Barry Long

The story of his realisations is told in a book published in July 2013, My Life of Love and Truth: A Spiritual Autobiography which describes his life up until the death of his second wife in 1982. His works are published by the Barry Long Foundation International, based in New South Wales, Australia and his last writings have yet to be published.

He started his public teaching in England and later went on to teach in Australia and New Zealand, Europe, the US and Canada. His last public seminar was the tenth annual 14-day Master Session held in Queensland, Australia in late October 2002. He continued to write new material after this and his observations on the approach of death were published on his website.

Long also wrote about many other aspects of “Love, Life, Truth, God and Death”. In The Origins of Man and the Universe he presents his cosmology. Speaking of this book he stated, “There’s so much in this book ….it’s like a base which my whole teaching goes back to, or extends from. My current teaching might be more refined, but is always consistent with it.” He taught and spoke about family life and the importance of raising children from birth in justice and truth not just love. In response to the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, an extract on terrorism from his Origins book written in 1983 was published separately as well as a new book A Prayer for Life: The Cause and Cure of Terrorism, War and Human Suffering.

Leaving India he moved to London, living in Highgate and working as a sub-editor in Fleet Street until he was able to support himself from teaching and publishing. In 1986 he returned to his native Australia, living on Tamborine Mountain, Queensland with his wife Kathy and young stepson, Simon, then in Burleigh Heads, Queensland when they divorced, and finally moving to Crabbes Creek, New South Wales where he lived until his death from prostate cancer in December 2003.

Long stated that he was a tantric master and that unhappiness arises because man and woman have forgotten how to love each other. In 1984 he recorded a double audio cassette Making Love: Sexual Love the Divine Way, later published as a book and CD.

In his early thirties he began to experience a disillusionment with his material life and in 1964 he abandoned everything, including his family, to go to India. There he experienced a spiritual crisis culminating in a self-ascribed “mystic death,” which he called his “realisation of immortality,” followed four years later by a “transcendental realisation”; a contact with a depth of consciousness from which he stated his knowledge of universal reality ultimately derived.

Barry Long (1 August 1926 – 6 December 2003) was an Australian spiritual teacher and writer.