Barry Long was an Australian spiritual teacher and writer. Barry Long was born and raised in Australia and had little formal education. In his twenties he became editor of a Sydney Sunday newspaper, The Truth and later press secretary in the New South Wales Parliament. At this time he was married with two children.
Barry Long acknowledged his respect for J. Krishnamurti and his teachings, nonetheless he considered himself to be an original teacher.
He recommended abandoning religious tradition in favor of direct experience and asked his audience not to believe anything he said, but to listen for the “ring of truth” in it.
He himself had an influence on a number of other teachers, writers and therapists. The most prominent of these is Eckhart Tolle, best-selling author of The Power of Now, who met him in person and is on record as saying he loved Barry Long’s teaching. (via Wikipedia)
Lets take a look into his collection of some great quotes.
On Love:
Love is beyond the mind because it is always new.
Love is beyond description but not beyond demonstrating.
On Worry:
Worry is a purely selfish expression.
On Knowledge:
Self-knowledge is the discovery of the new, it looks beyond the world that has all the answers and no solutions.
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.
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.
This process of self-discovery is scientific and the invariable rule of science has to be applied – experiment and observe.
You live, enjoy life and suffer according to that belief. What you believe, you live; or you do not believe it.
On God:
Reasonable acceptance, our way of living, is imperfect. But God, if God exists, must be perfect and beyond reason.
To experience beauty, love, truth and peace, or God, your mind has to be stilled.
If God exists you must have the experience of God in the moment; otherwise you are absent and God cannot exist for you.
On the way to God you have to pass through beauty, pure beauty. If you do not pass through beauty it is not God that you find.
On Beauty:
Beauty stands at the gate of the kingdom of heaven. It is of the Creator, but not the Creator; and it is all-mighty.
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.
Beauty is the only untreated thing you can experience apart from God.
On Awareness:
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’.
At the top of the ladder is awareness, or pure experience – the edge of yourself, and possibly the beginning of God.
Awareness is experiencing from moment to moment. Reason acts quickly in awareness, a thousand times faster than thought, and you do not even notice it is operating.