Barry Long love-making spiritual teacher

[Matai]

The romance reading list has enabled us to work through different perspectives and emotions whilst being taught via the sexual center as per the Cs. I have been reading books and watching videos of Barry Long and he has some very interesting, and I would say profound, takes on life, love and sexual relationships between men and women.

Using ChatGPT (Grok was down whilst writing this) and asking for a short summary of his teachings it gave me this:

Barry Long was an Australian spiritual teacher known for his direct, experiential approach to truth, love, and self-realization. His core teachings focused on:

• Living from truth: Emphasizing honesty, integrity, and awareness in daily life.
• Mastering the mind: Recognizing and transcending the illusions and distractions of thought.
• Facing fear and death: Encouraging deep inner stillness and acceptance of mortality.
• Real love between man and woman: Promoting sacred sexuality and the purification of love in relationships.
• Spiritual responsibility: Urging individuals to embody truth without relying on gurus or external authorities.

Long rejected traditional religious dogma and sought to strip spirituality down to direct experience and lived truth. His teachings were often intense, uncompromising, and aimed at awakening real transformation.

It is an accurate albeit brief, summary. His work is best "felt" or lived. The video below accurately captures the way he presents his information and teachings:

'Sex, Love & Your Sweet Nature' : Barry Long & Lisette Thooft

Darren Allen's blogpost also somewhat accurately captures the "essence" of his teaching: Barry Long’s Time Will Come

Love is a fine thing, objectivity too. Both can provide insight, and that’s why we turn to others for help. Fine. But who can identify your deepest reality and help you realise it? Who is uncivilised enough to understand the crippling dangers of domestication? Who really lives with the quietest voice of the unconscious; acts on what it says, thereby speaking to the quietest voice of others? Who!? Most of us turn to advice from people who are just as confused as we are: worse, because they (or their careers) are involved in our lives, because they are hoping to realise their dreams through us, because they are speaking on behalf of the system or on behalf of their little group, because they have vested interests, they are likely to give us the worst (which in many cases amounts to the safest and laziest) advice possible.

So what to do? Who to turn to? There don’t seem to be many expert human beings. Is there anyone who has risen sufficiently above the human condition to be able to speak meaningfully about our captivity, who can see us thrashing about in the web of the world (of the mind, the emotions) and who really knows why? Is there anyone who speaks directly to the unfathomable I, where there is nothing the world can know of? My view is ‘yes’, there is.

As a young man I had a very powerful urge to be free of suffering, ignorance, fear and confusion. It seemed to me that solving the problem of the self was priority one; yet, like many many other people before me with a desire to set out on a psychological adventure, I discovered that available guidance was incredibly sparse. There were plenty of self-help books of course, an innumerable number of adults with advice and an infinite number of subjects that could be studied. But the subject — self-discovery — where was the course in that?

And so, like many people, I grasped at straws. I fell upon whatever came into view that seemed to open this unlocked mystery that I was carrying around; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Deepak Chopra, The Tao of Pooh, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, My Dinner with Andre, anything which seemed to open up a new path into the unknown. It wasn’t long before I turned to the source of these works — to Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu and the author of the Upanishads — for answers; but I soon reasoned that whatever truth they had realised couldn’t possibly be confined to a handful of people over two millennia ago. There must be people now who have realised the same thing; who are living it, not just talking about it. So after a few more abortive experiments which churches, ashrams, therapists and other useless priestly endeavours, I hit the ‘Guru scene.’

To say that the world of ‘enlightened men’ is full of charlatans of the highest rank would be an understatement, but eventually I came across the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti and Georg Gurdjieff, the first two people to bring the reality of the East to the West. These were the first two modern people I encountered who appeared to actually be in contact with the meaning of life, or at least a fascinating truth which didn’t require a script. Krishnamurti seemed to say the same thing over and over and over again, yet never uttered a cliché or seemed to repeat himself. And it was peculiar stuff — somehow the mind couldn’t quite grasp it, impossible to remember; yet nourishing. A sense that the impossible was actually being spoken to.

Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti (whose life stories, incidentally, were fascinating) led me to Barry Long.

Barry Long was a self-declared spiritual master, a ‘world teacher’ or ‘guru’, words that make the secular mind vibrate with outraged scorn and the religious mind shrink back, as if from the pitchfork of Satan. The idea that someone could be free of suffering, could know the truth of death, could teach love or life; could be, in a word, enlightened — and not just ‘someone’, but someone living, someone ordinary, someone called Barry! — all this is usually rejected as the worst kind of cultic madness; indeed Barry Long’s teaching was often described as a cult.

Cult is a word which only ever refers to small groups led by an individual, never large groups led by a central figure, a class or an ‘identity’, such as Christianity, Buddhism, capitalism, socialism (official and unofficial), nationalism or Tottenham Hotspur; all of which are very obviously cults. The ordinary behaviour of ordinary people, gathered around viddy-screens to listen to big brothers, stuffing their faces with soma, marching off to a daily dose of alienating unlife, gathered giggling around centrigual bumble-puppies and lathered up over the latest pneumatic priestess; none of this counts as cult-behaviour; while, on the other hand, listening to someone who actually knows what they are on about, and loving the truth he lives and expresses, can only mean orgies and brainwashing and mass-suicide.

Not that, as I say, there aren’t an enormous number of creepy cults out there, fake masters and outright con-men. Since shamans began to monopolise access to the psyche, many thousands of years ago, through the innumerable mad sects and proto-religions that populate fringe-history, up to Jonestown, the Moonies, the shennanigans of Adi Da, Sai Baba and God knows what else that can be found, today, in the nooks and crannies of ‘spirituality’, men (always men) have been using the power of their personalities1 to lord it over credulous seekers.

Was Barry Long such a man? You’ll have to make your own mind up there; I can only speak for myself. Subtle creepiness, platitudinous cant, a weird sense of ‘specialness’, blindness to certain aspects of human life (especially sex), and other ‘alarm bells’ didn’t and don’t ring for me with Barry Long, just as they didn’t when I first came across Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti (or Sri Ramana Maharshi and Mooji for that matter). I don’t know if these men really were completely free of the human-all-too-human condition, but they were completely original, spoke with impressive authority, were not above-it-all and what they say worked; and that’s how it was with Barry Long.

I encountered his tape ‘Who Am I?’ when I was in my early twenties and it blew my mind, briefly stilling it to a state which was completely new to me and allowing something extraordinary to swell in my awareness. Not a psychological effect or trippy illusion — the kind of thing I’d had with drugs, Buddhism and other tricks I’d tried — but an extraordinary experience of the ‘I’ which precedes the ‘self’ which I think and feel I am. Listening to this tape felt like I was doing the most subversive thing on earth, listening to a truth so revolutionary it could dissolve the world, übergoldstein. After this I spent around ten years reading his books and listening to his tapes, which I still occasionally return to. I also attended a couple of his seminars.

The first one I went to, when I was still unconvinced about his status as a enlightened man, was in Sydney. It was a one-day event in a meeting room of a university. He began, as he usually did, by talking for half an hour, then there was his version of guided meditation, and then questions. I was astonished by three things. Firstly, the questions people asked him were amazingly, hilariously, intimate — ‘Barry, I don’t like the way my husband touches my breasts. He seems to grapple with them’ or ‘Barry, I am 80 and my sex-drive is low. My young wife wants to take another lover and I’m thinking it might be a good idea’ or ‘Barry. I’m dying.’ Secondly, his answers always seemed to be spot on. Not ‘mystic’ or holier-than-thou, but very practical. Thirdly, at this meeting, there happened to be on the lawn outside some kind of ‘children’s event’ hosted by McDonalds. There was a man out there on the mic who was shouting at the children with the harsh, over-involved mania that some adults adopt when trying to whip up fun in children. It was ghastly, and impossible to ignore; and yet Barry wasn’t distracted by it in the slightest. He maintained phenomenal presence — not the beatific calm you might imagine, but a very simple easy imperturbability that I felt, very much, that I wanted a piece of. No matter what he might be teaching, I thought, I want to be as present as this man.

In my view Barry Long’s books and tapes about presence are unrivalled. One of the basic reasons I would recommend Barry Long’s teaching is not holy-holy God-intoxication but the practical benefits of what he called ‘being’. Long himself cautioned against ‘being a follower’, or expecting assiduous practice of a teaching to get you somewhere, and, particularly after encountering U.G. Krishnamurti I have come to see this as a widely disregarded cornerstone to actually liberating oneself from the human condition. That said, the way Long taught meditation was quite free of the humid ‘spirituality’, which dangles the carrot of ‘enlightenment’ before naval-gazers the world over.

Barry Long’s insights about life generally, particularly what he had to say about emotion and sexual love, were also completely original. He said that emotions, which feed on the mind (particularly on likes and dislikes), comprised the bedrock of the false self and that these emotions were, first of all, hell, and secondly, radically different to the subtle feeling or sensation of ‘I-consciousness’ underneath.

Along with basic lack of presence there are two things which interrupt this I-consciousness, or the easy simplicity of simply living; two things which disturb the psyche and make people emotional and unhappy (which Barry defined as ‘happy-today-unhappy-tomorrow’). These were ‘not getting your life right’ and ‘the love between man and woman’.

He released several books and tapes on making love without emotion, on staying conscious with your partner, and he said a great deal about being honest, straight and present at work, with your children, family and friends; all of which was exceptionally direct, perceptive and practically useful. In short, the truth. I find it impossible to imagine that I could have experienced the love with women that I have without them. Not that the world never felt love before Barry Long, or that, even with his teachings, my own relations with women haven’t still been ruined by my selfish insensitivity and cruelty2, but what he said was radically new, completely original and superbly effective. His ‘Making Love’ book changed my sex life and that of many other people, not just ‘for the better’ — as in, having better sex — but into an entirely new reality. Not one that you might imagine — incense sticks, cheesy breathing and soft-focus giggling-and-nibbling — but a kind of intimacy and pleasure, almost terrifying in its intensity, that spread into my entire life.

I’ve emphasised in this account the practical nature of Barry Long’s teaching, its almost secular benefits — freedom from worry, from romantic problems, from emotional-slavery and so on. But the heart of the whole matter does come down to something which hardcore atheists and sceptics find impossible to swallow; adoration of and consequent experience and knowledge of the unknowable, the mystery of experience, the vivid strangeness of the present moment and the reality of one’s own consciousness, which the thinking mind can never grasp. All of this Barry Long rightly summed up with the word ‘God’ — not the fictional abstract-emotional God of established religion and myth, but the strange reality of life, the life behind the appearance-of-the-world conveyed to the mind by the mind. This life is the subject of religions like Buddhism, Advaita, Zen and Taoism, all of which are sometimes called ‘atheist,’ in that attention paid to God or gods is at best secondary, but which seek to uncover an ultimate reality which is still, literally, divine.3 ‘Living the divine life’ is a phrase guaranteed to give materialist minds the willies, but it’s what Barry Long taught, and taught better than anyone I have ever heard of.

You may be wondering, at least if you’re reading this at the beginning of the twentieth century, why you haven’t heard of Barry Long before. To this I would point out that Arthur Schopenhauer has long been widely ignored and one the most unfashionable major philosophers in Western universities (although this is starting to change), while his crowd-pleasing contemporary, George Hegel is still the subject of endless academic discussion. I would also point out that D.H. Lawrence, Ivan Illich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vincent Van Gogh, William Blake and many, many other great writers and artists were either totally ignored during their lives or their work has gone through long periods of total obscurity. Finally, I might bring your attention to the fate of Eckhart Tolle, a student of Barry Long who, without crediting or hardly ever mentioning his principle influence, took some of Barry Long’s most profound insights, repackaged them and became probably the wealthiest and most famous teacher of ‘mindfulness’ in the West.

Most people have no idea what the truth is and have no way of recognising it. When it appears in their lives they are confused, irritated or bored. They are only able to accept that something is genuinely original when they are told to accept it, either explicitly, from the recommendation of someone sufficiently famous, or implicitly, when they see lots of other people flock towards the fairground. Then great works find their moment in the sun and can be carried from one generation to the next. Until then, their influence is, so to speak, in the dark, travelling gradually through the veins of humanity, until the time comes; and Barry Long’s time will come.

In his book "Making love: Sexual love the divine way" he details the problems with modern day sex and how to truly make love. Here is an excerpt from the book showcasing his bold and uncompromising way of addressing these topics:

Orgasm is a part of lovemaking. But all too often orgasm is an emotional end. And lovemaking has no end. True lovers go on and on, making love until finally, perhaps hours later, the man ejaculates naturally and consciously. Or they pull apart and make love hours later, or the next day and the next and the next, without the man necessarily having to come. The emotional end to orgasm is a let-down, a period of post-coital sadness or depression. Before the troublesome emotions of the self are dissolved, physical intercourse stirs deep emotions of self-doubt. But know that this is so and is actually part of the spiritual process of facing yourself in order to know yourself. Most people miss the significance of post-coital depression and identify with it instead of gradually detaching from it. Orgasm is well and truly beneath the moment to moment beauty and purpose of lovemaking, but it will happen rightly for both of you, without producing emotional traumas afterwards, if you are present enough to concern yourselves only with making love. For man to come before he’s made enough love, before he’s gathered his partner’s divine energies, is gluttony. In woman, coming is easy and natural, sweet and becoming, if she can transcend her self-protectiveness and if only her partner can give her the chance to be natural and come naturally. But man is often too selfish. Down through the ages in his sexual greed he has taught her, tricked her, into chasing the orgasm, to divert attention from the lovemaking he cannot give her. You cannot be aware of the sensation of love if you are chasing an orgasm; or, in the case of a man, if you are trying to delay one. And a woman who believes orgasm is important but can’t seem to have one, will feel deprived or guilty; and she might give up. Many women have turned away from lovemaking because they confuse love with orgasm. And they turn their backs on the real wonder and glory of love. When woman stops trying to make love and is no longer lured or fooled by orgasm; when she refuses to have a greedy penis inside her and is pure and present herself in lovemaking, with not one thought in her head, the orgasm can come — naturally and effortlessly. It just happens beautifully, through the power of the loving penis deep inside her. The orgasm comes of itself, without either partner wanting it or trying for it; or it doesn’t come, and that’s no problem. These days a woman can have an orgasm and hardly feel it. The consciousness of love in very many women has actually left the vagina. It is so riddled with past, with tension and emotion, that women can’t fully get their awareness into it, especially up near the cervix. The vagina has been desensitised there, and it’s getting worse with every generation. Woman generally gets more pleasure and more sensation in the lower part of the vagina because man no longer has sufficient authority to get to the deepest (or highest) part or stay there in love long enough to do what he is supposed to do. Because he cannot reach the part of her that is next to her spiritual garden, where the true goddess of love resides, he has fetched her feeling (and her orgasm) down to the front and concentrated her awareness on the clitoris. He has done this in two ways — by persistent ejaculation immediately after entry, and by persistent stimulation of the clitoris with his fingers to compensate her for the orgasms she otherwise does not have. He has made clitoral satisfaction, clitoral compromise, the prize of lovemaking. She knows it is not love. But what else can she do? What else is there? Because of man’s failure to love her properly, she will masturbate on the clitoris as man taught her. If she were loved she wouldn’t do it. Without man’s influence she doesn’t have the same compulsion to masturbate as he does in the relief of his sexual aggression. She got the habit from him. Only the penis can really make love with woman, not the fingers or any other device. Only man’s living penis is designed to serve her in the vagina. Only a selfless, passionate, patient, loving penis can put the orgasm back where it should be — where orgasm happens naturally; where if it doesn’t happen there is no disturbing emotion; when she knows by the sensation, the consciousness, in her vagina, that she is being loved. Eventually, through loving woman, a man’s hands become like his loving penis. His whole body becomes love and woman will recognise this if ever she encounters it. Then his hands can love her in loveplay as her needs require. This cannot happen until man, through years of right practice of love, has developed and realised his psychic senses. The psychic senses are behind all the physical senses and are far finer and perceptive. As man learns to love the smell of woman he starts to actuate his psychic sense of smell. The same with his lips. As he kisses her body with increasing love — her hair, her skin, her breasts — his lips are endowed with a new dimension of communication. The same with his touch; it becomes a harmony, a flow. Finally he realises the whole psychic sense of sense. This is one sense instead of five and his whole body becomes that refinement of powerful and penetrating love. Then, even his presence communicates love.

This is also well detailed in videos available on the Barry Long youtube channel:

EP2. Transforming sex into love

He also has some very informative books and videos on meditation:

4 Steps of Meditation – Barry Long

Stillness Is the Way: An Intensive Meditation Course

Incorporating his practical steps of love-making and meditation is greatly enhancing my life and I recommend that others review his work to see if it might be beneficial to you. His teachings align with the goals and values of this forum. I would loosely describe him as a more conscious, less materialistic, western-orientated and advanced version of Gurdjieff.

 

[Nienna]

The romance reading list has enabled us to work through different perspectives and emotions whilst being taught via the sexual center as per the Cs.

I think that some clarification needs to be made here. Some people may thing that "sexual center" is the same thing as the "sexual chakra". It isn't.

Session 25 March 2017

Q: (L) What did the C's say about the centers? What did they say about the chakras?

Session 13 July 2002 which was quoted in the 25 March 2017 Session

Q: Does the recharging of the souled being come from a similar pool, only maybe the "human" pool?

A: No - it recharges from the so-called sexual center which is a higher center of creative energy. During sleep, the emotional center, not being blocked by the lower intellectual center and the moving center, transduces the energy from the sexual center. It is also the time during which the higher emotional and intellectual centers can rest from the "drain" of the lower centers' interaction with those pesky organic portals so much loved by the lower centers. This respite alone is sufficient to make a difference. But, more than that, the energy of the sexual center is also more available to the other higher centers.

Q: (L) Well, the next logical question was: where does the so-called "sexual center" get ITS energy?

A: The sexual center is in direct contact with 7th density in its "feminine" creative thought of "Thou, I Love." The "outbreath" of "God" in the relief of constriction. Pulsation. Unstable Gravity Waves.

Q: Do the "centers" as described by Mouravieff relate at all to the idea of "chakras?"

A: Quite closely. In an individual of the organic variety, the so-called higher chakras are "produced in effect" by stealing that energy from souled beings. This is what gives them the ability to emulate souled beings. The souled being is, in effect, perceiving a mirror of their own soul when they ascribe "soul qualities" to such beings.

Q: Is this a correspondence that starts at the basal chakra which relates to the sexual center as described by Mouravieff?

A: No. The "sexual center" corresponds to the solar plexus.

Lower moving center - basal chakra

Lower emotional - sexual chakra

Lower intellectual - throat chakra

Higher emotional - heart chakra

Higher intellectual - crown chakra

Q: (L) What about the so-called seventh, or "third eye" chakra?

A: Seer. The union of the heart and intellectual higher centers.

Back to Session 25 March 2017

Q: (L) So, then, basically, the C's gave a different description. And remember, the sexual center is the energy because they say you have to recharge your energy. The sexual center is drained by OPs. So, the sexual center corresponds to the solar plexus. The basal chakra is at the very bottom near your sexual organs. The sexual chakra is the organs.

(Pierre) Under the belly button?

(L) It's below your belly button.

(Galatea) But it's not the crotch area.

(L) Yeah, and then lower intellectual is the throat chakra, higher emotional is the heart, and higher intellectual is the crown chakra. And then when I asked about the 7th or the Third Eye, they said that's the union of the heart and intellectual higher centers. That closes the circuit in the "shepherd's crook".

(Pierre) And the Buddhists say something different.

(L) And they're quite possibly wrong.

(Galatea) So there's something about having sexual energy that increases your bodily energy that increases your ability...

(L) Oh yeah, it's the creative energy of the cosmos.

Something to think about.