Perspectives is a representative survey of more than seven thousand pages of notes Paul Brunton (1898-1981) withheld for posthumous publication. It introduces a much larger work that he spoke of as his "Summing Up."
To reap the greatest spiritual harvest from these "seed thoughts," particularly those written after April of 1963, we should try to appreciate a condition of mind heart that is rare in any century. Plotinus gives one of the best reports of this attainment when he writes:
The Intellectual-Principle is a self-intent activity, but Soul has the double phase, one inner, intent upon Intellectual-Principle, the other outside it and facing to the external; by the one it holds the likeness to its source; by the other, even in its unlikeness, it still comes to likeness in this sphere, too, by virtue of action and production; in its action it still contemplates, and its production produces forms--detached intellections, so to speak--with the result that all its creations are representations of the divine Intellection and of the divine Intellect, moulded upon the archetype, of which all are emanations and images, the nearer the more true, the very latest preserving some faint likeness of the source. --V.3.7, MacKenna translation
It would be an error to think even of a sage as operating with the omniscience of the Divine Mind (Intellectual-Principle). But we can think of a sage--insofar as the sage does at times speak thoughts of that Divine Mind with which he or she has become inwardly attuned--as producing "detached intellections," spiritual intuitions, and translating them into contemporary language. The World-Mind (Intellectual-Principle, God) uses such purified, ennobled, and spiritually mature individuals as vehicles through which it can fashion representations of itself in our world. The aphorisms and philosophic maxims of such sages give us a dim reflection, at least, of what is going on in the depths of the Mystery--depths of which we are aware, but which we are unable to penetrate without the help of superior wisdom.
Whenever such writings are produced, the task of "organizing" them proves insurmountable. Thousands of truly great and inspired minds have discovered through reading the Hindu Upanishads, for example, that it is impossible to reduce all the spiritual intuitions "captured" in them to any kind of systematic whole. Anyone who has sincerely tried has given up the task as hopeless. Some have found through their effort to do so, however, that the mind that coldly systematizes is on a lower plane than that which discovers in moments of awe. The kind of logical and coherent order that we find so important for the preservation of our sanity in the world of the senses is out of place in the realm of such discovery. It is transcended, though certainly not contradicted, by the unimaginably grand Divine Order of which our own best thoughts are but meager representations. To demand that the greater conform to the laws of the lesser is to deprive ourselves of our own best.
The stilled, introverted, and receptive mind of the sage perfectly mirrors the powers of the Divine Mind that unfold temporally as all that is real or true in our world. When appropriate conditions exist, the sage may be used to announce outwardly what is being thought in an indivisible way in the undivided larger Mind--with which the sage is inwardly at one and outwardly in harmony. The Divine Mind's ideation remains indivisible and whole, but its representation in our world (through the sage who writes or speaks with its inspiration) conforms to the laws of temporality and contemporary language. Though what the sage gives us through speech or writing not to be equated with the undifferentiated Intelligence of the living universal Consciousness, it is in truth an accurate reflection of That in terms more accessible to our spiritually younger minds. A functioning Wisdom that cannot be fathomed becomes dimly available to us; something of its master plan becomes available to guide our daily aspirations.
Such sages, as we read in chapter twenty-five, remain--or, more accurately, become--fully human. They verify in their being and life the attainability for ourselves of such ennoblement and self-completion. In one sense the simplest, in another the most complex of human beings, the fully developed sage fashions a legacy that is much more than an intellectual one--though it of course includes that as well. It is not a hard-and-fast, tightly formulated, systematic doctrine all on one level. Rather it is a multi-faceted and open-ended way of seeing and being, a Vision unfolding and completing itself within us as our own best selves becoming actual.
In fulfilling their spiritual birthright, such pioneers of humanity affirm the eventual fulfillment of a similar seed within each one of us. We can feel all that is good and noble within us being nourished by the inner Knower affirming itself in their written and spoken words.
A few remarks are also required about the form of these writings and the structure of their organization by category. Throughout the thirty years during which he refrained from publishing new material, P.B. deepened and broadened his research into spiritual matters and wrote daily. His method of writing involved a minimum of three well-defined stages for a given piece of material.
First he would jot down brief notes while an intuition was fresh and vital. He used whatever was at hand, anything ranging from a pocket notebook to the back of an envelope to a crumpled gum wrapper or matchbook. These handwritten notes were later organized by topic, typed, and filed as "Rough Ideas." He regularly reviewed the material in this stage and revised many of the notes there into more literary form. The revised versions were then typed afresh and filed by topic in notebooks entitled "Middle Ideas." A second review and literary revision followed, after which the "final" material was typed and then put into notebooks titled simply "Ideas." At any given time, new material for each stage could be found in his workroom.
P.B.'s preference for this form or writing is best expressed in one of his own entries, written probably in 1980:
To write a book that will sustain a single theme through three hundred pages is an admirable intellectual achievement, but it is not really my way; I have done with it since long ago. A man must express himself in his own way, the way which follows the nature he is born with. I prefer to write down a single idea without any reference to those which went before or which are to follow later, and to write it down in a concentrated way. The only book I could prepare now would be a book of maxims of suggestive ideas. I have not the patience to go on and on, telling someone in a hundred pages what I could put into a single page.
By the time the two present editors were invited to the project, more than seven thousand single-spaced pages of such "detached intellections" had been produced, along with approximately three thousand pages of related research material. During his last two years, P.B. conceived his final system of classification and began training a few students to bring the existing notes into conformity with his new categories. After his death July 27, 1981, we worked with numerous volunteers for seven years to complete the reclassification to the best of our ability in keeping with his guidelines. Readers should be aware that while the writings themselves are those of a sage, the organization is largely the work of students. Often a passage could fit more than one category, and we chose what seemed to us the most appropriate. The placement in some cases is admittedly arbitrary and should be recognized as such.
In the printed edition of The Notebooks, P.B.'s final schema appears as the table of contents for Perspectives and at the end of each volume. For the CD ROM edition, it appears at the end of this introduction.
The arbitrariness that applies to placement applies to some extent also to the contents of this survey. A work for general publication must try to anticipate the level of its audience, and there is little doubt that other people would have selected different writings from the voluminous array of possible choices. The original notebooks consist of "paras," as P.B. called them, addressing a variety of types of people and many different levels of development within similar types. In the same spirit, we tried to be representative of the actual material: advice is offered for many different types and many different levels. Where apparent contradictions surface, consider first that the advice may be for someone at a different level than yourself. Take what is relevant and valuable for you. Others may benefit from what does not appeal to you or apply to your present level.
Punctuation and capitalization are almost entirely as in P.B.'s original notebooks. Whereas standard stylebooks dictate many required "improvements," we left the vast majority of the paras untouched. In general, we opted for authenticity rather than to impose our own stylistic preferences. We made minor modifications only in those relatively few cases where--particularly in the "rough" and "middle" stages--we agree that P.B. would approve them as clarifying his meaning or expressing it more smoothly. This is a process each of us worked on with him frequently during his last two years. Wherever we do not agree, problematic paras stand as written for readers to debate what P.B. would have done with them.
We have made three useful concessions to the "hobgoblin" of consistency. We maintained P.B.'s British spelling and made it conform to the Oxford English Dictionary, with the following exception: When O.E.D. lists two correct spellings of which only one appears in Webster's Third International, we chose the entry common to both. Also, we applied the University of Chicago serial comma rule to those series in which commas already appeared in the notebooks. Our policy with respect to gender sensitive literary style is explained in the General Introduction to the CD ROM. [K: hyperlink General Introduction?] Finally, we established consistent hyphenation in compound words.
We hope that P.B.'s readers will forgive our personal shortcomings that find expression in this and subsequent sections of The Notebooks, and that they will sympathize with our sincerity in doing the best and most thorough job we could do. We are grateful to P.B. for his grace and guidance, and to Anthony Damiani for his essential and inspiring direction in the early years of the project and on this selection in particular. We are also deeply grateful for the extensive clerical, editorial, financial, and moral support given to this project by many friends at Wisdom's Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies and from P.B. readers throughout the world.
We conclude this introduction with P.B.'s final outline of categories and topics included in them:
Its choice -- Independent path -- Organized groups -- Self-development -- Student/teacher
Ant's long path -- Work on oneself
Intermittent pauses -- Tension and pressures -- Relax body, breath, and mind -- Retreat centres -- Solitude -- Nature appreciation -- Sunset contemplation
Place and conditions -- Wandering thoughts --Practice concentrated attention -- Meditative thinking -- Visualized images --Mantrams -- Symbols -- Affirmations and suggestions
Hygiene and cleansings -- Food -- Exercises and postures -- Breathings -- Sex: importance, influence, effects
Uplift character -- Re-educate feelings -- Discipline emotions -- Purify passions --Refinement and courtesy -- Avoid fanaticism
Nature -- Services -- Development -- Semantic training --Science -- Metaphysics -- Abstract thinking
What am I -- The I-thought --The psyche
Experience of dying --After death -- Rebirth -- Past tendencies --Destiny -- Freedom --Astrology
Karma, connection with health -- Life-force in health and sickness -- Drugs and drink in mind-body relationship -- Etheric and astral bodies in health and sickness -- Mental disorders -- Psychology and psychoanalysis
Nature -- Roots in ego --Presence in the world -- In thoughts, feelings, and violent passions -- Their visible and invisible harm
Situation -- Events -- Lessons --World Crisis -- Reflections in old age -- Reflections on youth
Appreciation -- Creativity -- Genius -- Art experience and mysticism -- Reflections on pictures, sculpture, literature, poetry, music
Meetings with the Occident -- Oriental people, places, practices -- Sayings of philosophers -- Schools of philosophy
Psychic and auric experiences -- Intuitions -- Sects and cults
Origin -- Recognition -- Manifestations -- Traditional and less known religions -- Connection with philosophy
Prayer -- Devotion -- Worship --Humility -- Surrender -- Grace: real and imagined
Consciousness is relative -- Dream, sleep, and wakefulness -- Time as past, present, and future --Space -- Twofold standpoint -- Void as metaphysical fact
Definition -- Completeness -- Balance -- Fulfillment in man
Mind and the five senses -- World as mental experience -- Mentalism is key to the spiritual world
Intuition the beginning -- Inspiration the completion -- Its presence -- Glimpses
Ant's long path -- Bird's direct path -- Exercises for practice -- Contemplative stillness -- "Why Buddha smiled" -- Heavenly Way exercise -- Serpent's Path exercise -- Void as contemplative experience
Be calm -- Practise detachment -- Seek the deeper Stillness
Their meeting and interchange -- Enlightenment which stays -- Saints and sages
Divine order of the universe -- Change as universal activity -- Polarities, complementaries, and dualities of the universe -- True idea of man
God as the Supreme Individual -- God as Mind-in-activity -- As Solar Logos
Mind-in-Itself -- The Unique Mind -- As Absolute