Paul Brunton

Paul Brunton is the pen name of Raphael Hurst (21 October 1898 – 27 July 1981), a British author of spiritual books.

A portrait of Paul Brunton

Quotes

Indian philosophy and modern culture (1939)

Brunton, Paul Indian philosophy and modern culture London : Rider, [1939] p. 9 - 92 Paternoster House, E. C.. Quoted from Londhe, S. (2008). A tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture

• We are witnessing in the West the appearance of an at present thin but slowly deepening current of interest in those very thoughts and ideas which the young men of India are today doing their best to reject as inadequate to their needs and which constitute the faith and religious traditions of their forefathers.

• For Indian culture is fruitful in the domain of psychology, philosophy, and religion, so fruitful that there are few doctrines which appeared out of original Western sources that have not already been anticipated and developed .. .in India.

• The Bhagavad Gita contains the mental quintessence and successful synthesis of the various systems of religion and philosophy it offers a unique epitome of the high culture of prehistoric India.

• The work of physicists like Currie, Rutherford, Fermi, Cockcroft, Chadwick, Anderson and Millikan has brought us to the practical and proven Scientific principle that the inner structure of matter is reducible to a single fundamental substance, an essential and Immortal energy which is the "life" of the myriad forms that make up the universe. Modem development in the laboratory will vindicate the theory of a single element underlying all the Visible and different manifestations of material Nature, we shall have to grant that the assertions of the Hindu philosophers, made thousands of years ago .... are but results of the insight practiced by keenly perceptive and concentrated minds.

• The ancient Hindus took their philosophic statements in the nature of a revelation from on high, as issuing forth from their seers as a result of a personal self-experience in the spiritual domain.

• The wisest men of the ancient East and the modem West. .. are beginning to arrive at precisely the same conclusions.

• This Indian doctrine declares human cognition of the entire manifold universe to be illusionary in character. The vast multitude of tangible objects and tangible creatures, which we so plainly witness around us were said to be the product of the constructive imagination of the One Hidden Self. Man and his material environments were but finite dreams passing through the mind of the Infinite Dreamer. Consequently all that we know of the world is nothing more or less than a series of idea held in our consciousness. Thus we arrive at a completely idealistic metaphysics, which because of its very nature, must apparently remain forever purely speculative and beyond the scope of the finest instruments, which can be devised to prove or disprove. Nevertheless the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the doctrine fascinated the Indian mind to an amazing extent. That this early foreshadowing of modem idealistic philosophy was not merely a worthless superstition is evidenced by the fact that some brilliant minds of the West have been equally fascinated and perplexed."