Category: Brunton
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Politicians
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. 9, Human Experience, p. 126, #520, emphasis added: Politicians — more interested in their own careers than in sincere public service, ambitious to gain their personal ends, unwilling to rebuke foolish voters with harsh truth until it is too late to save them, forced to lead double lives of misleading public statements…
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On Corporate Prayer and Institutionalized Religion
Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of P. B., vol. 12, part 2, p. 34, #68: A public place is an unnatural environment in which to place oneself mentally or physically in the attitude of true prayer. It is far too intimate, emotional, and personal to be satisfactorily tried anywhere except in solitude. What passes for prayer…
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Study Everything, Join Nothing
Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy? Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort…
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The Supreme Enigma
Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 4: Every puzzle that fascinates innumerable persons and induces them to attempt its solution — be it mathematical and profound or ordinary and simple — is an echo on a lower level of the Supreme Enigma that is forever accompanying man and demanding an answer: What is he, whence and whither?…
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On Forming Societies at Faint Provocation
Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 154, #56: I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A man's own problem stares him alone in the face, and it is not to be solved by any association of men. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste…
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Who Are the Oddballs?
Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. II, The Quest (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications, 1986), p. 24: We are regarded as odd people because we trouble our heads with the search for an intangible reality. But it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living…
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Dubious Consolation for the Bald
Paul Brunton, who was bald, writes, I take comfort in the continental proverb,"A hundred years hence we shall all be bald." (Notebooks, VIII, 202.) I am not bald and the genetics of my lineage suggest the unlikelihood of my becoming bald. But the occasional dream reveals a subconscious anxiety. In one, I caught a glimpse…
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Meditation as Disciplined Nonthinking: A Brunton Passage Exfoliated
‘Meditation’ has two main senses. The first refers to disciplined discursive thinking. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy classically illustrates this first sense. If we use ‘thinking’ as short for ‘discursive thinking,’ we can say that the second sense of ‘meditation’ refers to disciplined nonthinking. Accordingly, meditation2 is an attempt to silence the discursive mind and…
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Not a Joiner
Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. II, p. 117: He is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from his own. Another reason is that…