THE SPIRITUAL MASTER LIVES THE DIVINE LIFE 

by Barry Long 

You are a light that is forever. You are a consciousness. You are not just a person. The person will trouble you. The consciousness is what you know inside to be right and true. That is the love and the beauty inside you.

Why come to the master?

You don’t hear about masters or they’re criticised in the newspapers and the media because the people who write those things wouldn’t know a master if they fell over one. A certain depth of perception is needed to hear the master. Either you hear or you don’t. Either you see or you don’t.

I stop your thinking, problematical mind by you being with me. Your consciousness can then start to affirm a greater knowledge of God and truth, which is in your body now – this very moment.

When a man realises the master consciousness, he realises God. To realise God is to realise the power of the universe, the power behind it all. And then you have realised the Most High – although the realisation of God never ends. It goes on.

It is the same for woman. But she realises, or becomes, the consciousness of love. And that is God for her.

It is a consciousness, not an awareness, which is of the senses, of the body. We’re aware of the flowers. We’re aware of each other. But that’s not consciousness. Consciousness is the knowledge of something that is invisible and right and true.

We start off only aware of the external world, as I was for thirty years. I lived in the external world and did everything externally. Then I was converted. God converted my intelligence and it was directed in. So I started to go in, leaving behind the awareness.

The body still functioned. Everything still went on. But my intelligence started to go down, down, down, deeper and deeper towards God or being. And as it did so, I became more conscious.

My mind started to slow down. When you’re more conscious the mind doesn’t have the same support of the self. I became more and more conscious until I reached consciousness, which is a state of utter stillness – free of doubts, fears and uncertainty.

To realise God, or the master consciousness, there has to be an absence of self, an absence of selfishness. While you don’t give and give and give, and love and love and love, you can’t realise God. That’s why giving and love are so important in my teaching. In giving we tend to hold back a little. But you can’t hold back and realise God.

All I can do is reflect that state of consciousness to you. But you have to be able to receive it, along with my words of truth which describe life, death, love and God.

For the greater.

Originality – that’s the master consciousness. Not having to quote anyone.
Not having to quote any tradition. Utter and complete originality, coming every moment from the being – the place of stillness and silence within.

You are in the state of being when your intelligence is one with your body – one with the intelligence that keeps your heart beating. You are behind the senses and behind the restless human mind. This being is literally the God within you. It is absolutely still, silent and potent. It refreshes and nourishes your life.

In practical terms this means the circumstances of your life are gradually made easier and there is an increasing sense of purpose and freedom. Finally, a profound harmony and merging of being and living is not only realised but experienced. This is the state of grace available to all who are willing to start putting love and truth first in their lives.

When you die, you go into being forever. The purpose of living is to be able to connect consciously with this wonderful, nourishing place inside you while you are alive and awake.

Being emotional and thoughtful people, we are fearful. We are afraid – of what? We are not sure. When you are able to connect with the state of being, stay in it and actually be it, your fears disappear. And your emotions lose control over your life.

Being is now. You practise being now. And the more that you serve and give to others in your ordinary life the deeper you descend into this fathomless being.

There is only one man and one woman.

Man and Woman are two principles out of existence, deep down inside every body.

In every woman’s body is this extraordinary unimaginable power of She, who is the Woman, the divine woman, behind all her daily thoughts and longings. Every woman on earth is endeavouring to manifest her divine feminine qualities.

It is the same for man. Deep inside every man’s psyche is the divinely noble principle of Man. It too is endeavouring to manifest, to push up through two thousand million years of past into the brain and the senses, and express its divine male qualities.

The divine pair’s ceaseless effort to come into existence together and be united here, as they are there, is the explanation of the pain and joy of life and love on earth. All else is secondary to this great stirring movement.

And so every woman feels the extraordinary need to do or be better, to find out what love is, to be more real, to be more beautiful. Particularly to be more beautiful - but inside, not just in appearance. For beauty inside is divine freedom.

Every man feels the same divine pressure inside of him, the need to be noble, courageous, honest, truthful and to truly love and be loved by woman. Only through the love of each other can they ever be united here. That means giving up their selfishness and negativity.

Where are you making the best of things instead of getting them right? I teach man and woman to be honest with themselves in every department of their lives - in their jobs, in their homes, with their children, with their parents and in their relationships.

There is one unmistakable pointer to where and when you are being dishonest in your life: You will feel unhappy, worried or disturbed by a person or a situation. It is not the person or the situation that is dishonest or to blame. It is you – you who are avoiding addressing the problem.

It’s a great romance, isn’t it?

What is the situation between man and woman? We come together to enjoy being with one another, to enjoy our lives together. Isn’t that how we all start off – enjoying being together?

So the very first moment it is not a joy, when one of us is unhappy, that moment has to be seized and the question asked: ‘What’s wrong? Why are you unhappy with me? How am I not loving you? What have I done that is not pleasing you?’

That is the moment of truth and it must not be swept under the carpet: ‘Oh it’ll be all right.’ It is not a passing thing. Every bit of lack of love and honesty between us is going to accumulate as emotion. And eventually it will put a blockage in my system and I will be afraid to speak. Fear will gather in me or I’ll feel I can’t be bothered. And then you won’t be able to communicate with me and we will live together growing further and further apart.

There is no escape from love in existence. The task of life on earth is to return to the undivided divine consciousness behind the brain, behind the male and female forms. That is called God-realisation, the conscious re-entry or reunion with pure formless life within. It can only be done completely through the love of man and woman. The two apparent divisions of she and he must be eliminated in the consciousness of the union of love.

Since the truth, the pure intelligence of the universe, began to enter my body at the age of 31, my life of truth has been intimately connected with the love of woman.

The woman I describe as my first bhagavati, meaning ‘God in female form’, revealed herself in a vision to be just that, when I was about 36. By leaving me, she caused me such pain and suffering that I realised immortality. I passed through the level of death in the psyche and entered that realm of consciousness where the bodies of man and woman are one with the nature of the earth.

lt was only later I discovered that every significant woman in my life since the first bhagavati was an aspect of the same divine woman, the one divine female principle that is present in every woman’s body, more or less.

It can be said that I have been taught by the divine principle of woman. I have been led by her. I have been crucified by her. And most certainly I am loved by her. I am the product of that love, as is my teaching.

What we are is utterly magnificent.

Energetically we are all the life that has ever been on earth – all the trees and the flowers are energetically inside of us. lf we can only make the journey back, instead of going out and out . . .

Instead of measuring how wide the universe is out there, go back. Go inside, where it all comes from. Once you get through all the impeding structures, when you no longer cry out, ‘Oh God, what’s it all about?’ or, ‘What am I doing?’ then the miracle and the mystery of life is revealed.

Look into the blue sky, or into the space between the stars, and there is nothing. As without, so within. The blue sky, or the magnificence of the black night between the stars, is the representation of the truth of nothing. The whole appearance of the starry night, right around the whole dome of the heavens and all the stars, is a representation of the divine mind.

Go out on a cloudless, clear night and look at the whole of it. Look through the stars, not at them like the scientist – or you will miss the beauty. Look at the whole. See the pristine beauty of it, the wondrous, stark singleness of it. Then you will get a perception of what God’s mind is, represented in space and time through the sense mechanism of the human brain. For what you see out there is purely a representation of the energetic reality of everything inside of you.

You don’t have to try to understand this because it’s a description of the reality of every body in existence. Every body consists of this vast nothingness underneath the restless and ever moving mind.

The sensory universe and our entire existence is like a single cloud in a void, a speck in nothing. The void is timeless and the speck is time. The void is the divine mind, God’s mind. The speck in it is the existence of the human brain and its reflection, the human mind.

On those occasions when the mind stops, we feel the incredible stillness or peace of the void. Or, if we are very much attached to existence, in moments of the void the mind will feel disturbed, fearful and insecure.

The master speaks to you alone.

The only truth is in being. All you’ve got to do is be alone in your being. That directs you where to go.

So there is no community in my teaching. People like to have talks and discussions. I can’t support that. Discussions breed words. And words lead further and further away from the state of being.

It is not within my teaching that anyone should speak to you on my behalf. I’m sure, if I gave the word, people would form a community for me and act and speak for me and play my tapes and answer questions. But to me that is creating priests, who cannot speak for the master, ever. They can only speak for themselves.

In communities and ashrams there’s a great club formed. You’re able to chat about God and life and truth and have coffee together. But all communities are distractions from living the truth. You’re united like captive birds in a cage. You’re no longer a follower of your own being. You’ve given that up to become a follower of someone. There’s a corruption in doing that.

The spiritual life is not just reading about truth or listening to it. It is about living it. There is no truth – no truth on earth – unless you live it.

 ©  Barry Long 1999 / The Barry Long Trust 2007

Edited from a leaflet produced by The Barry Long Foundation International in 1999:
‘An Introduction to the Teaching of Barry Long: Living The Divine Life’.

Barry Long articles may only be reprinted or translated with the permission of The Barry Long Trust.