Paul Brunton Daily Note
The glimpse is as much subject to grace as the Enlightenment which endures forever. It happens outside the man's own will, although inside his consciousness.
| The continual practice of the mantram leads in time to the awakening of his spiritual forces. They rise up spontaneously from their deeply hidden source within him and begin to saturate his mind and overwhelm his ego.
| With the feeling of the ego's displacement, all feelings of devotional worship or mystical communion also come to an end. For they presuppose duality, a relation which vanishes where there is only the consciousness of a single entity--the Overself.
| All living forms everywhere embody this principle of being--the One Infinite Life-Power. It is not itself personal yet it is open to man's personal access and will respond to his invocation--provided he succeeds in establishing contact with it and provided his approach is right--but its response must come in its own way and time.
| This is the experience whose mystery as well as peace passeth understanding. It is incommunicable by or to the intellect. For with it we attain unity but lose personality yet preserve identity.
| A meatless diet has practical advantages to offer nearly everyone. But to idealists who are concerned with higher purposes it has even more to offer. On the moral issue alone it tends to lessen callousness to the sufferings of others, men or animals, and to increase what Schweitzer called ”reverence for life.”
| Ultimately he will have to rise into that pure atmosphere whence he can survey his personal life as a thing apart. And, still more difficult as it is, he will have to live in such a way as to use personality to express the wisdom and goodness felt on that height…
| Such is the all-round development of the human psyche offered by philosophy. It balances mystical intuiting by logical thinking, religious belief by critical reflection, idealistic devotion by practical service.
| After all, if this teaching helps some readers penetrate the mystery of the higher power even just a little, it will really help them a lot.
| These teachings are not the result of conjecture nor the mirror of opinion. They are insights got by an opening of the inner eyes. This fact must be pointed out, in all humility, if they are to carry to any reader the revelatory understanding which they have already brought the writer.
| After the descent of grace, he feels lifted by a power stronger than his own above the stormy passions and unpleasant greeds, the petty egotisms and ugly hatreds which agitate the mass of mankind.
| When the end of life comes, and a man goes out of it like a candle in the wind, what then happens depends upon his character, his prevailing consciousness, his preparedness, and his last thoughts.
| There, in the deepest state of contemplation, the awareness of a second thing--whether this be the world of objects outside or the world of thoughts inside--vanishes. But unconsciousness does not follow. What is left over is a continuous static impersonal and unchanging consciousness. This is the inmost being of man…
| Jesus' use of the metaphor, the Son and the Father, was intended to point out that man, in his inner self, was born of, and is still in relation to, the Higher power, God.
| We do not understand the depths of our own being, the mystery in which it is grounded. I speak for mankind in general, not for those few great ones who have banished illusion and ignorance.
| Only when he sees that he himself is the prime cause of his own troubles, and that other people have been not more than the secondary cause, does he see aright.
| … The felicitous experience of the Overself may come briefly during meditation. It comes abruptly. At one moment the student is his ordinary egoistic self, struggling with his restless thoughts and turbulent feelings; at the next the ego suddenly subsides, and every faculty becomes quiescent. All the disciple has to do is to be nonresistant to the divinity which is taking possession of him, to receive lovingly and not strive laboriously…
| A man can hold only one thought at a time… Applying this, it follows that it is his holding of the thought of his personal separate ego alone which prevents him achieving identification with the Overself…
| The qualifications required from him are love of the highest, desire for truth, conformity of living to the divine laws, and balance in his own person.
| Where a wrong is done us by someone generally we may be sure that the experience represents the expiation of a wrong which we have done to someone in a past incarnation. It is useless to cry out against the injustice of the injury when the cause lies deep within our own history. It is best to put aside the natural feeling of resentment and, understanding as well as we may what it is we are expiating, take its lessons to heart.
| Within is mastery, within is colossal power--but you have not yet touched it. However little you have so far accomplished you can still do big things.
| There are different stages in the development of people: some stand on the lower, some on the higher ones--and others fill in the space between. There is no equality among human beings, in character or manners, in intelligence or intuitiveness…
| We leave the body with the first death and the ego with the second death. But this is not the end. In the Overself we find our final being.
| In the last reckoning life is really a process whereby the individual becomes conscious of his own true identity. The spiritual nature of man does not exist potentially, but actually…
| All the experiences of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for the Overself. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest.
| The philosophical teaching is that the return of every prophet is an inward event and not a physical one. The common people, with their more materialist and less subtle apprehension, expect to see his body again. The initiates expect only to find his mental presence in themselves.
| That which sustains each individual mind is a universal one. Therefore, that which is best for him in social and ethical action must also fulfil the requirement of being what is best for all. Otherwise it is incomplete.
| It is out of such a splendid balance of utter humility and noble self-reliance that the philosopher gets his wisdom and strength. He is always kneeling metaphorically before the Divine in self-surrendering renunciation and often actually in self-abasing prayer. Yet side by side with this, he is always seeking to develop and apply his own intellect and intuition, his own will and experience in life…
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| The Short Path will bear fruit in several virtues, which will come of their own accord and without his trying to gain them. In this way it will help him calm his passions and discipline his ego, even though his thoughts and meditations make no reference to them.
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