Barry Long

A Personal Account

May 06, 2026

This is an updated version of an essay first published (but now removed from—see below) my collection of essays, Ad Radicem.

Most of us, when in need of counsel, turn to people who are just as confused as we are. We do this deliberately, because we aren’t really looking for a solution at all, but for comfort. We can be confident that those we confide in will provide what we’re really after, reassurance, because that is what they seek, in return for their blandishments, from us. What’s more, they are involved in our lives; they are hoping to realise their dreams through us, or they are speaking on behalf of the same system we want to advance through, or on behalf of the same group we want to be accepted by, so we know that they are very likely to give us the worst, which is to say the safest and laziest, advice; and that suits us just fine. We don’t want solutions, we want those we ask for advice to confirm the answers we’ve already arrived at, and they will. Of course they will, who wouldn’t?

Barry Long wouldn’t.

Seek, and You Shall Never Find

As a young man, I had a powerful, one might say desperate, urge to be free of the suffering, ignorance, fear and violent unhappiness which grievously oppressed me. My house was on fire, and putting it out, solving the problem of the self—of my self that is, never content for more than a few moments at a time—was priority one. And yet, like others before me with a desire to get out of a burning building, I soon discovered that perceptive, disinterested guidance on how to do so was hard to find. Wherever I went, I found people who lived in the basement of their own smouldering mansions, or who ran private fire and rescue services, or who loved to watch a good blaze up, or, more often than not, were perfectly comfortable in burning buildings. There were plenty of self-help books, innumerable adults with good advice and an infinite number of subjects that could be studied. But the subject, I, where was the course in that?

Like many in my position, I fell upon whatever came into view that seemed to offer the radical truth I was looking for. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the cheesiest of spiritual guidebooks. Anything which seemed to offer the freedom I sought, I swallowed whole; but it just seemed to pass through me, without purging me of unhappiness. I turned to the source of these works—to the Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu and the authors of the Upanishads—but I soon reasoned that whatever truth these originating masters had realised, couldn’t possibly be confined to a handful of wise men over two millennia ago. There must be someone now, today, who has realised the same thing; someone living it, not just talking about it. Priests, therapists, radical leaders and authors certainly weren’t. They were unimpressive humans, all packaging. And so I hit the ‘Guru scene’.

The world of ‘enlightened men’ is, as is well known, full of charlatans of the highest rank. Genuine authority is, for many, indistinguishable from charisma, worldly power or just ‘someone like me’, and followers the world over flock to surrogate parents with forceful personalities, glowing endorsements and reassuring diagnoses. I was lucky enough to have been given a head start on the odyssey, the one they call ‘self-discovery’, thanks to a few people I grew up with who certainly were impressive humans, and who had the love and gumption to kick me a bit further up the road than I’d’ve gone under my own initiative. Had it been otherwise, I might have fallen for more spiritual tricks than I did, and taken longer to come across the work of Jiddu Krishnamurti and George Gurdjieff, the first two modern teachers I encountered who appeared to actually be in contact with a reality deeper than personality, a truth which didn’t require a clever script, or dubious submission to a Sage on the Stage, to take in. Gurdjieff struck me as a kind of superhuman character, overflowing with exotic, and yet simple and intuitively powerful insights, while Jiddu Krishnamurti said the same thing over and over again, and yet never seemed to repeat himself, or, despite only ever speaking of absolutes, utter a cliché. And it was all peculiar stuff—somehow the mind couldn’t quite grasp it, impossible to remember; yet nourishing. A beguiling sense that life was being spoken of, rather than just about, a sense that these people were living the truth they gave voice to, a sense that I could never learn what they were teaching, I could only live the truth they had found.

But how? How to get this wondrous thing I wanted so badly? Despite the thrilling sense that I was approaching the source, nothing fundamentally was changing in my ordinary lived life, which, no matter how careful I was to conceal it from myself, was a mess. The house was getting tidier, yes, and nicer to live in, but I had a strange habit of setting fire to the carpet. I watched myself carefully, but acted in ways I could not fathom, fearfully leaping into crocodile-infested rivers and heroically throwing myself out of pillowed boudoirs. Why this bizarre behaviour? Whence this rabid dissatisfaction? And why, while we’re at it—given that I wanted to write for a living—did I look back on everything I wrote with the unsettling feeling that it had been written by an imposter?

Being With Barry

Gurdjieff and Krishnamurti were all well and good, but they didn’t seem to get at the root of my problem. I still had the feeling that what they were saying was coming from the same distant land of mystic dreams as the Sermon on the Mount (hard to apply—try considering the lilies of the field when your girlfriend has got the face on—and easy to dodge—just meekmaxx your way to the Kingdom). Thus it was I found my way to Barry Long, a self-declared ‘spiritual master’, then in his seventies, who, twenty years before, after abandoning his wife, family, and a successful career as a newspaper editor in Australia, had realised the infinite. He had followed a woman to India, gone through a ‘mystic death’ and then come to live in North London, where he met a madman, whom he called ‘The Blessed John’, who pulverised Long’s soul and transformed him into an ‘enlightened master’. After this, he put a full-page advert in the Observer newspaper announcing that he was ‘Guru’, taught meditation in London for a decade or so, then declared himself ‘World Teacher’ and, after moving back to Australia, toured the world in order to free his students from their unhappiness, from the state, as he put it, of being ‘happy today, unhappy tomorrow.’

How do you like them apples? Hard to swallow? ‘Spiritual Master’, ‘guru’, ‘world teacher’ are words that make the secular mind vibrate with outraged scorn and the religious mind shrink back, as if from the pitchfork of Satan. It’s fine for some mythical character in a book to declare that ‘I and the Father are one’, but for anyone else to actually do the same is certifiable madness or heresy of the darkest stripe. That someone could be free of suffering, could know the truth of death, could teach love or life, could make such impossibly grandiose claims about themselves; could be, in a word, ‘enlightened’—and not just ‘someone’, but someone living (in Highgate!), 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, Islam, capitalism, socialism, statist nationalism, postmodernism or Arsenal; all of which are cults. The ordinary behaviour of ordinary people, huddled around their viddy-screens, guzzling soma, sacrificing their lives to the triple-headed god of ‘power,’ ‘security’ and ‘identity,’ worshipping symbolic surrogates for their meaningless lives; none of this counts as cult behaviour; while listening to someone who speaks the truth, and loving that truth, can only mean drugs and orgies and brainwashing and mass suicide.

Not that, as I say, there aren’t fake masters out there, 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 [alleged] shenanigans of Adi Da, Sai Baba, Osho, Deepak Chopra, and all the rest of the nonsense that can be found, today, in the nooks and crannies of ‘spirituality’, men have been using the power of their personalities to lord it over credulous seekers (especially the pretty ones). Even if we are able to put aside the disastrous postmodern antagonism towards authority, particularly male authority—the common belief that a man with power to influence others must be corrupt in some way, or oppressively domineering—even if we can see straight through this inhuman, self-serving attitude, we still find a lot of powerful ‘spiritual’ men corrupted by their power.

Was Barry Long such a man? I can only speak for myself. Subtle creepiness, platitudinous cant, a weird sense of ‘specialness’, blindness to certain aspects of human life (especially sex), dressing up (himself or the truth) in fancy robes, taking advantage of his position, 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 J.Krishnamurti (or Sri Ramana Maharshi or Mooji for that matter). I don’t know if these men really were completely free of the human-all-too-human condition—and I’m not even sure if that really matters—but I do know they were, in the only sense that really matters, original; they spoke with impressive authority; they were not above-it-all; and what they said actually worked. And that’s how it was with Barry Long.

I encountered BL’s 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 big, magical wow, a psychological effect, a trippy illusion or, that most misleading of psychic experiences, a ‘spiritual realisation’, but a strange yet extremely simple and startlingly intimate experience of an original ‘I’ which I’d spent years piling a secondary feeling-thinking self on top of. Listening to this tape, and others (particularly the peerless ‘How to Stop Thinking’), I felt like I was doing the most subversive thing on earth, taking in a truth so revolutionary it could dissolve the world itself. After this, I spent around ten years reading Barry Long’s books, listening to his tapes and attending his seminars.

The first one I went to, when I was still unconvinced about his status as an original teacher, 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—and never appealing to a philosophy or a system—but very practical, and, crucially for me, often very funny. Thirdly, at this meeting, there happened to be on the lawn outside some kind of ‘children’s event’ hosted by McDonald’s. 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 (‘excite their selves’). 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 caaaalm you might imagine, but a very simple imperturbability that I very much 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 his 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 came to see this as a widely disregarded cornerstone to actually liberating oneself from the human condition; all teachings, not to mention fabulous spiritual experiences, are inherently misleading—which perennial seekers and god hobbyists fail to understand, either martyring themselves on their celestial specialness, or just giving up because ‘you can’t get to where you already are’. Long avoided both traps, presenting a spiritual discipline that was free of the humid sanctity of Buddhist retreats and Advaitist ashrams, the kind which dangle the carrot of ‘enlightenment’, or the capital-friendly analgesic of mindfulness, before navel-gazers the world over, and, at the same time, demolishing—often hilariously—his listeners’ expectations of what the ‘spiritual life’ is supposed to be.

The second time I went to see Barry was for one of his ten day sessions, when I was struggling with a self-made knot that he cut through with a blow, as he did for others who came to him tied up in themselves. This was the secret to Barry Long’s miraculously perceptive responses to his student’s questions, his ability to see, before his eyes, the difference between love, or conscious experience, and emotion, the bedrock of the false self, just under the mask it presents to the world, ready to jump out at a moment’s notice. A bit of bad news, the possibility of sex, an insult, ‘the last prawn on the plate’, and off goes the tumble drier of emotion. Barry taught that this experience is, first of all, hell on earth (did I need reminding? reader, I did), and secondly, that it is radically different to the subtle feelings or (his preferred word) sensations of the ‘I’ underneath. This one truth (along with the related insight that ‘imagination is the curse of man’), when I first heard it, changed my life. It was as if I had been living with a demon posing as a friendly housemate and someone had ripped its mask off.

I came to realise that there was nothing, but nothing, more important to learn than how to overcome the thinking-emoting mask that the false self pulls over my consciousness; to learn to stop thinking and let go of anger, irritation, anxiety, wanting, liking, hoping, imagining and deciding. The problem is, I soon discovered, that although these are things I could learn and understand in the normal way, in the end there is no ‘teaching’, from Barry Long or anyone else, which could possibly give me what I was looking for; which was my own life. What was getting in the way of the conscious experience I thirsted for wasn’t that I did not understand this or that, or couldn’t do what Barry Long could. The obstacle was me.

Barry Long’s Teaching

Long put it this way. He said that there are two things which interrupt the ‘I-consciousness’, or the easy simplicity of simply living, that you yearn for (if, of course you do; most do not), two things which disturb the psyche and make people emotional and unhappy. These are ‘not getting your life right’ and ‘the love between man and woman’. Until your life, and your love-life, are sorted out, you will never be happy. You can be The Buddha himself, but if you are living with someone who does not love you, or are stewing in your loneliness, or hate your job, or are being bullied by one of your parents, or can’t stop eating… if your life isn’t right, nothing can be added to it, certainly no teaching, that will make it right. And it takes years and years to undo all the damage that has been done. There are big realisations and self-smashing turning points, but tend to be a distraction from the truth of consciousness, which unfolds day by day by day…

Long 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. He also released several books and tapes on making love without emotion, on staying conscious with your partner. I find it impossible to imagine that I could have experienced the love with women that I have without this advice. Not that the world never felt love before Barry Long, nor that, even with his teachings, my own relations with women haven’t still been ruined by my selfish insensitivity, cruelty and weakness as a man, but what he said, aside from being radically new, was superbly effective. His ‘Making Love’ book changed my sex life and that of many other people, not just ‘for the better’—as in, having more satisfying sex—but into an entirely new kind of experience. 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.

Barry Long taught that love-making has a purpose; meaning that it is not just for pleasure, but for actually making love. It is the means by which love enters the world. He said that to make love, man must give to woman, not in the sense of feeble clinging and pedestal-putting worship, but in unself-conscious physicality. He wrote that ‘woman’s basic unhappiness is because man is unable to reach her physically, and man’s basic unhappiness is because, in being unable to make love he has lost his authority’, the only authority woman will willingly submit to. Because man doesn’t have this authority, he has to use force, cleverness and all the tricks men have used, for millennia, to make woman doubt herself. All of this leads to ‘premature ejaculation, guilt, anxiety, self-doubt, impotence, sexual atrophy masquerading as sexual disinterest, sexual abstinence due to repressed fear of failure, sexual bravado and lack of true wisdom—all of which he inflicts on woman, aggravating her basic discontent and his own restlessness’. Quite.

In order to become a ‘fully integrated male’ man has to learn to physically love woman. Not just give her orgasms and babies, but overcome self together, allow the mind-blowing power and beauty of her femininity to enter his world and, through him, the world that he makes. This is extremely difficult because, in order to gain power over his empty pride, over his reactive anger and (I would add) over the disastrous niceness that he learns from a feminine world, he also has to discover his own independent masculine integrity. Only this way can he manfully confront her tyrannous emotions—‘the fiendess’—without violence, and only this way can he build an objective life worth living, meaning one worthy of his woman. Imagine that; the whole world built as a love-offering.

If that sounds tacky, portentous or overblown; if, after listening to BL harangue the men in his audience for their disgraceful lovelessness, their shameful selfishness and their feeble lack of spirit you feel yourself nettling up; if you find yourself outraged at his insistence that men cannot make love with men, or women with women; if you get caught up on Barry Long’s more bizarre or questionable pronouncements, and there are a few of those; well then all this might not be for you. Fair enough—go somewhere else; but I would say that everyone I know whose lives were changed by Barry Long’s teaching were initially appalled at how he seemed, and came to realise that this reaction was actually a rather clever trick that the worldly self was playing through its opinions. ‘In truth’, said Barry, ‘nobody is entitled to their opinion’.

Talking of which, another astonishing aspect of Long’s work, at least one which forcefully struck me when I was first encountering it, is the almost outrageous insistence that ‘you have no right to be unhappy’. Ever! For Barry Long, the whole of one’s life is a life-or-death matter, meaning that every moment is one of absolute ethical responsibility. What this means is that all the tricks of spirituality, particularly the belief that one has to achieve this or that state, or that the world has to be changed through some kind of political or dissident activity, are irrelevant next to successfully meeting the most ordinary challenges of living; waking up with a moody, facing your boss, confronting the boredom of daily chores… As Gurdjieff put it; ‘there is a thousand times more value in sweeping the floor as it should be done than in writing twenty books’.

This is why, when I spent time with ‘spiritual’ people, who talked about universal love and self-overcoming and heightened consciousness and whatnot, who were able to write twenty books, or run twenty businesses, or run twenty marathons, or have twenty realisations, it became clear that they were unable to sweep up the dust and clutter that litters their love lives, their home lives, their relations with their families, and the dusty caverns of their hearts. They—and this includes many of Barry Long’s followers—talked up a great ‘global reawakening’ and ‘enlightened awareness,’ but their inner lives were barren, their physiognomy unimpressive, their lives a tedious nothing and their speech, despite being decorated with deep ideas and impressive quotations, empty. This is why so many of Barry’s students loved his general ‘presence’—which, like a good meditation, made them feel ever so nice—but reserved the personal right to disagree with his specific, explicit teachings.

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 comes down to something which hardcore atheists and sceptics, even promised godmen, 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, and so has no real passionate interest in. All of this Barry rightly summed up with the word ‘God’—not the fictional, abstract-emotional ‘God’ of established religion and myth, but the divine reality behind the appearance-of-the-world conveyed to the mind by the mind. ‘Divine’ — another off-putting word to the sophisticated worldly mind, ‘airy-fairy’, as Long said, like ‘love’. ‘Living the divine life’ is a phrase guaranteed to give materialist minds the willies, or induce a dismissive, world-weary headshake, but it’s what Barry Long lived and taught more directly and powerfully than anyone I have ever heard of.

The I Reading These Words

Have you heard of Barry Long? Unlikely. Probably you’ve come across his famous student, Eckhart Tolle, who repackaged his master’s finest insights while carefully shearing them of anything which Oprah Winfrey might have found difficult to digest. Even if you have come across Barry, you may have put him aside after a quick dip. Most people have no idea what the truth is and have no way of recognising it. They react against the form (in Barry’s case a strident, preachy, ‘patriarchal’ anger) and reject the quality. When original quality appears in their lives they are confused, irritated or bored by it, or they ‘try it out’ for a while, and get bored. They are only able to accept that something is genuinely original when they are told to accept it, either from the recommendation of someone sufficiently famous, or when they see 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.

…or perhaps it won’t. When I wrote and first published this account I ended it there, but it is quite possible that Barry Long’s teaching will sink into the waves, or be perverted into its demonic opposite or, most likely, only exist in general understanding as a gross caricature. But that doesn’t matter. Barry Long cared not a fig about being popular, or interesting, or clever. Like all great men, he spoke a truth that transcended fashion, at the cost of his popularity; he protected his students from his own influence by unsentimentally tearing apart their illusions; and he spoke directly to the present moment, to here and now, to the situation, the only time and place that eternity, and love, and truth, can be found, in the consciousness of the reader.

This Piece Might Be in Ad Radicem

As I said at the top, a shorter version of this piece was originally published in Ad Radicem, in the second edition, now updated to the third. If you buy from Amazon you’ll probably still get the second edition (because their stocks taking a while to deplete), but it’s a bit of a lottery right now. If you buy directly from me, you’ll only get the new updated edition.