Since the fall of 1981, when a working photocopy of Paul Brunton's personal notebooks was first made available in the library of Wisdom's Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies, the sections with notes on Inspiration and the Overself have been read more, and with more enthusiasm, than any other section in the Notebooks series. Their remarkable beauty, their rare atmosphere of intimacy with the divine presence, quicken our spiritual vigor and clarity; their practical, simple, and efficacious guidance on how to recognize, cultivate, and make the most of those brief moments of reawakening to our spiritual reality inspires long-range confidence and optimism.
Categories nineteen through twenty-one addressed the limited reliability of sense-knowledge and ordinary reasoning. They concluded with a convincing case for the point of view that the kernel of durable value and intelligent guidance in this purposive game of living is to be discovered directly, in the depths of one's own individual mind. Inspiration and the Overself now sets out to enhance dramatically the conscious relationship between our ordinary selves and that deeper level of our own minds.
Chapter one discusses intuition. Here is a faculty midway between our mundane identity and our true selfhood. It is intrinsically superior to ordinary sense, emotion, and reasoning, yet subject to misinterpretation, distortion, and consequent misapplication. This chapter stresses the importance of developing the intuitive faculty as the beginning of a conscious relationship between the ego and the soul. It also gives important and useful instructions on how to recognize and accept authentic intuitions, how to cultivate, test, and develop them, and how to apply them intelligently as the most reliable source of fruitful conduct in daily living.
Chapter two concerns inspiration--both inspiration in itself and several levels and directions of its operation. Whereas the first chapter emphasizes the knowledge available through intuition, this chapter emphasizes the soul's power to elevate both the ego's consciousness and the level of operation of its developed skills. The chapter's concluding section on the "Interior Word'' discusses the extraordinary power with which specific words and sentences can be charged when the lower mind awakens to this unique faculty of the soul.
Chapter three makes clear that the source of these intuitions and inspirations is one's own best self, the true individuality, which P.B. most frequently calls the Overself. Because it is one's own true self, it is never absent but is always accessible . . . even though usually ignored. This chapter is devoted to awakening us to that constant Presence and inspiring us to make it the conscious context of every detail in our lives.
In this chapter, P.B. insists that we cannot strictly define or even adequately describe in words the total nature of this "Overself.'' How can that which is the ever-prolific source of all our inspired ideas and intelligent actions be encompassed by any single idea, any grouping of ideas or activities that are themselves but memories by the time we finish formulating the definition? Yet this position arose not from a poverty but from an abundance of ideas about and experiences of it--not from a lack of detail but from a wealth of detail. Dwelling as frequently in early life--and as continuously in his later years--in full consciousness of its Presence as he did, P.B. saw both the validity and the limitations of concepts formed about it through human intellect and feelings. Many writers and teachers on this topic have felt constrained to produce or discover a strict definition or system, which they then spend much of the rest of their lives repeating and defending. They live, consequently, more and more in their memories of and thoughts about an earlier spiritual event whose living presence is increasingly replaced by dogmatism. In contrast, P.B. freely, affirmatively, and emphatically chose to center his attention and identity more in the living Presence itself than in his thoughts about it. This choice meant being reverentially awake to its ongoing mystery and intellectually precise concerning what can be spoken accurately about it. The indomitable mental freedom arising from such a position is the core of what is unique about his account of what he learned through constant attentiveness to its workings within him.
An issue of lively debate among serious students of this "true individuality'' concerns whether it should be described as singular or multiple. Does each individual have his or her own unique Overself, or is the Overself one and the same in every human being? In several places, P.B. addresses the problems involved in planting both feet inflexibly in either camp. In the eighth chapter of The Wisdom of the Overself he wrote, "If there be a slight technical confusion in using the singular number alone, there would be immeasurably more confusion if, in using the plural, this dire error of any radical difference existing between them were to be authenticated.'' For this reason, P.B. chose throughout his later writings to emphasize the oneness of rather than the diversity within the Overself--the sameness of the core of the divine consciousness rather than the variety of its expressions in different individuals. To readers concerned with the details of P.B.'s thought on this technical issue, we recommend--in addition to the present volume--study of The Wisdom of the Overself (especially chapter eight) and Notebooks category twenty-five, World Mind in Individual Mind.
The remaining chapters of Inspiration and the Overself are devoted to attracting, savoring, and following through on moments of authentic spiritual inspiration. It is this material in particular that readers in the Wisdom's Goldenrod library have found specially inspiring and valuable. Its wealth of detail about the what, how, when, and why of spiritual "glimpses,'' permeated by a rich atmosphere of intimate experience and crystal-clear understanding, is both poetically beautiful and uniquely informative. The final chapter, contrasting these ennobling but all-too-fleeting glimpses with the durable goal of philosophic realization, could have come from few other sources.
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.