Reflections on My Life and Writings is a mosaic of autobiographical excerpts from Paul Brunton's personal notebooks. The twelfth category in The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, it brings together a variety of the author's most personal thoughts and observations.
Though his readership numbers in the millions, Paul Brunton (1898-1981) was an intensely private and naturally unassuming man. He continually sought for effective ways to bring his ideas to the public mind and keep his own personality at a low profile. When pressed to describe himself, he usually said that he was a researcher--which he defined as "one who creates new knowledge."
Maturing with a century that brought more changes than the previous thousand years, he witnessed the advent of the automobile, the airplane, radio, television, and nuclear power, and devoted his life to a path of spiritual discovery suitable for this epoch of turmoil and transition. This role took him on many journeys into the soul, across the centuries, and around the world in an extraordinary quest for Truth. In the course of these journeys, he occasionally paused to record his private impressions of himself, his works, and people or places he encountered.
The inner and outer aspects of this quietly paradoxical individual were remarkably different from one another. Inwardly, Paul Brunton was a tirelessly exacting scholar and researcher of philosophical and religious ideas and practices. Outwardly, he dedicated himself to sharing his hard-earned understanding in the simplest, most inspiring and nontechnical form he could develop. In him, the poet's reverence for beauty and the scientist's reverence for truth demanded the creation of a mutually satisfying common language. The process gave birth to a voice that bridges an earlier and a future time.
The outer man traveled widely to drink deeply of a world-dispersed wisdom this century had largely chosen to ignore. The inner man, in love with the beauty of what a human being can become, envisioned a scientifically literate human community that would eventually rediscover and creatively reintegrate the values of its own spiritual heritage. As the scholar-researcher matured and the poet-mystic deepened, a thoroughly modern philosopher emerged. Long before other writers now well-known arose in the 1950s to focus attention on specific Eastern teachings, Paul Brunton's "exotic" books had awakened hundreds of thousands of the curious, the confused, and the sincere to the rich treasures of the Oriental mind. He is undeniably one of the individuals to whom the current popularity of the East-West cultural and philosophical movement is most indebted.
Although philosophically at ease with the necessary presence of the ego, P.B. was uninterested in its gaudy manifestations and preferred to direct his uncannily perceptive intelligence to the variety of topics that comprised his definition of philosophy. It is quite possible, therefore, that he would disapprove of this volume; at the very least he would dislike its focus on his personality and his personal opinions of himself and others.
And yet these pages reveal much of him: his humor, his anguish over the world situation, his admiration for great individuals, his disenchantment with the egotism so often found under the robes of the "holy ones," and his assessment of the value and imperfections of his own work. They provide at least partial answers to questions such as: What transformed a London-born journalist into such a successful interpreter and popularizer of Oriental wisdom and mystical techniques? Why did he deliberately undo much of his own worldly success and seek relative anonymity for the last thirty years of his life? How did he avoid the fate of so many of his contemporaries--that of becoming a guru surrounded by one circle of adulating disciples and another circle of vehement critics? What was the destiny that linked his cycles of inner and outer growth with the development of the East-West cultural movement itself? What is the relevance for us of life's unusual experiment with him?
Chapter one consists of two essays that summarize P.B.'s literary and mystical development up to the time they were written, in the early to middle 1950s. Chapter two considers the problem of bringing vitally needed education to bear upon the weakened spiritual condition of modern culture, and the need for a fresh approach to philosophy in response to the crisis. In the third chapter, P.B. reflects on the awakening of his own consciousness to the presence of the Overself, and the responsibilities that awareness required of him. The fourth chapter reviews lessons and achievements in the path of all seekers of spiritual truth; it describes some of P.B.'s own struggles to externalize the inner wisdom he had acquired. In the fifth chapter, P.B. reviews his literary life. He examines his books, his audience of critics and admirers, his own method and writing style, and looks beyond the written work to the less apparent but more powerful communication through silence. Finally, in the last chapter, P.B. takes a look at himself and at a few of the many places and people he encountered in his busy life, along with thoughts on a few other topics.
There is, however, a serious problem of chronology: very few of the notes in the notebooks bear dates indicating when they were written. The vast majority of them are impossible to date accurately. It is clear that the two essays forming the first chapter were written while the author was in his mid-fifties. Many of the paras also seem to have been written after the publication of The Spiritual Crisis of Man (1952) and before 1963, the year that brought a profound deepening that visibly affected all his subsequent work and writing. We hope, therefore, that the two essays will serve as a sort of landmark by which readers may be able to estimate whether a given statement is from an earlier or later period of his life.
What is most clear is that very little of the personal material available in The Notebooks dates from the later years. It seems that his disinclination to speak about himself eventually had its way.
One biography of Paul Brunton has been published and two are currently being written. The former, Paul Brunton: A Personal View, offers sixty years of richly varied memories from the perspective of his son Kenneth Thurston Hurst. It is available from Larson Publications.
Editorial conventions here are the same as stated in the introductions to Perspectives and The Quest. Likewise, (P) at the end of a para indicates that it also appears in Perspectives, the introductory volume to this series.