Without Questions
Meditation is a process of getting closer to the divine, closer to love, closer to having no self-doubt and no questions.
Reaching the authority of yourself is what meditation is all about - not an authority that builds you up, but which gives you a certainty within yourself that does not encroach on others. You get stiller and stiller, with less emotion, less assumption, less thought, so that your attention sinks deeper and deeper into the unconscious mind. When you get deep enough, various realisations come. I endeavour to get you to the point where the realisation of immortality comes. If you realise immortality, there are no more questions. How can there be? Every question is about fear and self-doubt, related to the fear of death.
There is an infinite depth to discover, but that doesn’t need questions, only stillness and listening. If I do have any questions, my unconscious mind will provide the people to tell me the answers, without my asking. As I am within is what my world is without. I am informed of everything I need to know.
If you keep persisting in trying to discover this and that, the past will sweep into the beautiful space where your stillness was; and it will appear in your world as well as in yourself, because we are emotional beings of the past. When we are born we bring into this world millions of years of the past life on earth, our taproot. If you realise immortality you cannot afford to start delving into all that past. If you cannot resist questioning and emotional self-examination, you will get sucked down into that taproot, that vortex. You will always know immortality, but you will lose the state of it because another part of you is mixed up in self-examination and you will feel split. You cannot flirt with the past. It is too gigantic. But if you can know the past without getting involved in it, then you can go into it any time you want.
~ Barry Long
Speaking to his meditation group in London, 1 July 1981