Barry Long citations

Page 3

“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.”

“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.”

“Before you can escape from your burrow you must know you are trapped. Then there's a chance.”

“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.”

“The moment is your only duty. Your duty at any time in your life is to do what you have to do from moment to moment. What you have to do is what you cannot avoid doing. What you cannot avoid doing is what you do.”

“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. Beauty stands at the gate of the kingdom of heaven. It is of the Creator, but not the Creator; and it is all-mighty.”

“It is the conscious man or woman who finds the secret of happiness and contentment; and that, surely, is the ultimate success.”

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

“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.”

“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 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 timeless - waiting for the unknown, which will come but cannot be willed.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Sex is excitement, seeks satisfaction and soon loses interest - selfishness. Making love is passionate, fulfilling and does not look for an end - selflessness.”

“Human love is not love. Love is natural to every body but it becomes human love as the person learns from society to confuse love with sex.”

“If God exists, God can be experienced; but only by you.”

“To listen, to learn, your mind has to be still. Have you ever observed that you can have only one thought in your mind at a time?”

“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.”

“Action will happen in its own time. Action taken on strength of feelings inevitably leads to more feelings to correct the action previously taken - and so the feelings of discontent and conflict, and corrective actions go on and on repeating themselves.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing is true unless it is true in your own experience. This is your protection against being duped or misled.”

“But in our ignorance we emotionalise joy, beauty and love. We make feelings of them, personal interpretations based on our old emotions. We put our personal past on the present with the result that joy, beauty and love don't seem to last. But it's our emotional substitutes that don't last and we become bored, discontented and unhappy again. The sensation or knowledge of joy, beauty and love is of course still there but it's overwhelmed by these coarser feelings.”