Paul Brunton Daily Note
In the end, after many a rebellion, he learns to trust God and accept his lot, like a tired old man.
1571 
| When the Quest becomes the most important activity in a man's life, even more important than his worldly welfare, then is Grace likely to become a reality rather than a theory in his life too.
1571
| It is because all humanity is approaching the threshold of a new era, a better era, that all the devils of the old era put forth their fiercest efforts, whilst there is yet a little time, to degrade human character, to drag it down into the hells of the worst forces and emotions--hate, envy, aggressiveness, and brutality.
1571 
| ... In my secret heart I separate myself from nobody, just as this teaching itself excludes no other in its perfect comprehension. Because I had to call it by some name as soon as I began to write about it, I called it philosophy because this is too wide and too general a name to become the property of any single sect. In doing so I merely returned to its ancient and noble meaning among the Greeks who, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, designated the spiritual truth learnt at initiation into them as philosophy and the initiate himself as philosopher or lover of wisdom…
1571 
| As one reflects upon the majestic grandeur of this teaching, its amplitude and height, one feels like a traveller who stands for the first time at a vantage point of the Himalayas, where loftier and ever loftier snowy summits fill the whole horizon to his left and right, as far as his eyes can see.
1571
| ... I do not know of any better or broader name with which to mark those who pursue this quest than to say that they are students of philosophy…
1571
| Whatever the universe be in human experience, it is, in important ways, like a dream... To the unenquiring mind it vividly is what it seems to be, but to the awakened insight of the sage its form presents itself like a more enduring version of the transient form of a dream world. Both forms are thought-constructions. Both have Mind as their underlying substance. Therefore Mind is their reality. Apart from Mind the world could not even exist, just as apart from the dreamer his dream could not exist.
1571
| When the sense of this presence is a continuous one, when the knowledge of the mentalness of this world-experience is an abiding one, and when the calm which comes as a result is an unshakeable one, it may be said that he is established in the Truth and in the Real.
1571 
| Our whole life on earth is in the end nothing else than a kind of preparation for this quest.
1571 
| All other approaches to the goal depend on a dualistic principle, which puts them on a lower plane. But the Short Path is nondual: it begins and ends with the goal itself; its nature is direct and its working is immediate.
1571 
| The Inner Being will rise and reveal Himself just as soon as the ego becomes sufficiently humbled, subdued, surrendered. The assurance of this is certain because we live forever within the Love of God.
1571
| The glimpse may move so gently into awareness that the beginning is hardly noticed. Or it may move in with a rush that overwhelms him. With it, knowledge, understanding, meaning, nobility, and divinity fill the aura around him at the moment.
1571 
| If everything was not told to the masses, it was largely because everything would not be acceptable to the masses, or the simple ones, as Origen, a Church Father himself, called them. Or it was too metaphysical for them, as the history of Alexandria, with its violent riots against the schools of Philosophy, showed. Origen staunchly included reincarnation and meatless diet in his teachings there, but how far has either of these two been taken hold of by the masses then or since?
1571
| ... It is quite important to have living faith in the Overself and to become like a child and to have as much dependence on the Overself as a little child has on its parents...
1571 
| ... If the effort to remember the Overself is kept up again and again, it attenuates the materialistic mental tendencies inherited from former lives and arrests the natural restlessness of attention. It eventually achieves a mystical concentration of thoughts akin in character to that reached during set periods of meditation, but with the added advantage of not stopping the transaction of worldly activity…
1571
| In the first and second stages of the Short Path, his aim is to set himself free from the egoism in which his consciousness is confined.
1571
| ... The antennae of intellectual research cannot penetrate into the Overself because thinking can only establish relations between ideas and thus must forever remain in the realms of dualities, finitudes, and individualities. It cannot grasp the whole but only parts. Therefore reason which depends on thinking is incompetent to comprehend the mysterious Overself. Realization is to be experienced and felt...
1571 
| The true purpose of prayer is not to keep asking for some benefit each time we engage in it, but rather to express the yearning of the underself for the Overself, the attraction felt by the ego living in darkness for its parent source dwelling in light.
1571
| It is a startling moment when he wakes up to the fact that he is dreaming without waking up to the physical world at all. For then he is able to know as a scientific observable fact that the measurable space around him, the sensations of resistance and solidity in his feet and the hardness or smoothness of objects in his hands, are nothing else than mental creations.
1571
| This act of recollection requires no effort, no exercise of the power of will. It is an act of turning in, through and by the power of love, toward the source of being. Love redirects the attention and love keeps it concentrated, sustained, obedient.
1571
| Because this emanated consciousness of the Overself ties itself so completely and so continuously to the thought-series, which after all are its own creations, it identifies itself with the illusory ego produced by their activity and forgets its own larger, less limited origin.
1571 
| Seeing the Light in front of him is one state; being merged into it is another, and superior.
1571
| A time comes when the prudent person, feeling intuitively or knowing medically that he has entered the last months or years of his life, ought to prepare himself for death. Clearly an increasing withdrawal from worldly life is called for. Its activities, desires, attachments, and pleasures must give way more and more to repentance, worship, prayer, asceticism, and spiritual recollectedness. It is time to come home.
1571
| ... Grace is the final, glorious, and authentic proof that it is not only man that is seeking God, but also God that is ever waiting for man…
1571
| So long as man listens to his little ego alone, and lets the voice of the Overself remain unheard and unknown, so long will all his cunning and his caution avail him little in the end when the body has to be left and the mind must return to its own proper sphere.
1571
| ... The Overself is present in each individual self as the witness and as the unchanging consciousness which gives consciousness to the individual.
1571
| It will not be until a late stage that he will wake up to the realization that the real giver of Grace, the real helper along this path, the real master is not the incarnated master outside but the Overself inside his own heart. What the living master does for him is only to arouse his sleeping intuition and awaken his latent aspiration, to give him the initial impetus and starting guidance on the new quest, to point out the obstructions to advancement in his individual character and to help him deal with them.
1571
| An ever-active Mind within an ever-still Mind--that is the real truth, not only about God but also about man.
1571
| We are living in wonderfully momentous times and it is the task of those on the Path to become bearers of the light in a dark age. But first, before that can be, each one must purify, ennoble, and instruct himself. He must fit himself for the divine grace because nothing can be done by his own personal power.
1571
| The Overself is not in time and consequently has no history. It is, with no beginning and with no end. The intellect which flits from past to future, from one chronological event to another, finds such ideas strange, hard to comprehend, and puzzling.
1571
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