Meditation: A Foundation Course (Barry Long)
[My 3-star Amazon review (March 17, 2014) of “Meditation: A Foundation Course: A Book of Ten Lessons” by Barry Long.]
After I read and reviewed Barry Long’s “Only Fear Dies,” which I gave four stars, I next perused “Meditation: A Foundation Course.” I found this book disappointing, because it’s super-skimpy, with its lessons too undeveloped, for it to qualify as a true meditation “course.” And the lessons themselves are unremarkable, though they may prove useful to neophytes.
How skimpy is this text? It’s 146 pages, but 35 of these pages are either blank or are just chapter headings with no text. And many of the pages with text contain very few words. For example, just leafing through the book, I found pages with, respectively, 11, 16 20, 23, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, and 39 words. If this dinky text were a regular-size book, with regular text, it would be considerably less than 50 pages.
The essence of Long’s instructions is: practice stillness. For example, he writes, “The purpose of meditation is to find the stillness within you... The first tuition is how to get on the road—how to still your mind... The truth is the stillness of the observer that sees the movement [of the mind].”
Long does provide some useful instructions on meditation. I particularly liked his posture recommendations—“Sit upright in a chair with your back straight, feet together or a few inches apart and knees spread naturally. Hands can rest on the knees or thighs or be held loosely together on the lap. Keep the skeleton upright. Let the flesh fall, so that you are easy and not tense. Hold the head erect. Gaze straight ahead.”
Long has a couple of paragraphs on Kundalini, but these do not even begin to do the subject justice. Most glaringly, he only talks about Kundalini as ascending energy, and not as descending power.
Long writes: “How long does it take to master the mind? About as long as it takes to master a foreign language,” This is nonsense. Only a fully en-Light-ened spiritual master has mastered his or her mind, and such mastery is exceedingly rare.
In sum, Long does not provide sufficient depth or detail regarding meditation and spiritual enlightenment. He doesn’t talk about samadhis, the mechanics and anatomy of awakening, or the role of Grace, Light-energy from above, in the awakening process. This tiny text is hardly a “foundation course”; in reality it is a mediocre introduction to the practice of meditation.
After I read and reviewed Barry Long’s “Only Fear Dies,” which I gave four stars, I next perused “Meditation: A Foundation Course.” I found this book disappointing, because it’s super-skimpy, with its lessons too undeveloped, for it to qualify as a true meditation “course.” And the lessons themselves are unremarkable, though they may prove useful to neophytes.
How skimpy is this text? It’s 146 pages, but 35 of these pages are either blank or are just chapter headings with no text. And many of the pages with text contain very few words. For example, just leafing through the book, I found pages with, respectively, 11, 16 20, 23, 24, 29, 32, 35, 36, and 39 words. If this dinky text were a regular-size book, with regular text, it would be considerably less than 50 pages.
The essence of Long’s instructions is: practice stillness. For example, he writes, “The purpose of meditation is to find the stillness within you... The first tuition is how to get on the road—how to still your mind... The truth is the stillness of the observer that sees the movement [of the mind].”
Long does provide some useful instructions on meditation. I particularly liked his posture recommendations—“Sit upright in a chair with your back straight, feet together or a few inches apart and knees spread naturally. Hands can rest on the knees or thighs or be held loosely together on the lap. Keep the skeleton upright. Let the flesh fall, so that you are easy and not tense. Hold the head erect. Gaze straight ahead.”
Long has a couple of paragraphs on Kundalini, but these do not even begin to do the subject justice. Most glaringly, he only talks about Kundalini as ascending energy, and not as descending power.
Long writes: “How long does it take to master the mind? About as long as it takes to master a foreign language,” This is nonsense. Only a fully en-Light-ened spiritual master has mastered his or her mind, and such mastery is exceedingly rare.
In sum, Long does not provide sufficient depth or detail regarding meditation and spiritual enlightenment. He doesn’t talk about samadhis, the mechanics and anatomy of awakening, or the role of Grace, Light-energy from above, in the awakening process. This tiny text is hardly a “foundation course”; in reality it is a mediocre introduction to the practice of meditation.
