Barry Long: Yourself

Barry Long was Australian spiritual teacher and writer. Explore interesting quotes on yourself.
Barry Long: 172   quotes 0   likes

“Do I want to suffer or not suffer NOW? That's the only truth for you. There's no tradition, no past, no discussion in it. It's all you need. Keep it with you and at the next temptation to suffer it will prevent you suffering. But only if you've learned in your own experience what causes you to suffer. If you haven't learned that, you're still attached to suffering and will unwittingly embrace it. In that case you have to read on, take more time and ask yourself more questions.”

Barry Long

Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)
Context: In other words, to be enlightened of the acquired burden every spiritual belief and notion has to be abandoned, every reference to what any spiritual teacher or master has ever said must be set aside. What does that leave? Your own experience. Not your historical or memorable experience, for that's the problem. Your own experience is your self-knowledge of life. Let's establish once and for all what this means now. Forget everything I've said in this article except this question: Do I want to suffer or not suffer NOW? That's the only truth for you. There's no tradition, no past, no discussion in it. It's all you need. Keep it with you and at the next temptation to suffer it will prevent you suffering. But only if you've learned in your own experience what causes you to suffer. If you haven't learned that, you're still attached to suffering and will unwittingly embrace it. In that case you have to read on, take more time and ask yourself more questions.

Truth , Question , Suffering , Learning

“At the top of the ladder is awareness, or pure experience - the edge of yourself, and possibly the beginning of God.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

God

“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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“Yes, well I noticed that in your last issues' interviews with those Eastern teachers ["From light to Light," Jan. 1995], emptiness was mentioned a lot. I find that a wrong word. Because in God realisation and being one with God the Most High, the unspeakable one, there's no sense whatsoever of ever having done anything yourself. It is all done for you. It's by grace. And so it's not being empty, it's being emptied. There's a different emphasis or a different connotation to that.”

Barry Long

Response to the question "You write, "Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the purest sensation of divine being." What's the distinction here between being "emptied" and being "empty" of feelings?"
Love is not a feeling ~ The Interview (1995)

God , Sense , Light , Teachers

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

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Lie

“You don't gather knowledge when you are getting to know yourself; you lose it. Many of your firmest ideas go out the window. You may feel naked, vulnerable, threatened, argumentative, angry.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Feeling , Idea , Knowledge

“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. 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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Thinking , Time

“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?”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Truth , Falseness

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

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Falseness

“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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Life , Understanding , Reality

“The fact is that unless you experience something for yourself it does not exist for you. If God exists you must have the experience of God in the moment; otherwise you are absent and God cannot exist for you.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

God

“This process of self-discovery is scientific and the invariable rule of science has to be applied - experiment and observe. 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. The sun is either shining or it is not. You do not have to conclude; you just look.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Law , Way , Question , Science

“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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Thinking

“KNOWING YOURSELF means being able to separate the true from the false in yourself - love from emotion, joy from sentiment, Will from desire. No man can teach another self-knowledge. He can only lead him or her up to self-discovery - the source of truth.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Love , Truth , Knowledge , Joy

“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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Truth , Search , Help

“Man conscious is man immortal. Man conscious gives to the creation as no other thing can give and is beyond death. But it is no use my just saying this. You must discover it, realize it for yourself.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Death

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

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“Your object is to see yourself exactly as you are. Self-knowledge is the discovery of the new: it looks beyond the world that has all the answers and no solutions.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

World , Knowledge

“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.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Life , Imagination , Thinking , Future

“The Creator has to be experienced beyond the five senses and the only instrument that can experience in this way, for you, is yourself - in the state of thoughtless awareness in which you declare 'I am' and hold it.”

Barry Long

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Way , Sense