Widely recognized as one of the most influential pioneers of East-West culture in this century, Paul Brunton kept detailed personal notebooks concerning the deepening and development of one's inner life in modern circumstances. Throughout his successful literary career, these notebooks were the major resource from which he developed material for publication. He authored eleven well-received books, from A Search in Secret India in 1934 to The Spiritual Crisis of Man in 1952.
Paul Brunton is esteemed not only for the expertise and simple prose with which he introduced formerly esoteric ideas to the general public of the West, but also for his uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. His was a mind in which highly developed faculties of critical observation joined an innate reverence for the sacred to explore fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the universe in which it appears, and of its proper relation to that universe.
The success of his books brought P.B., as Paul Brunton came to be addressed, numerous offers to take on the role of personal guru (teacher) for thousands of readers, to found ashrams and edit journals in which he would be cast as a central figure in organized movements intending to midwife the "spiritual rebirth" of the West. But such was not his own idea, and he graciously but firmly maintained a personal independence while warmly supporting many of those individuals who did take on such roles. He felt that his best service was to write for people who are not essentially "joiners" but who sincerely aspire for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. In light of that disposition, he preferred to serve as simply one human being exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. He presented himself formally as "a researcher, with some experience in these matters . . . and that is all." His leadership consisted primarily in personal example and in sharing ideas that had proven useful to him--rather than through directing organized groups or making concessions to the conventional teacher-student posture.
From 1952 until his death in 1981, P.B. chose to reserve his daily writings for posthumous publication. Perspectives, the first volume in this series titled The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, was published in July of 1984 as an introductory survey of the twenty-eight major topics addressed in the notebooks. This volume, The Quest, begins an in-depth presentation of the individual topics as roughly outlined by P.B. himself to the present editorial staff during 1980 and 1981. It deals extensively and exclusively with category number one of P.B.'s twenty-eightfold general schema.
As was the case with Perspectives, selection and placement of the material has been done by the editorial staff and not by P.B. himself. The editors acknowledge that much of the placement is arbitrary. Only the broad general divisions indicated by capital letters as titles of "chapters" two through six in the table of contents were given by P.B. for this category. Beyond the further grouping of related themes into secondary and sometimes tertiary clusters, little attempt has been made to sequence the material. This category and the sections that follow are meant as rich resources drawn from notebooks rather than as a finished, polished work.
The table of contents and the index together provide an abridged outline of the working model established by the editors for selecting and generally structuring the material. A study guide/index volume giving the complete working model will be published as the last volume in this "Ideas" series.
A few additional remarks are in order concerning editorial policy.
Like most writers of his generation. P.B. employed the literary convention of using masculine gender (for example, he, his, man, mankind) to refer to men and women alike. It is clear from his life and teachings that he never viewed gender as a determinant of superiority. It is also not always clear if P.B. may be using "he" or "his" as third-person references to himself or to a specific individual. Though P.B. did regularly update his writing style to reflect current usage, he saw none of the experiments with gender pronouns in use prior to 1981 as a sufficiently stable and suitable alternative for use in philosophic writings meant to withstand the test of time through many generations. For all these reasons, we have not here taken the liberty of substantially modifying his writings in this regard.
Finally, readers are encouraged to look more closely into what may on the surface appear to be unnecessary repetition of certain themes in some sections of this volume. Closer examination of the individual paras will bring to light important nuances of P.B.'s thinking, nuances that would have been omitted if all repetition were removed.
Throughout this project, we applied ourselves to two goals: (1) bringing together all P.B.'s principal ideas in each category, and (2) eliminating redundancy where significant nuances are not sacrificed. Our aim was to provide a comprehensive and comprehendible text of P.B.'s "seed thoughts," one that is neither too structured nor too amorphous to deliver their essential spirit and relatedness.
In the interest of the first goal, each category repeats some paras from Perspectives, the survey volume of the series. Such paras are indicated by a (P) at their end.
In the interest of the second goal, we have not published paras we consider repetitive of and less well written than the ones selected. While the published Notebooks series does not contain every para P.B. wrote in his last thirty years, we have erred on the side of including too much rather than too little. Having done so, we are certain The Notebooks thoroughly represents his valuable insights.
For the present, students who wish to do so may study the unpublished material in the library of Wisdom's Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies in Valois, New York, 14888. If there is sufficient demand, that material can also be made available by subscription.