The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

[The Mystical Man]

A lesser-known but great spiritual teacher:

https://www.paulbrunton.org/

https://www.paulbrunton.org/notebooks/

[The Mystical Man]

"All men come back to bodily life again if they leave a residue of karma. All karma that is not brought to an end by bringing the mind's bondage to the ego-thought to an end, makes reincarnation inescapable." - 17

"The more I reflect about my global travels, observations, and studies, the more I hold firmly to this truth: 'Character is fate.'" - 46

"We ought not to ask men to express qualities of character and mind which neither experience nor birth enable them to express." - 76

"If it were true that a bad man must always remain bad, where would the hope be for mankind? But in the perfect wisdom of the Infinite Mind, human lives are so arranged that the bad man will go on garnering the untoward results of his deeds until his mind, first subconsciously but later consciously, perceives the logical and causal connection between his act and his suffering and begins the attempt to control his evil tendencies. Both this education and this effort will continue through many births for a single one would be too short in time, too poor in opportunity, for such a total reformation to be achieved." - 225

"Even those who are well-intentioned and spiritually minded make many mistakes in life simply because they cannot see the unfortunate results to which their wrong decisions and actions must necessarily lead. Only experience can lead to their correction and only reincarnation can give enough experience." - 226

Edited November 23, 2022 by The Mystical Man

[The Mystical Man]

"Sins of omission are just as important karmically as sins of commission. What we ought to have done but did not do counts also as a karma-maker." - 89 

"Since it is demonstrably true that it is the degree to which events affect your thoughts or move your feelings that they have power over you, it must also be true that to gain control over thought and feeling is to become pleasurably independent of fortune. If you let your life be managed entirely by the hazards and chances of outside happenings instead of by your own intelligence, you imperil it.

Our outward miseries are symbols and symptoms of our inner failures. For every self-created suffering and every self-accepted evil is an avoidable one. It may not depend entirely upon yourself how far events can hurt you but it does depend largely upon yourself. If you had the strength to crush your egoism by a single blow, and the insight to penetrate the screen of a long series of causes and effects, you would discover that half your external troubles derive from faults and weaknesses of internal character. Every time you manifest the lower attributes of your internal character you invite their reflection in external events. Your anger, envy, and resentment will, if strong enough and sustained enough, be followed eventually by troubles, enmities, frictions, losses, and disappointments.

Yes, if you wish to understand the first secret of fate, you should understand that its decrees are not issued by a power outside you, but by your own deepest self." - 101

Edited November 23, 2022 by The Mystical Man

[The Mystical Man]

"It is better that strenuous effort at self-improvement and self-discipline should go side by side with efforts in meditation." - 474

"Some measure of moral culture is indispensable both as a preliminary course and parallel endeavour to meditation. The Path is beset with moral risks and mental dangers for those who have not previously prepared their characters and personalities to engage in its practices, for those who are still largely gripped by selfish instincts and undisciplined passions, for those who are emotionally unstable and intellectually unbalanced. Hence preliminary and accompanying courses of ascetic self-denial, self-control, and self-improvement are usually prescribed. Sensual lusts and low desires have not only to be curbed, but also ignoble thoughts and unworthy attitudes, if meditation exercises are to be done with safety and finished with success." - 492

Edited November 23, 2022 by The Mystical Man

[The Mystical Man]

"The longest book on yoga can teach you nothing more about the practical aim of yoga than this: still your thoughts." - 1

"Catch your thoughts in their first stage and you catch the cause of some of your troubles, sins, and even diseases." - 18

Edited November 23, 2022 by The Mystical Man