Paul Brunton Daily Note
It is not enough to know the internal self as the mystics know it. We must also know the real nature of the external world before we can realize Truth…
1603 
| ... Humanity, having so deeply and so widely lost sight of the higher purpose of its life on earth, has had to undergo calamity and distress in consequence. To recall blind men and women to this purpose is a noble task and a compassionate duty for those who tread the path of philosophy.
1603 
| Rare is the person who can witness his ego crushed to the ground and yet never forget his divine parentage, so that his mental equilibrium is not broken--who can be lifted up to the glorious heights of the Overself and yet remain humbly human.
1603 
| It is natural that the endeavour to follow this ideal of Balance will spill over into his judgements and opinions. He will want to see all sides of a matter, and especially all the weaknesses in his own views, all the sound points in opponent's views.
1603
| ... One has certainly to go through many incarnations before becoming a fit channel for the Overself. But this does not mean that he is not used by the higher power until then. The student who has not yet been purified of egoism can only be used brokenly, in patches, and at intervals, whereas one who has made and implemented the requisite inner delegation of self to Overself is used continuously.
1603 
| If greater knowledge brings greater power, it also brings greater responsibility. The more he receives from the Overself's grace, the more should he give to humanity's need.
1603 
| All we can rightly say is that the idea of the world is present in our consciousness. The moment we assert that the real world corresponding to it is outside, independent, and apart from us, we assert a supposition.
1603
| Although it is true that the help we give others always returns to us in some way, somewhere, somewhen, nevertheless he is not motivated in this matter by the desire of reward or return. He will engage in the service of humanity because compassion will arise in his heart, because of the good it will do.
1603
| There are three stages in each glimpse. The initial one brings a soft feeling of its gentle approach. The second carries the man to its peak of upliftment, enlightenment, and peace. The final one draws him down again into a fading glow which occupies the mind's background and later survives only in memory.
1603 
| Only when the desire for perpetuation of personal existence finally leaves him is a man really near the point where even a little effort produces large results on this quest. But getting tired of the wheel of rebirth's turnings does not come easily.
1603 
| ... God is in every atom of the Universe and consequently in full operation of the Universe…
1603
| One special exercise of the Short Path is easily done by some persons and gives them excellent results, although it is hard to do by others. It consists in refusing to let remain any particular mental registration of the surrounding place or people, or of any physical experience being undergone. Instead the mental image is to be firmly dismissed with the thought, ”This too is like a dream,” and then immediately forgotten. The exercise may be kept up for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time. The practical benefit it yields is to give improved self-control; the metaphysical benefit is to weaken the sway of illusion; the mystical benefit is to enable him to take the stand of the Witness-attitude more easily; and the personal benefit is to make him a freer and happier man.
1603 
| The moments between sleep and waking or between waking and sleep are very sensitive and very important. They should be used to switch thought to the highest ideal one knows.
1603
| ... We stand today between two cycles, two eras, two cultures. The next one will not only be new; it will also be brighter and better in every way.
1603
| The feeling of familiarity with someone met for the first time, of vague indistinct recognition which we sometimes get, may have varying significances. But one of them is an echo of remembrance of previous contact in a past birth.
1603
| Why is it that so many people are so unaware of their own higher existence? The answer is that their faculty of awareness itself is that spiritual existence. Whatever they know, people know through the consciousness within them. That in them which knows anything is their divine element...
1603
| Some kind of awakening is the usual prelude before people take to the Quest in real earnest. The glimpse provides it.
1603
| When his own ego becomes intolerable to him with increasing frequency, he may take this as a good sign that he is moving forward on this road.
1603
| ... When the ego feels attracted towards its sacred source, there is an equivalent attraction on the Overself's part towards the ego itself. Never doubt that the Divine always reciprocates this attraction to it of the human self. Neither the latter's past history nor present character can alter that blessed hope-bringing fact…
1603
| It is not that there are different minds in man, but different qualities of one and the same mind in each.
1603
| The World-Mind is omnipresent. There is a point where every man touches it. When he attains awareness of this point, he is at last attending the true Holy Communion service.
1603 
| ... Our waking life is really a kind of sleep, from which we need to wake up; that just as the dreamer only awakens when his fatigue exhausts itself or when someone else arouses him, so we, too, only awaken from life's illusions when we are exhausted with all the many different kinds of experience we get from many different incarnations or when a teacher appears to reveal the truth to us…
1603
| The same power which has brought him so far will surely carry him through the next phase of his life. He must trust it and abandon anxieties, as a passenger in a railroad train should abandon his bag by putting it down on the floor and letting the train carry it for him. The bag represents personal attempts to plan, arrange, and mold the future in a spirit of desire and attachment. This is like insisting on bearing the bag's weight himself. The train represents the Higher Self to which the aspirant should surrender that future. He should live in inner Peace, free from anticipations, desires, cares, and worries.
1603
| ... During the active part of the day, meditation takes the form of remembrance, always to try to remember the Overself: IT IS (that is enough)…
1603
| The writer George Moore was not particularly interested in metaphysics and usually left the subject alone. Yet half of a sentence he wrote upon writing itself contained the most important and significant metaphysical principle. It was: ”My own mind alone is known to me.”
1603
| If we analyse the ego, we find it to be a collection of past memories retained from experience and future hopes or fears which anticipate experience. If we try to seize it, to separate it out by itself, we do not find it to exist in the present moment, only in what has gone and what is to come. In fact, it never really exists in the NOW but only seems to. This means that it is a phantom without substance, a false idea.
1603
| ... We live in exceptional times and a whole cycle of civilization is coming to an end. A new one is struggling to be born. Hence a definite speeding up of the tempo of progress will be right and successful just now, because it will be helped by karmic forces and evolutionary trends. Such a conjuncture of events and influences provides not only the opportunity to serve humanity spiritually as never before, it provides also the obligation to do so…
1603
| In each test there exists the chance, through success, to gain strength and pass up in Initiation to a higher level or, through failure, to display weakness and fall in conduct to a lower one.
1603
| There is one natural capacity which is common to every human being and to every animal being--a capacity which is the very essence of its selfhood. It is consciousness. The most important of all states of consciousness is knowledge.
1603
| I love flowers but only when they are in gardens or in pots. For then they are living things but, cut, they are decaying, dying ones.
1603 
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