This category explores the spiritual demand to cultivate one's full humanity.
Human Experience radiates the sun of spiritual meaning and purpose through the opportunities and vicissitudes of daily living. Throughout his long career of spiritual service, Paul Brunton constantly reiterated this theme: every human experience has meaning and is related to a universal purpose. He considered it "a paradox of the strongest irony that the place where we can best find the Overself [the individual link with God] is not in another world, but in this one, that the chance to grow enduringly out of darkness into light is better here.''
The comprehensiveness of P.B.'s approach to full human development matured into an outlook that incorporates classical Eastern and contemporary Western ideas, yet transcends both in its universality and relevance for modern spiritual practitioners. Through it we can combine the best points of the mystical and the humanistic views.
Like a humanist, P.B. insists that spiritual maturity and integrity are best expressed through bringing tolerance, compassion, rectitude, and dependability into character and conduct. Like a mystic, he reverently acknowledges the benefic omnipresence of a greater God and the urgency of seeking ecstatic mystical union with it. Unlike the secular humanist, however, he does not extol the virtues of human character as a suitable substitute for conscious inner communion with deity. Unlike the majority of mystics, he does not return from his ecstatic raptures either to belittle everyday human experience as worthless illusion or to overpraise it as even more lovely than God intended. His rich, balanced, and thoroughly rational insight exposes and leads us beyond the various shortcomings of each of these points of view.
For P.B., a higher power has invested in us being, life, intelligence, intuition, and numerous other potential powers. Events and circumstances are intelligently ordered as opportunities intended to elicit our qualities and our exercise of those powers. Yet it is we who choose whether the qualities we respond with are positive or negative, whether the powers we actualize are used for good or ill. In the same moment that unalterable fate presents its stimulus, we exercise the freedom of our own personal response. The inner qualities we choose to align ourselves with, and express in our reactions to what life presents, indicate what is needed for the next step in our spiritual growth. In this sense life tests us, not to give us a grade, but to show us ourselves and the consequences of the self we have chosen. Through the consequences we learn the wisdom or lack of wisdom in our past choices and revise our future ones on the basis of what we have learned. It is a process of forming our own character, and in so doing, contributing to our collective destiny--that is, to what life can offer humanity as a world to live in today.
In this context of the interaction of self-chosen character and consequent circumstance, P.B. explores in chapter four various aspects of the present world-crisis. Though many readers may feel as we did for quite some time--that the material in this section fits more appropriately with the material in the third chapter The Negatives (category eleven)--P.B.'s outline does indeed call for placing the world-crisis material in the context of Human Experience.
In arranging the material to accommodate this outline, we have come to see the sense of doing so. We hope that readers likewise will see the usefulness of having been prepared for this world-crisis chapter by material in the preceding chapters of Human Experience. Nonetheless, there are significant points of overlap between the world-crisis material and The Negatives: we recommend that the two sections be considered together for a full view of P.B.'s thoughts on this subject.
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.