A Message from Arunachala
A Message from Arunachala by Paul Brunton. This book, written in 1936, only two years after A Search in Secret India, shows several changes in PB’s writing, and is a “prequel” to The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, for here we discover his natural writing style—a style he called ‘paras,’ which are short paragraphs or sometimes a simple sentence containing a single point or intuition, written down as they came to him in the course of his daily life. Here he speaks for Mount Arunachala as well as for himself, even as so many other mystics have used the metaphor of a mountain to express something of their journey and their vision. That he has chosen this austere mountain long associated with yogic asceticism and more recently the famed home of Sri Ramana Maharshi is fair warning for the message to come.
PB moves back and forth between critical analysis and mystical reverence throughout this book. Some chapters—“The Hill” and “Solitude and Leisure,” for example—are uplifting reflections on the fruits of the inner life. Other chapters, like those on Politics, Business, and Society, are sharp criticisms of life in the modern world. While these criticisms are indeed harsh, they are nonetheless true. If we are made uncomfortable by these words, we should consider them all the more seriously, if we ourselves mean to be serious about our mystical pursuits, for PB is writing from that viewpoint here—the viewpoint of the meditator, withdrawn from the world, seeing it as though from atop a sacred mountain, where one must abide sometimes, until the fulfillment of that practice sends one down into the world again.
