Reflections Overview

Throughout PB’s career, many people have written about his ideas and his many books.  Also, since his death many of those who had contact with him personally or studied him deeply have written about his life and ideas.  Here we offer a small collection of selected essays that give us some rare glimpses of PB as a person, his interactions with others, and the role he played in the evolution of philosophy and culture:

“A Healing Meditation” tells the story about a meeting with PB and is taken from a sermon that Dr. Roy Burkhart gave the year he met PB. Dr. Roy Burkhart was a charismatic, mystical pastor of the First Community Church in Columbus, Ohio. He inspired many individuals in the Columbus PB Group and in the community that he served.  PB was guided to seek out Dr. Burkhart and meet with him in 1950.

Ed McKeown’s “Grace Notes” is an essay written after the six months he spent assisting PB reflecting on the prayers PB would offer before meals.  Ed was the first ‘butler’ to arrive at PB’s doorstep from Wisdom’s Goldenrod in the lattermost years of PB’s life.

Avery Solomon writes about his meeting with His Holiness Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram. It was this teacher who had encouraged PB to meet Ramana Maharshi, and this story is described in A Search in Secret India. In A Visit to Shankaracharya, Avery shares personal moments and something special that the Shankara said about PB.

Anna Bornstein’s “A Mind for Peace” offers her interpretation of many of PB’s key terms and ideas, placing PB’s work in relation to other philosophies.  She has written a second essay, “Meetings with PB,” describing her first and later encounters with him.  Anna is well-known in her native Sweden for her project “The Dream of the Good,” which brings meditation into the classroom and other groups.  As her essays indicate, Anna is PB’s Swedish translator and as such was afforded the opportunity to meet with him many times in the last decades of his life.

In “Beyond the Maps” Paul Cash writes about PB’s view of self-transformation.  He explores the reasons one would seek transformation, he reflects on the responsibility of the aspirant towards this end, and he investigates the methods of the quest.  Paul, who was with PB for the last five months of PB’s life, has given us a second essay “Reflections on Paul Brunton,” which describes his own time with PB.  Paul Cash is the owner of Larson Publications and the co-editor of PB’s posthumous writings; he is also a long-time student of Anthony Damiani's and was a resident at Wisdom’s Goldenrod for several years, (as was Ed McKeown).

“Paul Brunton and the Secret Path: An Appreciation” by John Behague presents a brief summary of PB’s teachings and philosophy.

In their article “Rediscovering Paul Brunton," Barbara Platek and Steve Soiffer discuss PB in his times as a rising author, an extensive traveler, and as a key contributor to bridging Eastern and Western philosophy.  Barbara Platek  is a practicing Jungian therapist and the author of many articles about spiritual topics and spiritually-minded individuals.

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