Institute of Reflection

Publications by Barry Long

Barry Long, The Origins of Man and the Universe – The Myth that Came to Life

An excerpt below about Barry Long and his philosophy which is available from Amazon appears in:

AWAKE – CONSCIOUS PILGRIMAGE BY A PILGRIM

A sequel shows the simple answer available to those willing an able to go beyond the mind.

….In 1988, as I was distributing You Are the Key to London’s bookshops with a new age presence, I noted flyers posted in them speaking about the visit of an Australian spiritual teacher named Barry Long. The most prominent of these featured a photograph of him over some text which had a headline along the lines of, ‘I am the Master of the Western World’. There were also postcards with his photo and the words ‘The earth has few living masters – Barry Long is one of them’. These could clearly be heard as provocative and controversial statements and, when I asked Shaun what his sense of Barry Long was, he said, ‘He’s very full of himself.’ [Barry Long himself said that he had studied J. Krishnamurti and that, if he had read Krishnamurti’s last book right, the latter had said that, after 60 years of teaching, he was lucky if 5 people had heard him. Barry then added, “Well, I am one of them.”]

Nevertheless, I was curious enough to attend a talk he gave on August 24th at the Friends Big Meeting House on Euston Road.

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’.
Some of what he said resonated with me. From my notes:

“Insanity is defending the right to be unhappy in this body.”
“Will you be I or will you be unhappy? Ego is me. It is ok when the ego surrenders to the master, resulting in oneness. Then I can enjoy the beauty of life through the senses.”
“A master is responsible for being free of unhappiness.”
“You will never find the truth while you believe in anything.”

I had such a better feeling of well-being in the focus on ‘I am’ coming away from this meeting that I stopped the use of nicotine chewing gum, which I had been on for 16 months following 15 years of smoking.

I also attended a weekend workshop of his on sexuality and another 3-day seminar on self-transcendence at Regents College London (now Regents University London). During the lunch break at one of them, Barry saw me as he walked into the cafeteria and came over to greet me and ask me a little about myself. At another meeting, I met Clive Tempest, a long-time student of Barry’s who did most of the organizing of the publications and activities in the UK, and I was able to obtain some pointers from him about these, especially on publishing and distributing books and tapes (which I was then involved in for Shaun de Warren’s work).

There was a requirement that one had to have listened to Barry’s audio cassettes on the same subject as a prerequisite to attending the sexuality workshop. The workshop itself turned out to be surprisingly powerful – more of him talking and then responding to questions than an interactive workshop. As part of it, he had those in the audience put their attention into their stomach/digestive areas and spoke about this as something akin to a hot cauldron, an area used for processing and transformation, and not just for nutrition, but also for doing so on an energetic level.

There was a focus on staying anchored in the body and listening to the solar plexus area (rather than to the mind) to get a sense of our real reaction to externals and our feelings about our state of being. He said many people spend much of their lives about a foot higher than their corresponding body parts.

“Be aware of the good (God) In you and coming from you and know it can be nowhere else. You will lose all except the good you find in yourself.”
“Until we are ready to lose all – which we will lose anyway – we are still not ready to embrace life fully.”
“I am with you at death.”

At one point he told us that he had been met by some journalists who wanted to ask him questions for a write-up about him. Barry said he told them he only answered conscious questions. When they asked what a conscious question was, Barry told them it is one which has ‘I’ in it. This was an important message for me to always be present to our I, our subjectivity. Otherwise, so much of our life is wasted by being fully involved in – and identified with – the objective (which is what focusing on the purely intellectual is).

He elevated the sexual aspect of our lives to being one of worship of the sacred, and most especially of the male worshiping woman as God. My then wife, who was attending with me, said afterwards that she had been waiting all her life to hear this message. One middle-aged man attending this workshop actually left his wife of years to start a new ‘truer’ relationship with a talented middle-aged single lady, who happened to be a friend of ours. We had dinner with them on the middle evening of the two-day workshop and listened to his story. He had been extremely dependent on his wife and very much controlled by her. His leaving her sounded to me like something of a schoolboy’s rebellion against authority. He had told Barry what he had done (giving credit to Barry’s teaching as the impetus) and, in the next day’s talk, Barry cited his case as an example (perhaps of following truth). However, as I knew the new lady in his life, I learned later that this man soon left her – she was heartbroken, upset and angry – to return to his previous relationship with his wife.

The meditation Barry led had us being conscious of the inner and outer simultaneously. “Normally, we are in without only or, through traditional meditation, in within only.”

My wife and I wrote to Barry in Australia to thank him for how his messages had helped us and he replied with this curious response: “I thank you both . . . each [of our messages] communicates in its own way precisely what you intended for all real communication is beyond words. Barry, 24 December 1988”

Barry Long came across to me as not being fully at peace in himself at that time. Although I was in no doubt that he had experienced some kind of awakening beyond the mind people normally identify with, and I resonated with quite a bit of what he said, I was not drawn to follow him as ‘my teacher’.

His teachings did point me further inwards, included the crucial use of ‘I am’ and ‘being’, and indicated the direction of attention into and throughout the body while simultaneously also being on the externals. He was, too, adamant that we must sooner or later relinquish all attachments, including all relationships, outside of the ‘I’, as it is inevitable that they will all be lost anyway.

Another very gifted friend of mine, Roslyn H, left her life in the UK and moved to Australia to follow Barry and his teaching more closely.

After these workshops, I did listen to some of Barry’s later ‘Talks from Tambourine Mountain”. My friend who had gone to Australia to follow him wrote me that, after a year of his teaching there, she had found joy and beauty through a lasting stillness in her body, “A lasting stillness created by the truth. And in the stillness there is love as a tangible feeling sensation within my physical body, my true body if you like. . . .That is my learning of the teaching …be vulnerable to love? Yes, through the pain of losing all that I loved my resistance was broken, I had to go to Australia. A year later I realised the truth of the master’s words – be vulnerable . . . but only to love . . . Roslyn”

Of those I knew whom had experienced this teaching, some did seem to have reconnected with their physical bodies and to have found some more answers and an increased experience of peace which, in themselves, are remarkable achievements. Perhaps this might be described as having stepped back from the mind, but while still using the mind as one’s identity base, rather than having stepped out of the mind altogether.

I attended a further talk of Barry’s on 6 January 1990. From my notes:

“Take some deep breaths. Be easy. Smile. The smile on the face reconnects with the smile in the solar plexus area.”
“Me is in darkness, unhappy and rebellious when ignored. When I is with me, we are being. Being is the only place we know love/good. Thinking does not know love.”

Definitions:
The unconscious starts where we note the good feelings.
The subconscious is where I retreats to in dreams.
The conscious is aware.
Thinking is outside of who we are.

In a closed eye practice, he spoke of grounding ourselves “through returning awareness/being to the ‘bottom of the bottle’, the bottom of the trunk, bladder, bowels, genitals. Me is happy when I of senses am aware of experience of external world simultaneous to being with internal ‘me’ bodily feelings.”

“Pain/fear in me tells me about areas of my life that need changing/clearing.”

Barry’s The Origins of Man and the Universe- The Myth that Came to Life, which is a work of insight and introspection, makes the important point that the external evolution theory espoused by Darwin and science make valuable points, but completely ignores man’s inner evolution, from psychic principle, to sense perception, to intelligence and emotion and, finally, to self-consciousness. He points out that myths of creation, as in the Biblical Genesis, speak of this inner evolution, while Darwin and science are limited to speaking about the evolution of the physical.

Years later, I read the posthumously published autobiography of his life to 1982, My Life of Love and Truth. It was very interesting and extremely frank, but also disturbing in parts. He made decisions on his relationships (including ending them and abandoning his first wife and children) as if they were divinely guided, though admitted later to having made mistakes in some of his conclusions about them. He and his 2nd wife were dramatically affected by a black energy which seems to have come from another dimension and a friend/student he called ‘the Blessed John’ (who became his teacher for a brief period) was involved in a very unconventional healing of them. This John lived very spontaneously and was in and out of mental institutions. Barry credits Blessed John with taking him from his previous immanent (inside us) realization of the divine to a transcendent (outside this dimension) realization of the divine.

Barry notes he heard this teaching as a voice in the top of his head towards the front and was told, ‘This is a part of the seat of consciousness. I am in your consciousness.’

“ . . . the voice giving instructions in my consciousness was intelligent beyond my own conscious powers. One could, of course, say it was my higher self. . . . What it is called is really irrelevant when one experiences this wonderful inner integrity. For there is no doubt it is intelligent and vastly wise. The important thing it is there, within each of us, the individual.”
. . .
“At the end of two weeks I noticed that a different voice was now instructing me. Also that the voice had moved to the top of my head, the centre of my consciousness. This voice was John’s.” (p. 155 and 162, My Life of Love and Truth)

He says: “In the spiritual life when you go deep enough into the unconscious within your body you eventually enter the reality of external space – what we call outer space, or the space between the stars (astral space from the Latin astrum, star). This is another world of supreme stillness and nothingness. Conversely, if a man is ever able to travel deep enough into outer space (far beyond the influence of the solar system), he will end up in his own unconscious, the same other world of sublime stillness and nothingness. But unless he has been spiritually prepared, which is most unlikely, he won’t perceive any difference and will fill this space – as he fills his inner space – with the mundanity of his thinking and rationality. For finally ‘out there’ or ‘in there’ – the outer and the inner – merge to become the one consciousness.”
. . .
“The cosmos – the deep unconscious where inner and outer space merge – is filled with such extraterrestrial beings or intelligences. But they are too deep within or without – too spiritual or refined – to ordinarily be perceived by the human mind.” (pp. 160 – 161, My Life of Love and Truth)
Soon after, the evolved aspect of Blessed John is carried away from this planet by highly intelligent visitors from outer space – which John names Archons –, leaving just a shell of the man behind. Barry did seem to have become vulnerable to dark forces, which he implies may have caused his second wife’s illness and which must have been the source of the black energy.

Had I been aware of some of these things in Barry Long’s history at the time, I might not have attended his talks and workshops, but I am glad I did, as he imparted some very valuable pointers to me. I would have been concerned about the dark forces, but not what Barry said about outer space and extra-terrestrial life. After all, anyone who has woken to being an identity beyond the mind-body realizes that we are not really earthlings after all, but more conscious spirit or intelligent energy temporarily associated with a material self. This gives a new sense to the term ‘life sentence’.

A filmed interview of Barry not long before his death, called Scenes from an Enlightened Life, released in 2014, gives a sense of him having mellowed and as being more at peace than what I had felt from him at the meetings I had attended 15 years earlier.