Prefatory - 'The Wisdom of the Overself' (Part 3)

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Dear All,

 

In Dr. Paul Brunton's book of 'The Wisdom of the Overself', he said that:

 

(p.15) Let it finally suffice therefore to say that in the effort to provide

these ideas with a systematic form and scientific presentation, in the desire to

help students by progressively deducing one truth from another in an orderly and

consistent manner, in the aspiration to couch these doctrines in a medium

understandable by living contemporaries and in the need to ground the whole on

verifiable facts rather than on dictated dogmas, I have had veritably [i.e.,

with truthfulness, faithfulness, genuineness and sincerity] to reconstruct this

aged pyramid of external revelation along modern lines from base to apex. That

which is here presented is a fresh reincarnation and not a revivified corpse.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 1, p. 15.

 

Here now, is Dr. Paul Brunton's conclusion of the 'Prefatory'.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Prefatory - 'The Wisdom of the Overself' (Part 3)

 

(p.15) In any case, culture is becoming cosmopolitan. No idea can nowadays hope

to remain a merely national possession. Whatever is worth while tends to spread

its wings over all frontiers. (p.16) And after all, the best reply to Eastern

critics is that the inner light is present in all men, Western no less than

Eastern; that the flash of insight into Truth may come to them anywhere; and

that the discovery of the Real is not conditioned by geographical limits but by

personal ones. Philosophy, in my integral [wholistic] sense of the term, is no

longer a living force in the present-day East although metaphysics still

continues a somewhat precarious existence and mysticism a somewhat anaemic one.

To picture the Asia of today through these two to seven-thousand-year-old

Sanskrit texts which are the available remnants of this teaching--as enthusiasts

who say the Orient is spiritual and the West is materialist often do--and as I

in the inexperience of youth once said--is as romantically erroneous as to

picture present-day Europe through the Latin books of medieval scholastics. Such

enthusiasts are dazzled in the present by what the East was in the perished

past.

 

Today I walk in utter independence of thought and, like Emerson, " without school

or master. " My life has been a constant seeking after truth and if I have passed

at any time from one standpoint to another, the goddess who has lured me on must

also share the blame, if blame there be. I have for years been engaged in

examining and testing within my own experience--no less than in the observed

experience of numerous other men--a host of ideas and exotic exercises which

were alleged to offer theoretical or practical paths to various promised

mystical, yogic, occult and sacred lands. It is not my fault if the results have

not always been conducive to consistency.

 

I have said it before and must make it plain once again that I do not write as

one wearing the mantle of a teacher--much less as one wielding his ferrule

[cane/rod]--but only as one sharing the struggles of a student. I know well the

difficulties and darknesses, the errors and falls which measure every mile of

this quest. But I know also unearthly visitations and heavenly communions; and

something that brooks no denial bids me leave a record before I pass from this

earth. Any higher rank than that of a student among students is hereby

disclaimed, but this need not minimize the importance of what is here

communicated.

 

The letter of the present attempt is admittedly a bold one but the spirit behind

it is only a humble one. (p.17) The temerity [rashness] of printing these

thoughts may be great but the timidity [lack of courage] of withholding them at

such a time as the present will surely be greater. Amid the confusions and

despairs of a desolate epoch wherein the structure of civilization has tumbled

over our heads like a house built of thin cards, it is the inescapable duty of

whoever knows that a higher Hope exists for mankind to speak the lost Word for

the sake of those who will listen. Therefore those of us who do care for

humanity's true welfare must put forward such ideas, must burn reverent tapers

before them not for ourselves alone but for others also, for men live by their

dominant ideas however false or however true these may be.

 

I write for the few who, awakened by the world war into seeing that neither dead

materialism nor blind mysticism can alone suffice, have had many a question

brought to their lips and who therefore seek a higher truth which includes what

is of worth in both views and yet transcends their defects. Men must come and

knock at the doors of such a school out of their own interior prompting, out of

their own hard reflections upon the meaning of the afflictions and elations of

life, out of their own awakened desire to suffer blindly no longer. They must

come to the condition written of by Virgil: " weary of everything except to

understand. " And the awful experiences of this war-mangled era, with its living

horrors and buried hopes, will have brought not a few amongst mankind nearer to

such a condition.

 

If these thoughts were really too far out of the world to reach the people who

are haplessly [unhappily] inside it, then they would have no right to lift a pen

and stir ink. But because mind is the unacknowledged basis of all living,

knowledge of the truth about mind cannot do other than provide a better support

to such living. And that this is so, that the hoariest truths about reality and

its shadows can be brought into touch with the practical concerns of personal

and national life, should become abundantly clear to anyone patient enough to

study the teaching in its fullness.

 

These leaves are sent out across the window without adolescent illusions about

their reception and if a few of them shall flutter down to rest awhile beside a

friend or two and remind him of his divine origin and destiny, it shall surely

be enough.

 

The Wisdom of the Overself, Chapter 1, p. 15-17

Dr. Paul Brunton

Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, Maine

ISBN 0-87728-591-8

Library of Congress Catalog No. 83-60833

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