Master of the West
In this talk, Barry Long gets real about what it means to be truly present in your life. He invites us to stop living in our heads, cut through the noise of this information-overloaded culture, and reconnect with something simple but powerful — our actual, felt experience of being alive. At the heart of the message is a call to ground ourselves in the vital body — that deeper sense of being that doesn’t rely on memory, thinking, or emotional drama. He challenges the Western obsession with competition, therapy, and intellectual understanding, and instead speaks to the real joy and clarity that comes from feeling the truth for yourself, in your body, right now. If you're tired of chasing happiness and ready to feel alive again, this one’s for you.
LANGUAGE: English
YEAR RECORDED: 1985
PLACE RECORDED:
DURATION: 1 hours and 33 minutes
EPISODE NOTES
Extracts from this episode:
'I am a Western guru. I do not mystify. I am guru of the West. I do not need to use abstractions. I speak right down to earth where my fellow man and woman have to play and work in the muck of the West. Where it is hard because it is competitive, cruel, unjust, violent. I am of this violent and cruel culture. Just about everything that you have done has happened to me. So, I am with you. I am not in some robe. I am an ordinary man as you are an ordinary man or woman.'
'I know everything that is going on in you. I have had the experience so that I would be able to speak to you at every level. I've raised children. I've had to leave a wife and two children. I'd done that. Watch the woman that I love die of cancer and serve her. I've done that. Worked 9 to 5. 12 in the night to six o'clock in the morning. Started at 6 o'clock in the morning. I've done that. Had a rotten boss on top. Paid the rates and been completely ignorant in my body and my mind – but I am not ignorant any longer. I am here. I have enlightened this brain of its dependence on the past, of its dependence on promises. On its dependence on expectations, its dependence on tomorrow.'
'There is no tomorrow. But tomorrow always comes there is no tomorrow because there is only now to be free. I can only be free and now. I can't be free tomorrow. I can only be free now. Are you free now? It just means to give up the past now. Give up all yearning for the past. When we want the repetition of yesterday we're always looking forward to tomorrow.'
'Are you free now? Do not worry about tomorrow because if you worry about tomorrow you created tomorrow. Be free now. And tomorrow will come. And it'll be alright.'
'If you worry about tomorrow, you create tomorrow's worry. You are anxious about tomorrow. You create the anxiety of tomorrow. And so tomorrow will be filled with anxiety. It will be filled with problems.'
The Human Condition (is one of suffering and attachment to suffering)