Wisdom of the Overself

Paul Brunton was born in London in 1898 and after having served in the First World War, started to devote himself to mysticism. He came into contact with Theosophists. In the early 1930s, Brunton embarked on a voyage to India, which would bring him into contact with such luminaries as Meher Baba, Sri Shankaracharya of Kancheepuram and Sri Ramana Maharshi. Brunton has been credited with introducing Ramana Maharshi to the West through his books "A Search in Secret India" and "The Secret Path".After two decades of successful writing, Brunton retired from publishing books and devoted himself to writing essays and notes. Upon his death in 1981 in Vevey, Switzerland, it was revealed that in the period since the last published book in 1952, he had rendered about 20,000 pages of philosophical writing.A longtime friend of Paul Brunton, philosopher Anthony Damiani, coordinated the publishing effort together with a team of people including Paul Cash and Timothy Smith. The Swedish-American publisher Robert Larson started publishing the 16-volume set in 1984.

Brunton's essential philosophy, expressed in The Wisdom of the Overself, can be succinctly although inadequately stated as follows: Ultimate Reality is Mind. Mind’s first expression is the Void. The Void’s first expression is the World-Mind (God or Logos), then the World Idea, and finally, through a series of stepped-down emanations, the world itself. The individual can not know Mind, as such, but he can commune with the World-Mind through union with his individual Overself (Divine Soul). The Overself is individual, but not personal. It is the Conscious Self, beyond ego. Brunton originally advised one to experience or realize the Overself, Soul, or Self-Consciousness, first in the heart (as jnana samadhi), and then to bring that into the waking state until a greater, intuitive realization, the “lightning flash” (“open eyes”, “everyday mind”, or sahaj samadhi) reveals or stabilizes itself. He later revised this to say that the initial experience of trance was not absolutely necessary in every case.

         “..the Overself is with him here and now. It has never left him at any time. It
         sits everlastingly in the heart. It is indeed his innermost being, his truest
         self. Were it something different and apart from him, were it a thing to be
         gained and added to what he already is or has, he would stand the risk of
         losing it again. For whatever may be added to him may also be subtracted from
         him. Therefore, the real task of this quest is less to seek anxiously to possess
         it than to become aware that it already and always possesses him.”