Paul Brunton Daily Note
If, in meditation, he feels as if he had always been sitting there, it means he touched eternity, timelessness.
| … He cannot behave differently from the way he does--that is, if he is not on the quest and therefore not struggling to rise beyond himself. His own past--and it stretches back farther than he knows--created the thoughts, the acts, and the conditions of the present.
| This increasing loss of memory which afflicts so many elderly people need not be a cause of emotional depression, as it so often is: we have more likelihood of some measure of mental peace when the burden of unneeded or excessive memories falls away. It is something for which to be grateful.
| There is a gratifying secret entwined with this injunction to serve mankind. Whoever gives himself in such service will inevitably receive a boomerang-like return one day when others will display a readiness to serve him. For karma is a divine law which brings back to him whatever he has given forth…
| Suggestion pours in from his origins and devotions, his background and dedications, his experience and relationships, from all the past generations and past reincarnations which have made his ego what it is.
| Sins of omission are just as important karmically as sins of commission. What we ought to have done but did not do counts also as a karma-maker.
| The spiritual instinct may appear to be totally dormant in a man but it is never killed. In another birth, and after other experiences, it will return.
| When the ego is sufficiently crushed by its frustrations or failures--and sooner or later this may happen to most of us--it will turn, either openly or secretly, to the admission that it needs outside help. And what other help can it then find than Grace, whether mediated directly from the Overself or indirectly through a master?
| The Long Path is splattered with discouragements. Only those who have sought to change themselves, to remould their characters, to deny their weaknesses, know what it is to weep in dissatisfaction over their failures. This is why the Short Path of God-remembrance is also needed. For with this second path to fulfil and complete the first one, Grace may enter into the battle at any moment and with it victory will suddenly end the struggles of many years, forgiveness will suddenly wipe out their mistakes.
| The first service of the Master is to point out the way, both inwardly and outwardly, to the disciple. This shortens his journey by several lifetimes, which would otherwise have to be spent in wanderings, explorings, gropings, and searchings.
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| … The door upon which you may have been knocking a long time in vain will open to your frequent loving remembrances.
| … When examined, the ego is found to be a complex of body and thought, physical senses and mental tendencies…
| Lao Tzu was a librarian by profession, Janaka a king, and Brother Lawrence a kitchen menial. Yet all had this same wonderful experience of peaceful communion with Overself, proving that one's antecedents, or work, or position are neither helps nor handicaps.
| These glimpses are encounters with divinity. There is a quality about them which separates them from all the other contacts and encounters of life.
| The Short Path can only be travelled if faith in the Overself is fundamental and complete, and if trust in the effectiveness of its power is strong and unwavering.
| The man who fervently believes that Christ has the power to forgive his sins is not wrong. But his interpretation of his forgiver is wrong. The Christ who can do this for him must be a living power, not a dead historical personage. And that power is his own Christ-self, that is, Overself.
| … With the descent of Grace, all the anguish and ugly memories of the seeker's past and the frustrations of the present are miraculously sponged out by the Overself's unseen and healing hand. He knows that a new element has entered into his field of consciousness, and he will unmistakably feel from that moment a blessed quickening of inner life…
| Action is right, needful, and inevitable, but if it is overdone, if we become excessive extroverts, if it drives us like a tormenting demon, then no inward peace is ever possible for us.
| Mind in its most unlimited sense is reality. A man can know it only by the intuitive process of being it, in the same manner in which he knows his name, which is not an intellectual process but an immediate one.
| … The essence of this path is the giving up of the I, the ego… When the storm of hurt feelings goes completely, a great peace arises.
| … For the ego and the Overself fuse and unite, yet the union does not destroy the ego's capacity to express itself or to be active in the world…
| The ultimate secret of Grace has never been solved by those who do not know that previous reincarnations contribute to it…
| With both the brief Glimpse and the lasting Fulfilment comes a strong feeling of release. This refers to release from all the various kinds of limitation and restriction which have hemmed and oppressed him heretofore.
| Everything that helps one to become more aware of the existence of something higher than his personal self, and every experience that induces him to aspire towards a more spiritual way of life should be cultivated…
| He has come to the inner sight of the World-Idea's meaning for him: that he is to use the human self to lift his nature up from the animal one, and that he is to put himself at the service of his angelic, his best, self, to lift his nature up from the ordinary human. In this way he co-operates with the World-Idea.
| … It is a single awakening that enlightens the man so that he never returns to ignorance again. He has awakened to his divine essence, his source in Mind, as an all day and every day self-identification. It has come by itself, effortlessly.
| At the very gate of this higher quest, you will find certain obstacles obstructing your entry. They are not alien to you, they are in your mind. Your primary duty, therefore, is to overcome them.
| Karma must operate automatically, but the Power behind karma knows all things, controls all things, controls even karma itself, knows and understands when forgiveness is desirable.
| Once this stage is attained, neither the knowledge of reality nor the feeling of serenity will ever leave him again. He has found them not for a few hours but forever.
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