Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation homepage > Notebooks of Paul Brunton



All life is a paradox, being at once a combination of reality and appearance. An obstacle to the comprehension of mentalism is that one persistently, if unconsciously, views the world from the standpoint of the lower personality, which is extremely limited, and not from that of the higher individuality, which transcends both the intellect and the senses. Even life on earth in the body is really a kind of mystical experience from the standpoint of the mentalist but it is only a blurred, vague, and symbolic one. The thinking intellect finds it hard to grasp this situation because it is itself something which has been greatly filtered down out of the higher individuality. Mentalism can be understood up to a point through the use of reasoning but after this point it can only be understood through the use of intuition.

-- Notebooks Category 21: Mentalism > Chapter 4 : The Challenge of Mentalism > # 118