Barry Long (1 August 1926 – 6 December 2003) was an Australian spiritual teacher and writer.
Anything that is said is not the truth. It is a statement of truth, and no statement is the truth.
No religion knows the truth. Only he or she who lives it knows.
You can experience consciousness now by experiencing the fact that you exist.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.
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.
Any product of the mind is a reaction of the past, a synthesis of what is old.
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 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.
To experience beauty, love, truth and peace, or God, your mind has to be stilled.
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.
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. '
Acknowledgement is the only way to keep love alive.
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.