Barry Long Quotations

The fact is that to worry or suffer mentally you have to have an opinion. You have to say 'That is bad in relation to me.

There is only one thing in your life YOU can be sure of. That one thing is this moment, now. The last moment has gone forever. The next moment has not come. YOU can become fully conscious only when you are living in the moment. To begin to live in the moment you have to know it exists and understand it. To understand it you have to observe it in relation to yourself and in relation to life. When you understand it, when you become conscious, you will see it is all that exists. To see this is to glimpse reality.

Love is all around you like the air, and is the very breath of your being.

To experience beauty, love, truth and peace, or God, your mind has to be stilled.

Feelings are constantly changing. None is dependable for long. You can love someone intensely today, and tomorrow or next month not feel a thing. Except perhaps for the feeling of doubt or depression that what was so beautiful could change so quickly.

The whole purpose of existence is to bring love into existence where it is needed.

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.

Love is a power, a mighty principle that exists in its own right independent of any individual. Man changes, but the principle of love does not and cannot. Love does not leave men and women. Men and women leave love.

I suppose the most radical part of my teaching at present is that love is not a feeling. Everybody suffers from love, or the fear of it, or the lack of it. Why? Why is love so universally and inevitably heart-breaking, whether it be through the end of a love affair, the death of a loved one or being locked in with the habitual casualness or grim indifference of a partner? The answer is because we've been taught and conditioned by the world to believe that love is a feeling.

When the robot mind is mastered, undisciplined thinking ceases and is replaced by awareness. Awareness can know love.

Pornography is just 'fast-food feminine energy', it will always leave you wanting more, with little or no nutritional value. There is nothing ful-filling about pornography, it pales in insignificance to a fully embodied loving woman.

Acknowledgement is the only way to keep love alive.

WE HAVE SEEN that hunger and breathing are desires of the body. There are other desires that are not of the body, but again man seldom pauses to observe these desires in himself.

Beauty is and always is. You are absent. Why are you absent? Again your robot mind is the problem. It will not stay still and you cannot make it stay still. It is your master and it separates you from beauty and God.

Truth does not need argument, agreement, theories or beliefs. There is only one test for it and that is to ask yourself 'Is the statement true or false in my experience?.

No religion knows the truth. Only he or she who lives it knows.

All is energy and there is no energy higher than right love, which has no object

There is a notion that existence is an illusion. Existence is not an illusion. Existence is a projection from the inner through the brain producing the outer sensory world of what is - an amazing complete mystery.

The only way we can ever get through to the truth is by finding out what we are not. We do that by looking, by observation.

You must not believe anyone in the search for truth; you have to find out for yourself. But although you are on your own, help will come when it is really needed.

Love is all around you like the air and is the very breath of your being. But you cannot know it, feel its unfeeling touch, until you pause in your busy-ness, are still and poised and empty of your wanting and desiring. When at rest the air is easily offended and will flee even from the fanning of a leaf, as love flees from the first thought. But when the air or love moves of its own accord it is a hurricane that drives all before it.

Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating. Love is beyond the mind because it is always new. Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old. So the mind is a modifier, a reactor; a renovator, but it cannot create the new.

All love - love of children, love of parents, love of God or life - comes out of making physical love. Without the making of love there is no body to love anything.

You can't realise love or yourself until you are still enough to drop down through the restlessness and frustrations into that deeper level of your being

You think, you become that thought. And consciousness, or the state of pure awareness, is lost.

Anything that is said is not the truth. It is a statement of truth, and no statement is the truth.

You can only get next to God through the effort of preparation. To experience the uncreated, the state of awareness will have to be held for several minutes. You are then between time and the time-less - waiting for the unknown, which will come but cannot be willed.

Truth cannot be taught but it is quickly recognised by the person ready to discover it.

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.'

The more you observe life in relation to yourself the more you will see the fact that you are hardly ever correct when you think about something in the future. The future exists only in imagination; and that is why, no matter how hard you try to imagine it, you will not be able to predict the future with total certainty.

Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old.

When you observe yourself you must not condemn or approve what you see. If you tell a lie there is no need to judge your-self.

You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.

No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.

We can rarely see things from the point of view of another person because we look at the facts through the screen of an impression or an interest which distorts our view; and then there are accusations, quarrels and misunderstandin g.

It is a little known fact that truth cannot be memorized. Truth has to be discovered now, from moment to moment. It is always fresh, always new, always there for the still, innocent mind that has experienced life without needing to hold on to what has gone before.

Nothing is true in self-discovery unless it is true in your own experience. This is the only protection against the robot levels of the mind.

Love is beyond the mind because it is always new.

Love is beyond description; but not beyond demonstrating.

Self-knowledge is the discovery of the new, it looks beyond the world that has all the answers and no solutions.

It is always fresh, always new, always there for the still, innocent mind that has experienced life without needing to hold on to what has gone before.

Reason does not need thinking. If you observe yourself making a plan you will notice that having fixed the object, the facts just keep coming, linking up into a chain of proposed action.

You are either ready to discover yourself or you are not. Ready means you have been knowingly or unknowingly practicing self-observation.

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.

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.

The experiment is to ask the question; the observation is to look at yourself and see what happens. Being a science the law cannot vary. Any apparent variation is in you, you will have stepped off the way of facts into conclusions.

To believe what another says about you is unconscious, robot thinking.

Truth has to be discovered now, from moment to moment.

Truth cannot be taught but it is quickly recognized by the person ready to discover it.

Each moment provides a challenge to you to become conscious. The game is to be waiting, and aware.

The sun is either shining or it is not. You do not have to conclude; you just look.

Your object is to see yourself exactly as you are.

You must not believe me. You must realize it in yourself know it, for it is beyond words and thinking. And it has to be experienced without recourse to drugs or insanity.

Absorb what is said as you read but endeavor not to hold on to it or think about it.

Nothing makes man more unhappy than the untruth appearing as the truth.

The judge cannot be the judged, and even to accept is to judge.

IF YOU LOOK at life's totality you will notice that every living thing exists for something else.

You can predict exactly what a machine will do if you have sufficient knowledge of it.

The man-machine will crucify any conscious man who tries to help him; and convert his wisdom into an empty, mechanical dogma that suits his own understanding.

The true in the false, gradually strips away all self-delusion until all that remains is pure being.

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.

You will become more conscious if you use the moment of being rebuked or blamed to observe your reaction. You will observe yourself making an excuse, giving a reason.