Barry Long

Increasing numbers of people around the world are attracted to Barry Long's no-nonsense approach to living the spiritual life. His books, tapes and videos encompass all aspects of spirituality from meditation to raising children, from cosmic consciousness to making love.

An Australian, he took his radical and original spiritual teachings to Europe and America - transforming ordinary people's lives for more than 35 years.

The teachings arose from his dedication to truth and love and from his own spiritual realizations. A 'mystic death' in 1965 was followed by a series of transcendental experiences, including what he described as the rarest of all recorded realizations. Having lived an ordinary western life as a younger man, he was able to bring this profound spiritual knowledge to our everyday world and express it with great power and practicality.

'I say that I can explain any aspect of truth in ordinary English words . . . I am the first master to present a comprehensive way of life that embodies honesty and the love of man and woman - without intellectualising the realisation of God . . . I seem to be the first teacher to have ever said 'You have no right to be unhappy' and then to demonstrate that as a way of life.'

He attributed much of the unhappiness on earth to the sexual relationship of men and women and introduced a contemporary tantric teaching which brought him to the attention of many thousands of couples.

He stayed away from the media and the bright lights of fame but nonetheless men and women sought him out from many countries. Among them were therapists, teachers, psychologists and counsellors whose own work now carries Barry Long's influence. And other spiritual teachers came to him (notably Eckhart Tolle). Barry Long's legacy is not only in his writings (his books are in 12 languages) and his recordings but in the countless lives he transformed.