’s perfection.

~ Barry Long

From the Tamborine Talk October 1990

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BARRY LONG ~ Spiritual Master (1926-2003)

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No Problem Partnership

Is your partner there?​  Call him or her over, and let’s do a deal together.

You say to him, ‘I won’t give you any problems and you don’t give me any problems. Right?' 

He agrees and says, 'I won’t give you any problems and you don’t give me any problems.' 

And you agree. Otherwise, what else are you living together for? To give each other problems? ​

​To make this work, you have to be very honest. Having agreed not to give each other any problems, as soon as a problem arises between you, or arises in your head, you must front up to your partner straight away: 'I have a problem.’

Your partner, of course, having agreed to be honest with you - you have to be extremely honest - says, 'Tell me, what’s the problem?’

You tell your partner, or he tells you, precisely what the problem is with you or that you are apparently causing in him or her. You must do it.  Don’t put it off.

That’s how you live together without problems.

~ Barry Long

From the Tamborine Talk October 1990