Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Brunton

  • The Dangers of Psychic Phenomena on the Spiritual Quest

    The thoughts of Paul Brunton well presented in a short video. I have been reading him for years. Like Thomas Merton, the man is at his best in his journals. I have read and re-read all sixteen volumes. For some extracts see my Brunton category. 

  • The Lethal Chamber of the Soul

    I float the suggestion that the problem of the external world was originally ontological, not epistemological. The material world is the great lethal chamber of the soul. Only spiritual heroes can arouse themselves sufficiently to escape from its stupefying effect upon consciousness. (Paul Brunton) The Brunton quotation is distinctly Emersonian, as witness: The influence of…

  • Requite Good with Evil?

    Or with justice? And what is justice? 'Equity'? Substack latest. The short piece ends thusly: You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.

  • Detachment and Renunciation

    The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume Two, The Quest, p. 130, #242: Detachment from the world is an absolute necessity for the man who seeks authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. But renouncement of the world is not necessary to any except those who have an inborn natural vocation for the monkish life.…

  • Paul Brunton on Eugene O’Neill

    The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 7, Healing of the Self, p. 50: The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O'Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the gaunt tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brought him down in his…

  • Meditation as Disciplined Non-Thinking

    A Brunton passage elucidated. Substack latest.

  • The Lethal Chamber of the Soul

    "The material world is the great lethal chamber of the soul. Only spiritual heroes arouse themselves sufficiently to escape from its stupefying effects upon consciousness." (Paul Brunton)

  • Requite Evil with Good?

    From The Notebooks of Paul Brunton: When Confucius was asked his opinion of the injunction to return good for evil, he answered, "With what then will you return good? Return good for good, but justice for evil." Is this not wiser counsel? Does not the other push goodness to an extremist position, rendering it almost…

  • Brunton Quotes Muhammad

    "Contemplation for an hour is better than formal worship for sixty years." (Paul Brunton, Notebooks vol. 15, Part I, p. 171, #16) Brunton gives no source. Whatever the source, and whether or not Muhammad said it, it is true. Aquinas would agree. The ultimate goal of human existence for the doctor angelicus is the visio…

  • Proper Equilibrium

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 15, Part II, p. 76, #316: He will maintain a proper equilibrium between being aware of what is happening in the world, remaining in touch with it, and being imperturbable towards it, inwardly unaffected and inwardly detached from it. Small is the number of those who can appreciate this as an…

  • Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

    If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation?  One corresondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation.  So five hours of philosophy ought to…

  • Better Unwed Than Ill-Wed

    The title is mine to the following observation of Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. 5, part I, p. 106, #240): It is true that men who are lonely or young or romantic are likely to marry a young woman with whom propinquity has brought them in touch.  In such cases he puts an illusion around the…

  • The Atheist

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Volume 12, Part I, p. 96, #14: He alone can be an atheist who has never experienced a glimpse, or who has been caught and become embedded in a hard dry intellectualism, or in whom ethics and conscience have withered. The point is quite defensible if put in less ringing terms.  Most atheists…

  • Doubt, the Engine of Inquiry

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 13, part II, p. 10, #48: It is the first operation of  philosophical training to instill doubt, to free the mind of all those numerous suggestions and distortions imposed on it by others since childhood and maintained by its own slavish acceptance, total unawareness, or natural incapacity. Or as I have…

  • No Resting Place in Any Earthly Desire

    Paul Brunton, Notebooks, Vol. 15, Part 2, p. 58, entry #179: In the end man has to arrive at this conclusion: that there is no resting place for him in any earthly desire, and that the satisfying and enduring peace of desirelessness is immensely superior to the always partial and transient fulfullment of such desire.…