Paul Brunton - The Secret Path

CONTENTS

About the Book

The treasure-trove of the real self is within us, but it can be lifted only when the mind is still.

The late Paul Brunton was one of the twentieth centurys greatest explorers of, and writers on, the spiritual traditions of the East. He travelled widely throughout India (in particular) and met gurus and teachers who enriched his life immeasurably. By passing on to us the wisdom he learned directly from these holy men, he is widely credited with having introduced yoga and meditation to the West.

In The Secret Path , Paul Brunton explains in simple language how to meditate, and how this will transform your everyday existence. He also describes the remarkable experiences and understandings he himself gained from meditation and how, by making this ancient practice a part of your life, you will be able to experience a valuable kind of freedom and a deep inner peace.

This classic work which has been reprinted many times is a very special pointer towards your inner world, and one written by a most unusual and adventurous man of insight.

About the Author

Born in 1898, Paul Brunton travelled extensively in the East and published thirteen books between 1935 and 1952. He is generally recognized as having introduced yoga and meditation to the West, and for presenting their philosophical background in non-technical language. He died in Switzerland (where he lived for twenty years) in 1981.

Also by Paul Brunton

A S EARCH I N S ECRET I NDIA

A S EARCH I N S ECRET E GYPT

A M ESSAGE F ROM A RUNACHALA

A H ERMIT I N T HE H IMALAYAS

T HE Q UEST O F T HE O VERSELF

T HE I NNER R EALITY

I NDIAN P HILOSOPHY A ND M ODERN C ULTURE

T HE H IDDEN T EACHING B EYOND Y OGA

T HE W ISDOM O F T HE O VERSELF

T HE S PIRITUAL C RISIS O F M AN

T HE N OTEBOOKS O F P AUL B RUNTON

(in sixteen volumes)

E SSAYS O N T HE Q UEST

M EDITATIONS F OR P EOPLE I N C HARGE

M EDITATIONS F OR P EOPLE I N C RISIS

W HAT I S K ARMA ?

Praise for Paul Brunton

Paul Brunton was surely one of the finest mystical flowers to grow on the wasteland of our secular civilization. What he has to say is important to us all. Georg Feuerstein

a great gift to us Westerners who are seeking the spiritual. Charles T. Tart

A person of rare intelligence thoroughly alive, and whole in the most significant, holy sense of the word. Yoga Journal

Paul Brunton was a great original and got to a place of personal evolution that illumines the pathways of a future humanity. Jean Houston

A simple, straightforward guide to how philosophical insights of the East and West can help create beauty, joy, and meaning in our lives His keynote is balance, and his uplifting message encompasses all phases of human experience. East West Journal

sensible and compelling. His work can stand beside that of such East-West bridges as Merton, Huxley, Suzuki, Watts and Radhakrishnan. It should appeal to anyone concerned personally and academically with issues of spirituality. Choice

Any serious man or woman in search of spiritual ideas will find a surprising challenge and an authentic source of inspiration and intellectual nourishment in the writings of Paul Brunton. Jacob Needleman

The Secret Path

The Classic Work on Meditation

Paul Brunton

Dedicated to His Highness the Maharaja of Burdwan

INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION

HOW TO GET around the mediocre in myself that settles for less because it lacks vision or power to create more?

How to stop pretending to be better than I am, or just wishing to be better than I am, and actually be better than I am?

How to do, of my own free will, what I would have God do for me? And for my friends in pain? And for the world at large?

How to find out if such things are possible for me? And if they are, then how to make them so?

The Secret Path s responses (not answers) to these issues, and others every bit as urgent for the beginning of a new millennium, make it an enduring spiritual classic. Paul Brunton wrote it in just four weeks of relentless inspiration, apparently at the behest of the great Indian sage Ramana Maharshi. It was his second book, of 11 published while he lived and another 19 already drawn from the voluminous notebooks he left for posthumous publication.

At age 35, this man who would become a sage in his own right already knew that no prescribed system of exercises, or rules, or ideas would suffice for the task at hand. He knew that the most important element of the needed mix is one that the seeker is powerless to supply. And he had tried, with encouraging success, a variety of good ways of asking that Something to show itself and lead the way.

The Secret Path shares the safest and surest of them. These are methods based in traditional practices, adapted in a fashion that has stood the test of 70 years of use by tens of thousands of contemporary men and women from various walks of life throughout the world.

Yet no matter how well publicized or how often spoken of, the path they point to remains secret. It is a way that remakes itself anew for each traveller, a way marked out for one person only, never to be travelled or told of unless by the one unique living soul. It can never get old and is always a path of continual surprise and discovery.

It begins with something almost inconceivable. It leads to something utterly inexhaustible.

May this little book help you find your Way.

Paul Cash

Co-editor, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton

CHAPTER I

W ITH A W ISE M AN OF THE E AST

SOME YEARS AGO I wandered for awhile through sun-baked Oriental lands, intent on discovering the last remnants of that mystic East about which most of us often hear, but which few of us ever find. During those journeyings I met an unusual man who quickly earned my profound respect and received my humble veneration. For although he belonged by tradition to the class of Wise Men of the East, a class which has largely disappeared from the modern world, he avoided all record of his existence and disdained all efforts to give him publicity.

Time rushes onward like a roaring stream, bearing the human race with it and drowning our deepest thoughts in its noise. Yet this sage sat apart, quietly ensconced upon the grassy bank, and watched the gigantic spectacle with a calm Buddha-like smile. The world wants its great men to measure their lives by its puny foot-rule. But no rule has yet been devised which will take their full height, for such men, if they are really worth the name, derive their greatness not from themselves but from another source. And that source stretches far away into the Infinite. Hidden here and there in stray corners of Asia and Africa, a few seers have preserved the traditions of an ancient wisdom. They live like ghosts as they guard their treasure. They dwell outwardly apart, this spectre-race, keeping alive the divine secrets which life and fate have conspired to confide in their care.

The hour of our first meeting is still graven on my memory. I met him unexpectedly. He made no attempt at formal introduction. For an instant, those sybilline eyes gazed into mine, but all the stained earth of my past and the white flowers that had begun to spring up on it, were alike seen during that one tinkle of the bell of time. There in that seated being was a great impersonal force that read the scales of my life with better sight than I could ever hope to do. I had slept in the scented bed of Aphrodite, and he knew it; I had also lured the gnomes of thought to mine for strange enchanted gold in the depths of my spirit: he knew that too. I felt, too, that if I could follow him into his mysterious places of thought, all my miseries would drop away, my resentments turn to toleration, and I would understand life, not merely grumble at it! He interested me much, despite the fact that his wisdom was not of a kind which is easily apparent and despite the strong reserve which encircled him. He broke his habitual silence only to answer questions upon such recondite topics as the nature of mans soul, the mystery of God, the strange powers which lie unused in the human mind, and so on, but when he did venture to speak I used to sit enthralled as I listened to his soft voice under a burning tropic sun or pale crescent moon. For authority was vested in that calm voice and inspiration gleamed in those luminous eyes. Each phrase that fell from his lips seemed to contain some precious fragment of essential truth. The theologians of a stuffier century taught the doctrine of mans original sin; but this Adept taught the doctrine of mans original goodness.