The fact is always simple. The difficulty is in seeing it through the — Barry Long

"Okay, so you dont have drugs, alcohol and sex but you love someone, as a feeling. Then it wont be long before youll be experiencing one or more of the painful feelings Ive mentioned above - and thinking its natural! Wait and see. Even in every day living youre continually interpreting experience via your emotions instead of being the experience direct. "This is good, thats bad," your feelings swing subtly to and fro all day long obscuring the reality, the sensational knowledge or gnosis that its not bad at all; its simply life as it is."

"All feelings are false and deceptive. [...] Enlightenment is to be emptied (not empty) of feelings and thus at one with the pure sensation of divine being. And that pretty well sums up the whole spiritual process. But the spiritual process is so little understood that people dont realise their feelings are personal and false and have been misleading them all their life. If thats not true, why is humanity still unenlightened and basically unhappy after all this time - when enlightenment is the completely natural, sensational state of being every moment?"

"By disidentifying with your feelings you break your attachment to them. When that is done sufficiently youre back at the beginning, in pure sensation or unconditioned knowledge. Youve been beating your head against the wall to get some feelings and all youve got to do is break the habit and get used to living anew without pain and conflict. But thats a mighty realisation, and a mighty simple one which few are going to accept - theyll be too busy defending their feelings! So, I guess Ill still be demonstrating this the day I die."

"Incidentally, it seems to me thats why Andrew Cohen tells his students to be fearless and deadly serious. It takes that kind of one-pointed commitment to detach from the delusion of feelings and finally discover the blessing of the valiant; once freed of personal feelings the troublesome mind stops forever."

"Enlightenment is enlightenment. And thats that. Its an unalterable, unwavering state of knowledge and being beyond doubt, a completion every moment by grace of the Most High, the unspeakable one, God. Thats the ultimate; the absolute being beyond any description. But the ultimate, the enlightenment of man, must translate into his living life. And to me and my teaching that means an enlightened man is liberated from unhappiness. Being and living free of unhappiness is the natural and simple state of all life on earth - except man. He has been misled away from it by spiritual lures and glamour and the result is the conflict and pain, the fluctuating unhappiness, of his short life."

"Love is not a feeling; its a sensation. Drinking water when youre thirsty is a sensation, not a feeling. Being in nature or swimming in the sea is a sensation, not a feeling. Lying down when youre tired is sensational, not a feeling, although you may say it feels good. Feeling is an emotional interpretation of experience and these sensations dont need interpretation; they are just good or right. Making physical love rightly is a sensation, not a feeling. So is the love of God. The same goes for joy and beauty; both are sensational."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."

"We are shocked when we see educators, timid before criticism and confused about first principles, betray their trust. And we wonder what can be that philosophy of education which believes that young people can be trained to the duties of citizenship by wrapping their minds in cotton wool."

"An [hypertext] encyclopaedia will be an overall attempt by the knowledgeable, the learned societies or anyone else, to represent the state-of-the-art in their field. An encyclopaedia will be a living document, as up to date as it can be, instantly accessible at any time. It will contain carefully authored explanations and summaries of the subject, as well as computer-generated indexes of literature. A reference to a paper from the encyclopaedia conveys authority and acceptance by academic society. A measure of a paper’s standing may be conveyed by the number of links it is away from an encyclopaedia."

"A sample of the modern debate, which neatly summarizes the anti-reductionist position is provided by Grene (1974). She points out that in principle a one-level ontology—the belief, for example, that with increasing knowledge all science will become an account of the world in the language of, say, atomic events—contradicts itself. This is so because such a belief, to be meaningful, requires an ontology which admits both atomic events and cognition. Here at once a second level is smuggled in! It is logically possible... that there might be no levels in between those of atomic events and cognition (that in essence is Descartess position) but the sciences of chemistry and biology consist of some well-tested conjectures that there are such intermediate levels as are represented by molecules, cells, organelles, organs, and organisms."

"All competent thinkers agree with Bacon that there can be no real knowledge except that which rests upon observed facts. This fundamental maxim is evidently indisputable if it is applied, as it ought to be, to the mature state of our intelligence. But, if we consider the origin of our knowledge, it is no less certain that the primitive human mind could not, and indeed ought not to, have thought in that way. For if, on the one hand, every Positive theory must necessarily be founded upon observations, it is, on the other hand, no less true that, in order to observe, our mind has need of some theory or other. If in contemplating phenomena we did not immediately connect them with principles, not only would it be impossible for us to combine these isolated observations, and therefore to derive profit from them, but we should even be entirely incapable of remembering facts, which would for the most remain unnoted by us. Thus there were two difficulties be overcome: the human mind had to observe in order to form real theories, and yet had to form theories of some sort before it could apply itself to a connected series of observations. The primitive human mind, therefore, found itself involved in a vicious circle, from which it would never have had any means of escaping, if a natural way of the difficulty had not fortunately found by the spontaneous development of Theological conceptions. ...chimerical hopes ..exaggerated ideas of mans importance in the universe to which the Theological Philosophy ...at the commencement, ...afforded an indispensable stimulus without the aid which we cannot, indeed, conceive how the primitive human mind would have been induced to undertake any arduous labours."