Paul Brunton and the Truth of Mentalism
Damiani was a devoted student of the illuminate Paul Brunton (hereafter “PB”). After Damiani read PB’s book The Wisdom of the Overself in 1946, he wrote to the publisher to try to arrange a meeting with PB. This meeting took place a bit later in New York City, and after PB spoke a few words, Damiani knew intuitively that he had met his spiritual teacher. PB had raised the question in his earlier book The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga how do we know of a world that is apparently outside us? His answer, which takes many chapters to unfold and reason out, is that all we can know of the world is what our mind presents to us. The sensations that inform us of the existence of the world are ultimately mental experiences. The world is within the mind, not outside it.
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The only world we can ever experience is a mental one. PB calls this doctrine “mentalism.” The reasoned arguments of that book, which are continued in its sequel, The Wisdom of the Overself, jolted Damiani out of complacency and led to a lifelong preoccupation with epistemology, mentalism, and the nature of the mind. For although the basic truth of mentalism seems easy to grasp, it runs counter to our habitual thinking and often provokes fierce resistance. Moreover, if our mind can produce the sensations of the vast sky, sun, jagged mountain peaks, and exquisitely formed flower petals without our conscious deliberation or deliberate choice, then evidently we are conscious of just the surface functioning of our mind and are ignorant of its depths. So these reflections, among other things, spurred Damiani on a quest for self-knowledge and an investigation into the Soul, what PB terms the “Overself.”
Thus the archive contains many transcripts of classes on mentalism, the symbolic nature of the mind’s functioning, and the epistemology of various schools and traditions such as the Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya, Yogacara, Platonism, Plotinus, the Buddhist Logicians, medieval Scholastics, and Kant.
You can find many of these transcripts grouped by topic on the class series page. There is even a seven-month series on the core chapters of The Wisdom of the Overself, comprising thirty-two classes, “Paul Brunton’s The Wisdom of the Overself.”
PB’s Notebooks
Shortly after PB’s death in 1981, his notebooks arrived at Wisdom’s Goldenrod, to be edited and published posthumously by some of Damiani’s students, who were selected by PB to be his editors. PB’s notebooks were filled with “paras,” as he called them, short paragraphs consisting of only a few sentences, which he organized using a system of twenty-eight categories. Damiani and the Wisdom’s Goldenrod community immersed themselves in studying PB’s vast literary output, as well as in preparing the material for publication. In the last three years of his life, Damiani studied and meditated on these paras and then explained many of them with originality and insight in classes he led. There are twelve class series alone that focus on PB’s paras in various categories—for example, the Intellect, the Ego, What is Philosophy? Mentalism, Overself and Inspiration—and these series comprise at least ninety-three individual classes! The titles of these series all begin “Paul Brunton’s Notebooks.” To explore them, visit class series section of the archive. To learn more about PB, go here.
These paras also influenced the way he thought about other topics that he had been investigating, especially the nature of the individual Soul and its relationship to both the cosmos and the three primal hypostases of Plotinus. For example, from April to June 1983, he led a series of classes on PB paras on the Overself, “Paul Brunton’s Notebooks: Category 22, Inspiration and the Overself,” which had a great impact on the way he thought about and presented the double nature of Soul in Plotinus. His essays for the Soul chapter in Astronoesis reflect this new orientation. You can follow the progression of his thinking about individual Soul as he assimilated PB’s paras about the Overself in the classes in these two series:
See also the sections “Plotinus and Astronoesis” and “Advaita Vedanta” for other ways in which Damiani’s contemplation of PB’s paras affected his ongoing investigations.