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Sally and Jade

 

interview

For a period of three years, Barry Long made love with five women in the role of tantric master. We asked him if we could interview one of his tantric consorts in order to have first-hand account of what it is like to practice sexual union with a living tantric master. While Barry denied our request to speak directly with any of these women, he said he would be happy to submit our questions to two of them and that they would respond in writing. The power of his teaching speaks for itself in their words.

QUESTION: You were involved in a sexual relationship with a spiritual teacher who has described himself as a "Western tantric master." In what ways is being in relationship with a tantric master different from being in a conventional romantic relationship?
Sally   Jade
Sally is one of the women Barry Long speaks about in his interview. She was in an intimate association with Barry for five years and is now thirty-seven.

Sally: First, I would say I was never in relationship with a tantric master, although we were together many times as people in relationship are. Relationship is sought so individuals can be secure with each other, where I as an individual can live in a state of security and relative ignorance, where you give me what I want both sexually and psychologically, and for that I stay with you.

Being with a tantric master is going beyond my want of relationship and becomes a process of self-knowledge, self-annihilation and absence as I become more one with the divine consciousness he is. Fundamentally, through the physical making of love-the most dangerous thing on earth-all personal love and attachment, sexual want, insecurity, jealousy and possessiveness will be faced. This can never truly be faced sufficiently in conventional romantic love. Tantric love is love of God, the unknown, love of Nothing, not love of the individual man or woman.
  "My name is Jade, and I am one of the five women Barry speaks about in his interview. I had an intimate spiritual and physical association with Barry for about seven years, which started when I was thirty-two; I am now forty."

Jade: To start with, I would like to define "tantric" because there's a lot of nonsense spoken about it. In my experience, tantra is the power to bring a woman more deeply into the love of God within through the act of making love. A tantric master has that God-given power.

I could not describe my association with Barry as a relationship in any conventional sense. A conventional romantic relationship is more of an apparently random, haphazard process usually entered into with minimal, if any, sense of purpose. With Barry the association was entered into consciously, as a process of purification for me, so there was purpose in it. This was known by me and stated by Barry right from the beginning. The association was always only about returning me to a deeper sense of God, impersonal love or truth; this was why Barry had taken me on. I was told I would be taken through love and in that process purified—the degree of purification was in God's hands. And that is what was done.

In a conventional relationship there are usually emotional needs, expectations, wantings and dependencies on both sides—in other words, the love is selfish or personal. This was not the case in my association with Barry. The love in Barry was impersonal and profound, an intelligence that wanted nothing for itself out of the association. It or he was not true to the person I was but was only uncompromisingly true to the divine will or what was right—the purpose, which was to bring me closer to God. How did I know he was true? First, the power of such love was able to communicate to the depths of me, in a place outside time and space. This was quite extraordinary and at the same time quite natural. And second, over many years I saw Barry consistently demonstrate selfless love and service; in fact his entire life was about bringing others to a greater sense of God. It was that which he served. So it was always clear to me that Barry was a God-man or realized consciousness and therefore provided a true reflection that would help to purify me.


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