A Teacher
Paul Brunton
The Overself; the quest for the real
The transmission
Paul Brunton was the pen name (and later legal name) of Raphael Hurst (21 October 1898 – 27 July 1981), a British journalist, author, and traveller who became one of the early popularisers of Indian and Asian spirituality for a Western readership.
In 1930 he travelled to India, where, at the insistence of the Paramacharya of Kanchi, he sought out and met the sage Ramana Maharshi; his first visit to Ramana’s ashram took place in 1931.
The encounter became the centrepiece of his 1934 bestseller A Search in Secret India, a vivid first-person travel narrative that introduced Ramana Maharshi to a large Western audience and was eventually translated into more than twenty languages.
Brunton followed this with further books, including The Secret Path, and over his life produced a substantial body of work on meditation, the “Overself,” and what he called the philosophic quest. Although later commentators have noted that his accounts mix careful reportage with his own interpretive framing, his historical importance is firm: more than any other single writer, he opened the door through which mid-twentieth-century Western seekers first encountered Ramana and the living Advaita tradition.
His extensive later philosophical writings were collected and published posthumously as The Notebooks of Paul Brunton. He died in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1981.
What they gave
Introduced Ramana Maharshi to the West: A Search in Secret India (1934) brought Ramana and the practice of self-enquiry to a broad English-speaking public for the first time.
- Popularised the inner quest: Framed Eastern contemplative practice as a “quest” accessible to ordinary Western readers, helping seed mid-century popular interest in meditation.
- The “Overself”: Developed a accessible vocabulary, centred on the Overself, for the deeper Self beyond the ego, bridging Eastern nonduality and Western readers.
- Travel-narrative as transmission: Used the popular form of the spiritual travelogue to carry contemplative ideas far beyond specialist circles.
In their words
There is something in this man which holds my attention as steel filings are held by a magnet. I cannot turn my gaze away from him.
I perceive with sudden clarity that the intellect creates its own problems and then makes itself miserable trying to solve them.
I surrender myself to the steadily deepening sense of restfulness until two hours have passed. The passage of time now provokes no irritation, because I feel that the chains of mind-made problems are being broken and thrown away.
I become aware of a silent, resistless change which is taking place within my mind. One by one, the questions which I have prepared in the train with such meticulous accuracy drop away.
Yet my sense of awareness has been drawn out of the narrow confines of the separate personality; it has turned into something sublimely all-embracing. Self still exists, but it is a changed, radiant self.
With it arrives an amazing new sense of absolute freedom, for thought is like a loom-shuttle which is always going to and fro, and to be freed from its tyrannical motion is to step out of prison into the open air.
My arms embrace all creation with profound sympathy, for I understand in the deepest possible way that to know all is not merely to pardon all, but to love all. My heart is remoulded in rapture.
There is That in man which belongs to an imperishable race. He neglects his true self almost completely, but his neglect can never affect or alter its shining greatness.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Ramana Maharshi, whose teaching anchored his most influential book; Advaita Vedanta; the Western esoteric and Theosophical currents of his early milieu.
- Influenced: The Western readership of Ramana Maharshi; the popular mid-twentieth-century wave of interest in Indian spirituality; later generations of seekers who reached the satsang movement partly through the door he had opened.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- A Search in Secret India1934
- The Secret Path1935
- The Notebooks of Paul Brunton1984-1988