Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation homepage > Notebooks of Paul Brunton



Although an uninformed, unchecked, and unguided imagination can carry him into dangerous places or on useless journeys, can bog him down in utter self-deception or influence him to delude others, nevertheless when it has the right qualities the imaginative faculty can carry him far along the spiritual path. It can help him to create from within himself good qualities and bettered attitudes which, ordinarily, the discipline of painful events would have created from without. It is needed for visualizing the Ideal, for acquiring virtues, and for holding the Symbol in meditation. Hence the old Rosicrucian adept, Mejnour, who is one of the leading characters in that interesting occult novel, Zanoni, says: "Young man, if thy imagination is vivid . . . I will accept thee as my pupil." And Bulwer Lytton, the author, himself an experienced occultist, remarks: "It was to this state that Mejnour evidently sought to bring the Neophyte. . . . For he who seeks to discover, must first reduce himself into a kind of abstract idealism, and be rendered up, in solemn and sweet bondage, to the faculties which contemplate and imagine."

-- Notebooks Category 4: Elementary Meditation > Chapter 4 : Meditative Thinking > # 223