Barry Long

….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: