by Peter Holleran

    Paul Brunton (1898-1981) was one of the first westerners to visit Sri Ramana Maharshi in the 1930’s. He arrived at the sage’s abode after a long search that led him to the feet of many faqirs, yogis, and saints. His journeys were chronicled in the books A Search in Secret Egypt and A Search in Secret India. Brunton’s experiences with Ramana as detailed in the latter culminated with an episode of mystical absorption under Maharshi’s influence in which he was drawn into the heart and experienced an infinite expanse of supra-physical light. This appears to have been an exhalted form of savikalpa samadhi, or transcendental consciousness where the subject-object distinction persists. (His experience was later clarified by Ramana who said "Since the experience is through the mind only, it first appears as a blaze of light. The mental predispositions are not yet destroyed. The mind is, however, functioning in its infinite capacity in this experience...When you wake up from sleep a light appears, which is the light of the Self, passing through Mahatattva. It is called cosmic consciousness. That is arupa (formless). The light falls on the ego and is reflected therefrom."(1)) Brunton later went on to write about the further realization of the spiritual heart, the inner source of attention, in jnana or jnana-nirvikalpa samadhi (the transcendental subject, exclusive of body and world, which he termed the Overself), and supra-mystical realizations beyond that, but it was this first contact with Maharshi that revolutionized his quest. He acknowledged Ramana as the inspiration behind much of his early writing efforts, and affirmed years later that his inner link with the sage had remained unbroken. While Ramana remained his "root" guru, he had many other teachers and influences who elaborated different aspects of the higher teachings to him and "filled in the gaps" or intellectual blind spots that his experience with Ramana did not provide. Among these were the sage Atmananda (Shree Krishna Menon), the Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, and Vedantist V.S. Iyer, the latter whom Brunton said "made the scales fall from my eyes."

    Brunton wrote that he was no stranger to mystic rapture as a child. A burning desire for truth caused him to set aside his position as a journalist, while yet in his thirties, and travel the world in pursuit of the higher wisdom. He wrote thirteen books between 1935 and 1952 converting a wealth of ancient doctrines into forms understandable by modern men and woman. His historical significance was that of being one of the original East-West bridges, putting traditional religious and philosophic teachings into a contemporary form consistent with science and a global world-view, and, in the opinion of many, for making a creative reinterpretation of the perennial wisdom teaching which had only existed in incomplete fragments in both the East and the West at the time.

    Brunton once confessed that his stars were dark and brooding, and, much as he wished, he could not give up playing the wise old owl. The mature form of his teaching did not emerge until the release of The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself. These monumental books introduced the philosophy of “mentalism”, in which Brunton argued in great, even tedious, detail that all phenomena (thoughts as well as objects) are mental creations. By the term mentalism he meant that everything manifest arises in Consciousness or Mind. There are no objective entities at all, but only subjective perceptions or experience. To those who argue for the existence of material things Brunton’s answer is that they are only guessing, for no one has ever actually experienced anything apart from their consciousness of it.

    Therefore, similar to Bishop Berkeley, Brunton proposes a subjective idealism, athough a subjective idealism in which a master world-image is projected by a World-Mind (God) and in which an infinite number of individual minds participate. It is not that a tree, for instance, ceases to exist because I do not see it, for someone else may be seeing it, and over and above that the World-Mind is projecting the idea of that tree. The fundamental truth of our experience is that it is conscious in nature and that at the heart of it lies our own conscious Self which can be realized. The goal proposed in The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga was for the quester to realize this consciousness as the Overself in the heart. This established, Brunton then argued in The Wisdom of the Overself that one should carry this realization into the fully projected waking state and realize the heart without retreating into trance samadhi. He affirmed the superiority of such open-eyed awakening to the exclusiveness of interior yogic realization. Thus the philosophy of mentalism solved certain metaphysical problems not readily explainable by conventional mysticism or yoga: the world is not merely maya or illusion, or some kind of trap, but a manifestation of God and the divine Self. Nor is it something to be radically avoided or separated from in order to achieve liberation or enlightenment. Consciousness is not in the body, as lesser forms of yoga maintain, rather the body and world arise in consciousness. The sage knows his bodily identity just as the ordinary man, only in the case of the sage he is not exclusively identified with it, but sees all arising as non-separate from himself.

    Brunton's essential philosophy, expressed in The Wisdom of the Overself, can be succinctly although inadequately stated as follows: Ultimate Reality is Mind. Mind’s first expression is the Void. The Void’s first expression is the World-Mind (God or Logos), then the World Idea, and finally, through a series of stepped-down emanations, the world itself. The individual can not know Mind, as such, but he can commune with the World-Mind through union with his individual Overself (Divine Soul). The Overself is individual, but not personal. It is the Conscious Self, beyond ego.

   Brunton originally advised one to experience or realize the Overself, Soul, or Self-Consciousness, first in the heart (as jnana samadhi), and then to bring that into the waking state until a greater, intuitive realization, the “lightning flash” (“open eyes”, “everyday mind”, or sahaj samadhi) reveals or stabilizes itself. He later revised this to say that the initial experience of trance was not absolutely necessary in every case.

   “..the Overself is with him here and now. It has never left him at any time. It sits everlastingly in the heart. It is indeed his innermost being, his truest self. Were it something different and apart from him, were it a thing to be gained and added to what he already is or has, he would stand the risk of losing it again. For whatever may be added to him may also be subtracted from. Therefore, the real task of this quest is less to seek anxiously to possess it than to become aware that it already and always possesses him.” (2)

   Of the first stage of realization, the culmination of the mystic path, that of absorption or recognition of the divine Overself in the heart, the ultimate subject, prior to the world appearance, Brunton spoke in this manner:

   "The actual experience alone can settle this argument. This is what I found: The ego vanished; the everyday "I" which the world knew and which knew the world, was no longer there. But a new and diviner individuality appeared in its place, a consciousness which could say "I AM" and which I recognized to have been my real self all along. It was not lost, merged, or dissolved: it was fully and vividly conscious that it was a point in universal Mind and so not apart from that Mind itself. Only the lower self, the false self, was gone but that was a loss for which to be immeasurably grateful." (3)

   Of the second and ultimate stage, that of sahaj samadhi, or realization of the oneness of the individual Overself with the Absolute Soul or World Mind, he wrote these beautiful lines:

   "The Glimpse, even at its fullest extent, as in the Hindu nirvikalpa and the Japanese satori, is only intermittent. If it becomes continuous, an established fact during the working and resting states, both, only then is it completed...The awareness of truth is constant and perennial. It cannot be merely glimpsed; one must be born into it, in Jesus' words, again and again, and receive it permanently. One must be identified with it."

   "It is easier to glimpse the truth than to stay in it. For the first, it is often enough to win a single battle; for the second, it is necessary to win a whole war."

   "When you awaken to truth as it really is, you will have no occult vision, you will have no "astral" experience, no ravishing ecstasy. You will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and you will realize truth was always there within you and that reality was always there around you. Truth was not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. it is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. it is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again."

   "The discovery of his true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except himself. The world may not honour him for it; he may die as obscure as he lived. But the purpose of his life has been fulfilled; and God's will has been done."

   "No announcements tell the world that he has come into enlightenment. No herald blows the trumpets proclaiming man's greatest victory - over himself. This is in fact the quietest moment of his whole life."(4)

   In his later writing Brunton clarified further that he did not claim that even sahaj yielded ultimate reality, but only that it represented the ultimate as far as man was concerned: namely, the realization of his Divine Overself, which could then intuit the presence or the existence of the World-Mind (source of the Universal World Image) and the Absolute Soul (source of individual Overselves or Divine Souls). The sage in union with his Overself (itself an eternal existant) could achieve further penetration of the Void and gain intuitive knowing or glimpses of its "priors", although he would eternally remain as Soul. Brunton was thus beginning to elaborate his teaching in light of the three Primal Hypostases of Plotinus (the One, Intellectual Principle, and Absolute Soul). He rejected the straight merger theory of the yogins or reductionism of Vedanta by positing the Overself or Divine Soul as an intermediary between man and ultimate God, the unknowable Godhead or Mind, which one could never actually become but from the position of reunion with the Overself could know exists as the source of one's Being. This would explain how a non-dual realizer like Ramana Maharshi could exclaim in ecstasy "father, father", and also attest that only the sage in sahaj samadhi is a perfect devotee. From the point of view of the ego, the Overself for practical purposes can be considered as God, although metaphysical accuracy requires these further distinctions be made, which assume further importance once the Overself is realized and the Soul becomes, as it were, "rapt in robes of glory".

    While introducing meditation and yoga to the West, and offering practical advice on the same, Brunton was, therefore, very critical of mystical paths that claim liberation to consist of abstracted rapture alone. He called his teaching “philosophy”, or the “yoga of the uncontradictable”. The philosophic path is superior, says Brunton, as it combines mystical experience, metaphysical thinking, and enlightened activity. It realizes that which exists simultaneously with the world, but prior to it. Such liberation cannot be “contradicted” by life, death, waking, dreaming, sleeping, or any change of state. While the mystic knows the Self, the philosopher knows the Self, God and the World, as well as the true relationship between them.

    Brunton spent the last twenty years of his life in Switzerland, writing daily. He maintained a mostly telepathic correspondence with students worldwide, receiving letters but not usually sending written replies. He did entertain visitors from time to time, however, and I knew several who spent time with him. Anthony Damiani (1922-1984), a longtime student and friend of Brunton and a man of realization himself, once remarked to his study group (Wisdom’s Goldenrod in Valois, New York), “people look at P.B. (as Brunton refered to himself) and say, ‘he seems like such a nice man’ - but they don’t know - they have no idea what goes on in his company, particularly at night!” He meant, of course, that in proximity to a free soul one’s own spiritual processes are quicked, and such was his own experience. Perhaps the most intimate and heartfelt account of time spent with P.B. in the last few months of his life is Reflections on Paul Brunton by Paul Cash.

    In spite of all this Brunton vigorously denied being a guru, accepted no disciples, and did not even accept formal students. When questioned of his realization he would often demur, saying quietly, “I’m not a sage, just a writer.” Yet those who heard him utter those words felt the power of the Self behind them. No common man could have penned his words, particularly the posthumous Notebooks series, with volume after volume of lucid and elegant writing with insight on innumerable aspects and subtleties of the path. See excerpts.

    Brunton said that his special work was to research, condense, and present the highest truths of ancient teachings in a format suitable for the modern world: a new East-West philosophy plainly stating truth beyond the limitations of common religion and mysticism with their egoistic perspective and often world-negative views. Yet he predicted that

   ”Not one but several minds will be needed to labor at the metaphysical foundation of the twentieth century structure of philosophy. I can claim the merit only of being among the earliest of these pioneers. There are others yet to appear who will unquestionably do better and more valuable work.” (3)

   So far I have found few to compare with him. I admire and find Brunton reliable for the insightful and balanced nature of his teaching capability, which is so eloquently described, without personal reference to himself, in Volume 16 of his Notebooks:

   "There are men of enlightenment who cannot throw down a bridge from where they are to where they once were, so that others too can cross over. They do not know or cannot describe in detail the way which others must follow to reach the goal. Such men are not the teaching masters, and should not be mistaken for them...The man of enlightenment who has never been a learner, who suddenly gained his state by the overwhelming good karma of previous lives, is less able to teach others than the one who slowly and laboriously worked his way into the state - who remembers the trials, pitfalls, and difficulties he had to overcome." (5)

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For a definitive scholarly thesis on Brunton's life and thought see Part One and Part Two of "Paul Brunton: A Bridge Between India and the West" by Annie Cahn Fung.    (from the Wisdom's Goldenrod website).

Also see Paul Brunton for links to several articles and first-person accounts of the sage.

(1) Talks with Ramana Maharshi (Carlsbad, California: Inner Directions Publishing, 2001), pp. 133, 425
(2) Paul Brunton, The Wisdom of the Overself (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1984), p.441
(3) The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Vol. 8, (Burdett, N.Y.: Larson Publications, 1987),
    2:187
(4) Ibid, Vol. 16, Part 1, 2.28-29, 33, 77-78, 83
(5) Ibid, 5.20-21