Barry Long

Barry Long makes a distinction between ‘I am’ and ‘me’. He speaks of ‘me’ as our ego and ‘I am’ as the living master of the here and now. This ‘I am’, which was also the one in the flyers, he told us, refers to each of our ‘I ams’, not just rather exclusively to his own. The ego, as ‘me’, is ok once it has surrendered to ‘I am’ as its master. He also referred to our false personality as ‘the tenant’. The purpose of evolution according to Barry Long is to make life on earth more conscious. The Origins of Man and the Universe is the account of a spiritual enquiry into evolution, civilisation, our place in the universe and the structure of reality itself. It is a cosmology which relates to present science but takes us beyond the Big Bang. Charting the evolutionary work of consciousness on earth, it takes us back through man’s psyche to our original state in eternity or God’s mind. Life, death and the whole of existence is seen as a great mythic design. The amazing complexity of life on earth is related to the reality behind everything. The evolution of consciousness is our human story and when we hear it told we can connect with our own reality more consciously. For there is a profound connection between man’s discovery of the universe and self-discovery, between scientific knowledge and self-knowledge.