The Short Path to Enlightenment Quotes

“There is really nothing to be achieved here; only something to be accepted-the fact of your own divinity.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The first is the art of mind-stilling, of emptying consciousness of every thought and form whatsoever. This is mysticism or Yoga.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The aspirant who frequently measures how far he has advanced, or retrograded, upon this path, or how long he has stood still, is seeking something to be gained for himself, is looking all the time at himself. He is measuring the ego instead of trying to transcend it altogether. He is clinging to self, instead of obeying Jesus’ injunction to deny it. Looking at the ego, he unwittingly stands with his back to the Overself. If he is ever to become enlightened, he must turn round, cease this endless self-measurement, stop fussing over little steps forward or backward, let all thoughts about his own backwardness or greatness cease, and look directly at the goal itself.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“Saint John of the Cross gave the following advice: “Enter into your heart and labour in the presence of God who is always present there to help you. Fix your loving attention upon Him without any desire to feel or hear anything of God.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The second is to grasp the essential nature of the ego and of the universe and to obtain direct perception that both are nothing but a series of ideas which unfold themselves within our minds.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The ego self is the creature born out of man’s own doing and thinking, slowly changing and growing. The Overself is the image of God, perfect, finished, and changeless. What he has to do, if he is to fulfil himself, is to let the one shine through the other.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“It does not lie within man’s power to gain more than a glimpse of this diviner life.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“What is the key to the Short Path? It is threefold. First, stop searching for the Overself since it follows you wherever you go. Second, believe in its Presence, with and within you. Third, keep on trying to understand its truth until you can abandon further thoughts about it. You cannot acquire what is already here. So drop the ego’s false idea and affirm the real one.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“Muchos maestros contemporáneos trazan su linaje al gran sabio indio Ramana Maharshi. De hecho, fue Paul Brunton quien introdujo por primera vez a Ramana en Occidente a través de su exitoso libro La India Secreta, publicado en la década de 1930. Los muchos libros de Brunton no solo describen el Camino Corto, sino que lo colocan en el contexto de toda la gama del esfuerzo espiritual, incluyendo el importante desarrollo en el Camino Largo de la razón y la ética, la purificación de las emociones, la concentración, y así sucesivamente. Su visión extraordinariamente amplia y erudita ayuda a orientar a los buscadores espirituales, para que puedan discernir cómo el Camino Corto se complementa con las prácticas místicas con las que podrían estar familiarizados.”
― Paul Brunton, El corto camino hacia la iluminación

“Many complain that they are unable in meditation successfully to bring their active thoughts to an end. In the ancient Indian art of yoga, this cessation—called nirvikalpa samadhi in Sanskrit—is placed as the highest stage to be reached by the practitioner. This situation must be viewed from two separate and distinct standpoints: from that of yoga and from that of philosophy. Would-be philosophers seek to become established in that insight into Reality which is called Truth. Intuitive feeling is a higher manifestation of man’s faculties. So long as the feeling itself remains unobstructed by illusions, and—after incessant reflection, inquiry, study, remembrance, reverence, aspiration, training of thought, and purification—a man finds the insight dawning in his mind, he may not need to practise meditation. He may do so and he will feel the satisfaction and tranquillity which comes from it. Those who become sufficiently proficient in yoga, even if they achieve the complete cessation of thoughts, should still take up the pursuit of understanding and insight. If they are content with their attainment, they can remain for years enjoying the bliss, the tranquillity, the peace of a meditational state; but this does not mean knowledge in its fullest meaning. (20”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“We need to know the truth, the wisdom-knowledge, but it is not enough. We need to have the living mystic experience, the vital feeling of what I am, but it is not enough. For we need to synthesize the two in a full actual intuitive realization, conferred by the Overself. This is Grace. This is to emerge finally—born again!”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The true aspirant who has made a positive turning-over of his personal and worldly life to the care of the impersonal and higher power in whose existence he fully believes, has done so out of intelligent purpose, self-denying strength of will, and correct appraisal of what constitutes happiness. What this intuitive guidance of taking or rejecting from the circumstances themselves means in lifting loads of anxiety from his mind only the actual experience can tell. It will mean also journeying through life by single degrees, not trying to carry the future in addition to the present. It will be like crossing a river on a series of stepping-stones, being content to reach one at a time in safety and to think of the others only when they are progressively reached, and not before. It will mean freedom from false anticipations and useless planning, from vainly trying to force a path different from that ordained by God. It will mean freedom from the torment of not knowing what to do, for every needed decision, every needed choice, will become plain and obvious to the mind just as the time for it nears. For the intuition will have its chance at last to supplant the ego in such matters. He will no longer be at the mercy of the latter’s bad qualities and foolish conceit.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The world is there for both sage and student, and both must work and serve—the difference being mental only. Illusionism is not the doctrine except as an intermediate stage towards truth, which is higher. One must participate in God’s work by assisting evolution and redeeming the world, not squat idly in peace alone.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“there is no real difference between earthly experience and divine experience. Those who are wedded to forms, that is, appearances, set up such a difference and posit spirit and matter, nirvana and samsara, Brahman and Maya, and so forth, as antithetic opposites, but those who have developed insight perceive the essential stuff of everything even while they perceive its forms; hence they see all as One.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“He who has passed through this deepest and longest of the “dark nights” which precedes mature attainment can never again feel excessive emotional jubilation. The experience has been like a surgical operation in cutting him off from such enjoyments. Moreover, although his character will be serene always, it will be also a little touched by that melancholy which must come to one who not only has plumbed the depths of life’s anguish himself, but also has been the constant recipient of other people’s tales of sorrow.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“During this period the mystic will feel forsaken, emotionally fatigued and intellectually bored to such a degree that he may become a sick soul. Meditation exercises will be impossible and fruitless, aspirations dead and uninviting. A sense of terrible loneliness will envelop him. Interest in the subject may fall away or the feeling that further progress is paralysed may become dominant. Yet in spite of contrary appearances, this is all part of his development, which has taken a turn that will round it out and make it fuller. Most often the student is plunged into new types of experience during the dark period. The Overself sends him forth to endure tests and achieve balance. The most dangerous feature of the “dark night” is a weakening of the will occurring at the same time as a reappearance of old forgotten evil tendencies. This is the point where the aspirant is really being tested, and where a proportion of those who have reached this high grade fail in the test and fall for several years into a lower one.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The upward flights of the aspirant’s novitiate are bought at the cost of downward falls. It is as much a part of his experience of this quest to be deprived at times of all feeling that the divine exists and is real, as it is to have the sunny assurance of”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“What are the signs whereby he shall know that this is an authentic glimpse of reality? First, it is and shall remain ever present. There is no future in it and no past. Second, the pure spiritual experience comes without excitement, is reported without exaggeration, and needs no external authority to authenticate”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The position of the impersonal observer is only a tentative one, assumed because it is a practical help perhaps midway toward the goal. For when it is well-established in understanding, outlook, and practice, something happens by itself: the observer and the observed ego with its body and world become swallowed up in the undivided Mind.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“Witness His role is to play witness of what he is, how he behaves, the thoughts he admits, just as if he were witnessing someone else. This move-over from the actively-engaged person to the watcher who is impersonal and disengaged even in the midst of action, is one from drift to control. He must begin by putting the ego, his own ego, forward as an object of observation. He will not succeed fully in doing so, because he is involved on both sides—as subject and object—but the direction can be fixed and the work can be started. With time and practice, study and reflection, help and sincerity, some sort of impersonality and neutrality can be established. When inner stillness is fully reached, the work becomes much easier until it is completed by the grace of the higher Self, Overself. Of course, outside of meditation, he is conscious of his commonplace body; but he is also conscious of his awe-inspiring Overself. He sees the first as part of a passing show, himself as an uninvolved observer, and behind both the eternal Overself. (23”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The student has to stand aside from the thought-forms, which means that he must stand aside from the person and look at it as something external to himself. If and when he succeeds in getting behind it, he automatically adopts the standpoint of the Overself. He must make the person an object and the Overself its observer. Now this element of pure awareness is something constant and unbroken; hence it is not ordinary consciousness, which is a discontinuous thing made of totalized thoughts, but transcendental consciousness.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The teaching of nonduality is that all things are within one and the same element—Consciousness. Hence there are no two or three or three million things and entities: there is in reality only the One Consciousness.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“fortune to attain such serenity—to be lifted above passion and hatred, prejudice and fear, greed and discontent, and yet to be able to attend effectively and capably to one’s worldly duties. It is possible to reach this state.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“Do not be satisfied with the self-conscious spirituality which comes from forced growth and harsh unnatural asceticisms, or from egocentrically watching personal progress.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The secret is to remember the Overself, to turn the battle over to IT. Then, what he is unable to conquer by himself, will be easily conquered for him by the higher power.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The remembrance is a necessary preparation for the second exercise, in which you try to obtain an immediate identification with the Overself. Just as an actor identifies with the role he plays on the stage, you act think and live during the daily life “as if” you were the Overself. This exercise is not merely intellectual but also includes feeling and intuitive action. It is an act of creative imagination in which by turning directly to playing the part of the Overself you make it possible for its grace to come more and more into your life. (23-5-2)”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The “remembrance exercise” consists of trying to recall the glimpse of the Overself, not only during the set meditation periods but also in each moment during the whole working span of the day—in the same way as a mother who has lost her child can not let go of the thought of it no matter what she is doing outwardly, or as a lover who constantly holds the vivid image of the beloved in the back of his mind. In a similar way, you keep the memory of the Overself alive during this exercise and let it shine in the background while you go about your daily work. But”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“Often the aspirant is not ready to start these two exercises until after one or several glimpses of the Overself.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“The world is always with us, but only those on the Short Path recognize the miracle that it is. In moments of exaltation, uplift, awe, or satisfaction—derived from music, art, poetry, landscape, or otherwise—thousands of people have received a Glimpse; but only those on the Short Path recognize it for what it really is.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening

“In the early stages of enlightenment, the aspirant is overwhelmed by his discovery that God is within himself. It stirs his intensest feelings and excites his deepest thoughts. But, though he does not know it, those very feelings and thoughts still form part of his ego, albeit the highest part. So he still separates his being into two—self and Overself. Only in the later stages does he find that God not only is within himself but is himself.”
― Paul Brunton, The Short Path to Enlightenment: Instructions for Immediate Awakening