Paul Brunton Papers Archive Overview
INTRODUCTION BY TIMOTHY SMITH
The Paul Brunton papers are a remarkable collection of philosophic, cultural, and historic documents; some are absolutely unique and original, some are thoroughly dated and mundane. Paul Brunton was active as a researcher, and later as an authority on Eastern spirituality, mysticism, and philosophy. He was also a student of the mystical practices found in the bygone eras of Christendom, Judaism and Islam. He investigated and endeavored to clarify the differences between spirituality, occultism (real and imagined) and psychology. He began his recorded researches in 1930 with his first trip to India, and traveled throughout the world until his retirement to Switzerland in 1966. He published several well-received books, of which ASearch in Secret Indiastill sells well today. He continued writing, meditating, and giving interviews right up to his last few months of life in 1981, when he died of a stroke.
We know for a fact that in 1979 Paul Brunton (hereafter PB) went through all his papers and destroyed entire file cabinets of correspondence, personal papers, etc. Therefore, we have concluded that he either consciously intended that the papers extant at the time of his death to be available to the general public-or that he didn't care about their disposition. As anyone who engages with this material will quickly realize, there are several grades of relevance in these papers! After going over the major groups, a description of their further subdivisions will follow. There are separate essays introducing the Letters, the Biographical and Secondary Material, and the Photographs.
MAJOR GROUPS - 1. ORIGINAL WRITINGS, 2. LETTERS, 3. BIOGRAPHICAL and SECONDARY MATERIAL, 4. PHOTOGRAPHS, 5. BOUND BOOKS, 6. UNSCANNED CLIPS
We have created six broad groups within the collection. The first group is PB's own writings, which are primarily philosophic or mystical in nature. Within this group there are several significant subdivisions, which will be discussed below. We have included his own notes and rough drafts in this group, but not material we deem entirely trivial, including some of the notebooks which amount to the record of an author experimenting with ways of saying the same thing (remember, he did not intend these papers to be published, merely to be made available to any who wished access to them). Since PB had a lifelong habit of typing out (and sometimes rewriting) material taken from other authors, we have included the "Book Notes" folders as part of his writings. They are, however, notes for his own reference, and as such neither intended to be used in his books, nor are they an indication of his own beliefs and values. Many of these excerpts succinctly state viewpoints he absolutely disagreed with, and many represent views he did agree with. He often quoted the Buddha's last words: "Be a lamp unto yourself," and that is advice which applies to all of this material.
PB's original writings are without a doubt the material that is most important. He said of them: "I have written down what I have learned and discovered over the many years of my life; if these ideas are helpful to you, you are welcome to them-but do not make the mistake of calling me a guru. We must all learn to think for ourselves in the end, so these words can only be a guide to your own work." When we consider the many thousands of pages of PB's writings and notes, it is obvious that he was extremely prolific. Furthermore, the repetition of his ideas and observations is extensive. What we are looking at is the collection of drafts by a meticulous philosophic author-he would work for many days on trying to find the phrasing that best communicated his idea. Unfortunately, PB rarely dated his notes, so we have material that ranges from the mid-1930s up through 1980. I have worked with these pages for the past 35 years, and have learned to recognize specific stationery, typewriters, and even hole punches as characteristic of certain decades in his life. This information is recorded in the spreadsheet having to do with this material. We do know that any of his notebooks cataloged with his new category system was written in the last two years of his life (more about that later).
By and large PB wrote what he called "paras"-often a mere sentence, more rarely a paragraph. He wrote these down as quickly as they came to him, on whatever lay to hand and with whatever writing instrument was available. Some material was written in little notebooks or on free note-pads handed out by hotels and banks; a lot was written in the margins of magazines, newspapers, tickets to the opera and so on. At regular intervals PB sent fistfuls of these paper slips to a patient typist who typed them all into pages, putting them into some order as he or she did so. PB's typists were often living a continent away from himself, and mail wasn't always reliable-he therefore had the paras typed with carbons and then had the originals, the typed pages, and the carbons all sent to him separately. Due to the exigencies of said post offices, sometimes the carbons arrived first, and he would start editing and reworking them-only to set them aside when or if the more legible typescript arrived-sometimes months later. As a result, the so-called "Carbons" in the writing series are often de facto originals-either because the typescript never made it to him, or because PB altered the paras in the carbons differently than he did in their typescript cousins. The Carbons have the added advantage of seldom being butchered into fragments as part of his book-building process. As for the original bits of paper, most of the time he would soak them in his sink, bake the resultant glob, smack it with a hammer and toss the dust away-rather more thorough than merely shredding them! The majority of the Carbons are grouped together under the heading "Idea Series (Old Categories Auxiliary)" to indicate that they have original writings arranged in the Old Category system and which may or may not be duplicated in the "Old Category" series. We have included a set of scans of the envelopes in which the Carbons were stored, since these may have some bearing upon their age; these are found in "Idea Series (Carbons Envelopes)."
At any rate, these paras are the building blocks of his books and essays-something which is easy to see in the manuscript of his final publication, The Spiritual Crisis of Man. He wrote this book during his marriage with Evangeline Glass, and we owe her thanks for donating this MS and its various drafts to our collection. This is our only written documentation of how PB went from his small little "paras" to a proper text-and observing his revisions tells us something of his own thought-process as well. Some of the longer dictations to Evangeline, Ed McKeown and myself also show PB's thought process; these can be found in the Biographical and Secondary Material group.
Having read these paras for many, many years, I have come to recognize that what first appears to be mere redundance is usually a subtle nuance of meaning which alters the idea or intuition being presented. Clearly the publication of such repetitiveness would be pointless; we have included all this material because we have found that when an individual is researching a particular tenet of PB's philosophy these various phrasings become quite useful. To that end we have done what we can to provide filters or finding guides so that the average student is not obligated to wade through volumes of words in search of a few clarifying statements!
Within PB's writings, a good deal of it has Roman Numerals affixed to the individual "para" or to the whole page. These Roman Numerals refer to one of two sets of "Categories" which encompass PB's philosophic vision. His final request was that a selection of these numbered paras should be published in a fashion that required the reader to study all 28 categories rather than merely focus upon the few that were of personal interest. That was largely accomplished in the posthumous Perspectives(the first volume of The Notebooks of Paul Bruntonis an overview) and to a lesser degree in the remaining 15 volumes of that collection; these texts were edited and as such present a modified treatment of PB's ideas. As to whether that editing was an improvement or not isn't our concern-it is simply important to recognize that these volumes, unlike his earlier published books were edited without his own involvement with that process.
PB always used a system of Roman Numerals to categorize his paras for later development. Eventually (around 1940) he settled on 28 categories; when I asked him why, he said there was no particular meaning in the number, it just worked out that way. Evidently PB changed the contents of these categories from time to time throughout his life-reclassifying earlier material when he did so. We have no direct documentation regarding this habit, only the results. At the end of his life, he decided to make a full overhaul of the categories, redesigning them into the order in which he thought they should be read. As this occurred during my tenure as his secretary, we have included the trial versions of this final order as well as the final order itself. Here is a table of the Old (and predominant) Categories and the New Categories created during my tenure in 1980. All the paras drawn from his unpublished works that were used in The Notebooks of Paul Bruntonwere reclassified according to the new scheme, although there is a reference text (Monster Sort) which provides the original source of each published para. PB undertook this massive reorganization for one reason: he wanted to create a specific order in which his ideas were to be studied. He intended that a reader should devote equal time to all 28 categories; PB believed strongly in balance, and did what he could in these writings to forestall readers from cherry-picking the topics already most appealing to their own psychology.
CROSS INDEX TO OLD AND NEW CATEGORIES
| OLD (1940—1979) | NEW (1980—1981) |
|---|---|
| i. ART AND INSPIRATION...XIV,XXII | I. OVERVIEW OF THE QUEST…iv |
| ii. RELAX AND RETREAT...III | II. OVERVIEW OF PRACTICES INVOLVED...xvii |
| iii. MEDITATION...IV, XXIII | III. RELAX AND RETREAT...ii |
| iv. THE PATH...I | IV. ELEMENTARY MEDITATION...iii, xxviii |
| v. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY...XX | V. THE BODY...viii |
| vi. EMOTIONS AND ETHICS...VI | VI. EMOTIONS AND ETHICS...vi |
| vii. THE INTELLECT...VII | VII. THE INTELLECT...vii |
| viii. THE BODY...V | VIII. THE EGO...xi |
| ix. THE NEGATIVES...XI | IX. FROM BIRTH TO REBIRTH...xiv |
| x. MENTALISM...XXI | X. HEALING OF THE SELF...xxvi |
| xi. THE EGO...VIII | XI. THE NEGATIVES...ix |
| xii. THE OVERSELF...XXII | XII. REFLECTIONS...xxiv |
| xiii. THE WORLD-MIND...XXVII | XIII. HUMAN EXPERIENCE...xxv |
| xiv. FROM BIRTH TO REBIRTH...IX | XIV. THE ARTS IN CULTURE...i |
| xv. THE REIGN OF RELATIVITY...XIX | XV. THE ORIENT ...xxiii |
| xvi. THE ABSOLUTE MIND...XXVIII | XVI. THE SENSITIVES...xx |
| xvii. WAY TO OVERSELF...II, XXIII | XVII. THE RELIGIOUS URGE...xix |
| xviii. THE GOD WITHIN...XXV | XVIII. THE REVERENTIAL LIFE...xxii |
| xix. RELIGION...XVII | XIX. THE REIGN OF RELATIVITY...xv |
| xx. THE SENSITIVES...XVI | XX. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?...v |
| xxi. THE WORLD-IDEA...XXVI | XXI. MENTALISM...x |
| xxii. THE REVERENTIAL LIFE...XVIII | XXII. INSPIRATION AND THE OVERSELF...i, xii |
| xxiii. ORIENT AND OCCIDENT...XV | XXIII. ADVANCED CONTEMPLATION...iii, xvii |
| xxiv. GENERAL...XII | XXIV. THE PEACE WITHIN YOU...xxvii |
| xxv. HUMAN EXPERIENCE...XIII | XXV. WORLD-MIND IN INDIVIDUAL MIND...xviii |
| xxvi. MIND-BODY IN HEALTH & SICKNESS ...X | XXVI. THE WORLD-IDEA...xxi |
| xxvii. THE PEACE WITHIN...XXIV | XXVII. THE WORLD-MIND...xiii |
| xxviii. PRACTICES FOR THE QUEST...IV | XXVIII. THE ALONE...xvi |
| NEW (1980-1981) | OLD (1940-1979) |
|---|---|
| I. OVERVIEW OF THE QUEST…iv | i. ART AND INSPIRATION...XIV,XXII |
| II. OVERVIEW OF PRACTICES INVOLVED...xvii | ii. RELAX AND RETREAT...III |
| III. RELAX AND RETREAT...ii | iii. MEDITATION...IV, XXIII |
| IV. ELEMENTARY MEDITATION...iii, xxviii | iv. THE PATH...I |
| V. THE BODY...viii | v. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY...XX |
| VI. EMOTIONS AND ETHICS...vi | vi. EMOTIONS AND ETHICS...VI |
| VII. THE INTELLECT...vii | vii. THE INTELLECT...VII |
| VIII. THE EGO...xi | viii. THE BODY...V |
| IX. FROM BIRTH TO REBIRTH...xiv | ix. THE NEGATIVES...XI |
| X. HEALING OF THE SELF...xxvi | x. MENTALISM...XXI |
| XI. THE NEGATIVES...ix | xi. THE EGO...VIII |
| XII. REFLECTIONS...xxiv | xii. THE OVERSELF...XXII |
| XIII. HUMAN EXPERIENCE...xxv | xiii. THE WORLD-MIND...XXVII |
| XIV. THE ARTS IN CULTURE...i | xiv. FROM BIRTH TO REBIRTH...IX |
| XV. THE ORIENT ...xxiii | xv. THE REIGN OF RELATIVITY...XIX |
| XVI. THE SENSITIVES...xx | xvi. THE ABSOLUTE MIND...XXVIII |
| XVII. THE RELIGIOUS URGE...xix | xvii. WAY TO OVERSELF...II, XXIII |
| XVIII. THE REVERENTIAL LIFE...xxii | xviii. THE GOD WITHIN...XXV |
| XIX. THE REIGN OF RELATIVITY...xv | xix. RELIGION...XVII |
| XX. WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?...v | xx. THE SENSITIVES...XVI |
| XXI. MENTALISM...x | xxi. THE WORLD-IDEA...XXVI |
| XXII. INSPIRATION AND THE OVERSELF...i, xii | xxii. THE REVERENTIAL LIFE...XVIII |
| XXIII. ADVANCED CONTEMPLATION...iii, xvii | xxiii. ORIENT AND OCCIDENT...XV |
| XXIV. THE PEACE WITHIN YOU...xxvii | xxiv. GENERAL...XI |
Besides these 28 categories, there are several notebooks of material we have grouped under the title "Themed Notebooks." Notebooks with titles like "Atmananda + 5 [topics]," and "Titled Items" (which includes themes such as "esoteric" and "etiquette") comprise this group. We have bundled some loose papers into files also included in this category, and have relegated a couple of the original notebooks-specifically PB's notes on Food-to tertiary status.
There are some additional groups in the Writing series-the nearly self-explanatory "Themed Notebooks (Trivial)" and the less obvious "Early Writings" series. The former material runs the gamut from the boring to the trivial. It is probably of some interest to particular specialists researching the history of health fads and the like--but is certainly not of interest to the average student of philosophy or biographer. These include newspaper clippings, articles from magazines, and what I suspect to be the world's worst collection of vegetarian recipes! Regarding this latter material: PB was poisoned twice whilst in India, in an effort to kill him; these attempts together with contracting sprue left PB with a volatile digestive system-hence the preoccupation with food and healthy eating. As one of his last butlers, I can say that in person he exhibited no more preoccupation with food than any elderly person watching their diet. Much of this material has been included rather than redacted at the suggestion of our friends at Kroch Library, who assure us that they are a useful resource for anyone documenting the evolution of vegetarian and vegan lifestyles through the 40s and beyond.
Regarding the "Early Writing" series, when this group was first cataloged, we had little information available to us regarding the relative age of PB's material. As the years passed our understanding of this improved, and the specific file names now reflect this. Even so, we suggest that readers refer to our date columns, while also taking those dates with a grain of salt! As to the material itself, it is often either parallel to or directly related to PB's published books, and a good deal of it is quite informative.
LETTERS
The second group is PB's correspondence. Unfortunately, this is a largely one-sided collection with two outstanding exceptions: his letters to his son Kenneth Hurst, and to his third wife Evangeline Young Glass. The correspondence with Kenneth runs from 1930 (when Kenneth was seven) right through to the end of his life. Evangeline's correspondence is primarily from her years of marriage to PB (1950-1957). In addition, we have a much larger collection of correspondence gathered together as "Readers' Letters." See the relevant essay for a proper discussion of this group, which does include some very remarkable correspondents.
A note about the father-son correspondence. Since this collection came to us from the estates of PB and Kenneth Hurst, they surely redacted at least some of their correspondence, creating lacunas in their conversation. Even so, it is a remarkable collection of letters from 1930 through 1980. Readers of this material will quickly form the opinion that Kenneth was…a difficult youth who really didn't find his footing in life until his late 20's. Kenneth grew up with his mother and step-father, Leonard Gill, and had only minimal contact with PB until they met in America after WWII. This estrangement was the result of the divorce agreement, which gave sole custody of Kenneth to his mother, and which significantly restricted PB's contact with the child. Add to that the chaos of WWII, and it is no surprise that Kenneth was a handful as a young man-as letters between PB and Len Gill attest! By Kenneth's middle years their correspondence (that we have) settles down to an almost routine interplay of communications about trips, finances, and such mundane matters. Finally, we have included a bundle of letters to Kenneth from PB's friends and admirers around the time of PB's death (found in the KTH Perimortem file); any subsequent correspondence between Kenneth and these individuals developing their own relationship has either been redacted or put in the Postmortem file.
BIOGRAPHICAL and SECONDARY MATERIAL
The third group includes a wide range of material; this is covered in more detail in the essay of the same name. However, I have a few comments. Part of this group is the journals of Evangeline Glass during her marriage to PB and a few other journals recording individuals' impressions of PB or his statements to them. Evangeline's journals cover the greatest timespan and contain a lot of dictated philosophical material as well as her own private reflections on her marriage. These documents have been signed over to PBPF by Evangeline, who approves their public access. The journals of Zohmah Charlot (from 1930s), Ed McKeown and myself (Timothy Smith) from 1979 and 1980, respectively, are also in this group. This collection of journals and other personal items provides a good deal of the biographical knowledge we have of PB, and adds to our skimpy collection of actual documents and certificates, such as PB's birth certificate, his name change, his marriages and divorces, his passports and his Doctoral diploma (regarding which see below).
"Certificates" includes various passports, name changes, birth certificates, marriage and so forth. This is probably the most challenging material in the collection. There is a lot of anecdotal material which flat out contradicts several of these documents, starting with PB's birth certificate. Wikipedia currently gives the correct birthdate for PB: October 21, 1898, but there has long been a second date in circulation- November 27, 1898. There have been a few theories about this discrepancy, ranging from the accidental to an intentional obfuscation based upon PB's desire to thwart his enemies from misusing his horoscope. So far as I know, he used the November date on one passport and the October one on another passport; this allowed him to slip in and out of India without there being a record of his movements. During the height of the Indian bid for independence from the UK, Brunton was suspected to be spying for each side by the other. So far as I know, there is neither anecdotal nor hard evidence to this effect: he simply wanted to explore the spiritual landscape of India-something which Nehru disliked as part of India's backward past, and something equally disliked by Lord Mountbatten and Co. At any rate, I know that PB valued his privacy to such an extent that he frequently published the alternate birthdate, but I don't know how PB wrangled getting a fake one registered! There is one story that he nearly died as an infant, and was re-christened upon his recovery. There is another story that he feared occult attacks which used his horoscope to take advantage of his "bad" days. PB was certainly interested in astrology, but he only rarely referred to it and definitely didn't fully buy into it. (I met him when I was beginning to practice astrology, which he encouraged, but also spoke to me very firmly about its dangers and limitations.)
All in all, we inherited from PB and others (mainly Kenneth Hurst and Evangeline Glass) several bookshelves of material all neatly gathered into three-ring binders and already possessed of their own categories, themes, or other identity-and bushels of loose papers! These latter overlap with all the other groups, including letters, and has been fully discussed in its own essay.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Another biographical source is photographs (and negatives). The earliest ones were taken by PB during his travels, the later are photographs of himself taken by various visitors. The early images show several temples in considerably better shape at the time PB visited them than they are at present-thanks largely to various wars. This is particularly true of his visits to Egypt, Angkor Wat and Tibet. Wherever possible the other people, locations, and date have been associated with the photos in their spreadsheet. We owe a great deal of thanks to Evangeline Glass for her patient assistance in identifying all the images taken during her marriage or later visits with PB. As researchers will quickly realize, the labels on the backs of many photos are inaccurate if not wildly speculative: we have so noted them wherever possible. One small group of photographs is of particular interest as it appears to place PB in Tibet in the 1930s! This startling fact is corroborated by his correspondence with his personal secretary Zohmah Charlot. For further information, please consult the extensive essay on the photographs which discusses their many problems and our proposed solutions
BOUND BOOKS
Beyond his own writings, there is a collection of "Bound Books" which further demonstrates the sources of PB's ideas and the extent of his scholarship. We have limited these Bound Books to titles which are either otherwise non-existent, rare, or significantly expensive to acquire. Any titles in his library which are commonly available new or used have been redacted-unless there are significant marginalia. The group is titled "Bound Books" because these are a set of books and articles (mostly from the 1930s and 1940s) that PB always had with him, even in the remote reaches of the Himalayas and the unpopulated deserts of Egypt. Since much of his transportation to these regions was by donkey, he removed any unnecessary pages from the books and rebound several books as a single compact volume, doing he could to lighten the donkey's load. This collection is comprised largely of very dense scholarly works on Hinduism, Buddhism, and contemporary Western Thought-both mainstream and New Age. The bulk of his personal library is housed at Wisdom's Goldenrod in Valois; since these books are either in print or cheaply available from used book dealers, we did not include them in the collection. A list of them can be found in the "List of PB's Bookplated Books" file and the "Deaccessioned Bound Books" file.
UNSCANNED CLIPS
The unscanned clips are a massive collection of newspaper clippings that PB saved, and in many cases annotated, that contained notes of interest to him. Reading each item individually makes one question why it was worth saving; however, when read en masse, a picture takes shape of the world that PB was living in, and how the cultures of the time viewed philosophy and spirituality. I find that it provides insight into the audience that PB was writing for, and his attempts to understand the perspectives of the layman of his time. The clips are organized into three levels-High, Moderate, and Unclear Relevance-depending on how heavily they were marked and how clearly they related to his fields of study. Within those levels, they are sorted according to PB's 28 categories (discussed above), or as personal topics. Category 13 in particular is worth noting as where clippings that involved the politics of the Cold War were placed here. Some of these folders were marked with Operation (Crown Symbol); this was PB's term for the plans he was making with the Massons, Damianis and others to relocate to a country which would be safe from the nuclear winter he had had a vision of. His concerns about WWIII are discussed in their own section below. Clippings involving people of interest were given their own folders, especially if it was someone that we knew he had met personally. Finally, as if this was murky enough, we know that he also saved articles which were sent to him as a point of reference for further contact with the sender. This ranged from erudite articles either illuminating or challenging his own work (usually collected into Book Notes or elsewhere) to unbelievable so-called occult nonsense, written as often as not with an eye to profiting from the gullible. We strongly recommend familiarizing yourself with his original writings and the information found in the Biographical and Secondary Material group before engaging with this group.
Finally, we have included some guides and other research tools we developed for ourselves as aids in navigating this daunting collection. This includes spreadsheets associated with each of the above specified groups, a timeline of where PB was when, and two who's who-one identifying personal connections such as wives and friends, and the other a list (lifted from Wikipedia) of the many hundred philosophers and other historical figures quoted or otherwise referenced by PB. Finally, there is a short narrative of how this project came to be, and our own thoughts regarding its future. The print version of all this (minus the spreadsheets, which you really don't want to read as printouts) is in the PB Writings box of Miscellaneous items.
Various Details and a Who's Who.
STORY OF THE PROJECT
As for how this project came to be what it has become, the short version begins in 1978, when PB's primary student-and my own teacher-Anthony Damiani convinced PB to accept domestic help. Over the final three years of Brunton's life five people came to serve in this capacity-Ed McKeown, followed by Robert Geyer, followed by Timothy and Devon Smith (myself and my first wife), and concluding with Paul Cash. Besides ordinary domestic tasks like housecleaning and food preparation, PB gave each individual a try as a secretary, eventually deciding that two individuals-Timothy and Paul-could fulfil that function. When Paul Brunton died in the summer of 1981, he left a careful will and instructions regarding his papers-specifically that Timothy and Paul were to be given charge of them! This truly came as a surprise to both of us, and took some getting used to. Sometime in the Autumn of 1981, Kenneth Hurst and Paul Cash shipped Brunton's papers to America (he had died in Switzerland). Shortly thereafter a twin focus on the material began to take shape. Paul, under Anthony Damiani's guidance, primarily focused on transforming PB's unpublished material into a collection of books now titled The Notebooks of Paul Brunton. While we were heavily involved with this project, we had already begun learning what we could about archiving these papers for future generations.
We wanted these papers to be freely available, but also accessible and not merely a jumble of notes of wildly varying quality-and we wanted them to be placed in the hands of a proper archival facility. The search for such a facility and the early efforts to organize the material were largely volunteer, and, inevitably, sporadic. In 2001, I became disabled, and this had the benefit of freeing up time previously devoted to earning a living. That together with the arrival of a major donor to the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation, and the rapid improvement in computer technology allowed us to finally accomplish our goals. We were able to organize the material, scan it all, get much of it typed (since the scans are not searchable due to their holographic nature), and eventually to sign a contract with the Kroch Library at Cornell.
Even though Cornell might seem the obvious choice from the outset, our first conversations with Olin and the Archival department were not promising. Only after we had captured the interest of SOAS-a subdivision of London College-were we able to come to Cornell with academic support for our endeavor. Although SOAS was quite interested in taking the collection, they would only make it available to their own students and alumni-and they have no internet presence. Cornell, on the other hand, offers its resources to the general public, and is very supportive of online databases. While no one can truly predict the future, we at PBPF and specifically myself, are confident that Cornell can do a far better job than our modest foundation both in long-term preservation of the originals and in providing a platform through which Paul Brunton's writings and research can be put to use-and tested-by generations to come.
PB NAME CHANGES
Tracking-and understanding-his name changes is at least a simpler task. PB's parents started this when they immigrated from Poland to the UK, changing their last name from Issacs to Hurst and that may well have been an assumed name. A brief review of the anti-Semitism rampant in Europe in the first half of the 20thcentury seems adequate explanation for this change, as it does PB's own first name change-from Hyman to Raphael-undertaken by his father. Thus, it transpired that PB began his adult life as (Hyman) Raphael Hurst; he kept the "Raphael" at least through the end of his marriage to Evangeline and often signed his letters to her with that name. He went on to use a number of nom de plumes, particularly when he and Michael Juste were trying to create an occult magazine. In order to give the impression of a large staff each of them wrote articles under a number of pseudonyms-only a few of which we are certain of. When he made the switch from "New Thought" to Eastern mysticism, Raphael Hurst opted to conjure a nom de plume for his publications, and chose "Brunton (brunt-on) Paul" to symbolize both his brusque style and the fact that like Saul on the road to Damascus, he had gone through a spiritual transformation. The assumption of a new name to mark a spiritual rebirth has long been a part of Hindu culture, and was very au courant in the West in the 30s and 40s (you think the 60s were bad for this sort of thing!). Many of the Western students of Sri Ramana and other early 20thcentury gurus happily took on a new, often Hindu, name. In any case, PB decided to formalize his name to Paul Brunton after the printer reversed his chosen nom de plume and never looked back (nor did he make any effort to cover his tracks). As for the shift to his initials-perhaps it had to do with the brevity of telegrams (which he signed Peebee), and perhaps he simply opted for this succinct form of address for personal reasons. He most definitely did not require people to address him as "PB;" he responded equally graciously to "Paul" and "Dr./Mr. Brunton."
PB'S PH.D.
And that leads to the lovely nest of worms which is PB's Ph.D. Readers of Jeffrey Masson's book will be aware that Mc Kinley-Roosevelt Graduate College was little more than a diploma mill, thus diminishing if not annihilating the "Dr." of Dr. Paul Brunton. (Masson tried to track down Brunton's participation at Roosevelt University and naturally couldn't find it since it was the wrong institution-PB's graduate certificate is in the archive.) When PB undertook his thesis, accreditation was not in full sway in America-that didn't happen until 1965! While nobody ever believed that Mc Kinley-Roosevelt Graduate College was a top-drawer institution, at its outset it functioned as a brokerage house, sending out theses to various known authorities [sic] in the relevant field and taking their recommendation regarding the granting of a degree or not. Within a decade this practice disappeared, and it became a full-blown diploma mill, selling a "degree" for a modest sum. In its final days it advertised in the back pages of "Science Illustrated," "Mechanics Illustrated" and no doubt a fistful of similar magazines. PB soon came to realize that despite the quality of his thesis, the quality of his Ph.D. was doubtful-so he dropped the "Dr." from his own documents. This was definitely the case by 1950, in spite of Masson's claims to the contrary.
PB AND FOOD
A note on PB and food is probably warranted, and this is as good a place as any to address this issue. PB was a lifelong vegetarian-at least from adolescence forward. He chose this largely on moral grounds and partially because of his health. His travels throughout the Orient in the 1930s did his health no favors, and this was exacerbated by his being poisoned with heavy metals by the jealous brother of Ramana Maharshi. This individual demanded that PB turn over all his wealth to himself claiming that PB's fame was solely due to his association with Ramana Maharshi. PB pointed out that his book, A Search in Secret Indiagave equal treatment to His Holiness Sri Shankaracharya, the elder Sai Baba and even Meher Baba-and that if PB were to give his money to the Sri Ramana ashram he should equally give all of it to these other individuals. It was at this point that Ramana's brother figured the only way to get money from PB was to kill him-obviously not clear thinking. Even so, PB was seriously ill for many weeks and never really regained his health-and this led to him more or less continually seeking different mainstream and alternative cures, treatments and diets. In all other domestic matters PB was eminently practical and balanced, which made his preoccupation with diet all the more visible. Finally, neither nutrition proper, much less vegan nutrition was well understood back in the day, creating a mash-up of good science and bad superstition regarding plant-based diets. Since a good deal of real science has developed in the intervening years, PB's records of his trials and errors in this field are now only of interest to historians of this field-hence the relegation!
PB'S TRAVELS
The astute researcher will eventually notice that PB moved around the world the way some of us walk around a grocery store! His own explanation for this was that he simply was called from one place to the next, often to meet with particular people or to research particular locations. As his "Search" books tell us, he traveled deep into the deserts of Egypt, into the still-inhospitable reaches of the Himalayas, and all point in between. He travelled across China in the 1940s, toured Burma, Japan, and made at least one pilgrimage into Tibet. He also was a welcome guest in the homes of many royal families, including the Greek royal family, the English, the Maharaj of Mysore, to mention a few. All of these connections are substantiated by newspaper clippings and correspondence now in the collection. He also traveled into Mexico, lived for a few years in Australia and New Zealand, and spent his final years in Switzerland. As a result of this self-chosen peripatetic lifestyle, PB lived out of suitcases more often than not, and was consequently astonishingly practical and organized. He was also frugal, since he did not always have access to the amenities of European civilization; so even when he returned from the Orient of the 30s and 40s, he retained the habits and mind-set of an ex-pat.
In fact, he was known as such in those years, and socialized with his fellow world-travelers, including Hemingway, Henry Miller, and many others. One person he never met was Somerset Maugham! Their paths almost crossed a number of times, but Maugham's book The Razor's Edgewhich is thought by some to have been inspired by PB, was more likely modeled after Christopher Isherwood, whom Maugham did meet at the Ramana Ashram. We have included a tab in the spreadsheet summarizing PB's whereabouts; this list is far from complete but we believe it to be accurate so far as it goes. It was created in collaboration with Evangeline Glass and often based on letters to her or to Kenneth Hurst.
PB's People
When it comes to the letters and journals, it may be helpful to have a sense of who's who (so far as we know). In fact, there's a lot more we don't know, largely due to PB's near-obsessive penchant for privacy, and also because many of his students and contemporaries predeceased him. What follows is a rough description of PB's teachers, students, relevant peers, wives, and hangers-on. This information comes from three main sources: conversations with Evangeline Glass and her daughter Melody Talcott; conversations and notes from the students of Anthony Damiani (including myself); and the inferences or conclusions drawn from the letters we have on hand.
To begin, we know from PB's quasi-autobiographical comments in A Search in Secret Indiathat he had guidance from a Brahmin living in London, from the mysterious "M" (whose name was Charles Willis Thurston), and from Charles Henry Allan Bennett (aka Ananda Metteyya). According to Melody Talcott, PB (who was Jewish by birth) was a prodigy at his synagogue in his youth, and was being groomed to be a rabbi, but there is no written material about this. PB eventually renounced Judaism in favor of a more open-ended study of many religions, but he never denied his roots. At the same time, he did have his Semitic features modified to simplify his travels in Arabic lands.
ALLAN BENNETT (ANANDA METTEYYA)
(Charles Henry) Allan Bennett is sufficiently well known that we won't address his own remarkable story here, other than to note that he began life as a compatriot of Aleister Crowley (who was Malfoy to his Potter), and ended as an ordained Theravadin Monk. PB knew him before and after this change, and when Bennett offered PB his notes on practical magic, PB thought about it for three weeks and then refused, saying he wasn't worthy. Bennett promptly set fire to them (with a gesture) and PB (who told me this story) was stricken with regret. Curiously, PB's own occult abilities evaporated exactly three weeks later. As to what those abilities were, he did not elaborate. This does point out, however, that like the mismatched mixture of civil disobedience and drugs in the 60s, occultism and scholarly investigations of Buddhism and Hinduism were not sharply distinguished in the 1930s. Even Evans-Wentz, the first translator of the Tibetan Book of the Deadproduced a fascinating book on the occult characteristics of mountains (Cuchama).
PB then studied in London with someone named "M" for whom we have a photograph and two terse partial letters. We know he encouraged PB to travel to India, but never went himself, and that PB gave his own son, Kenneth the name "Thurston" to honor "M."
ZOHMAH CHARLOT
A word about Zohmah Charlot. Her name showed up in a startling way: amongst PB's papers there is a rather bad poem about Egyptian Deities with a note at the bottom from "Zohmah." Google led us to Zohmah (Dorothy) Charlot, the wife of Jean Charlot, a painter of some note, whose son, John Charlot was a professor at the University of Hawaii-which also houses the paintings of Jean Charlot. When we contacted him on the off chance that it was the same Zohmah, we learned that yes, it was the same person, and that she had kept both a diary and some of her correspondence with PB from the 1930s-which the university library kindly copied for us. These documents have been integrated into our "Letters and Journals" group. While a great deal of her diary has to do with her social and romantic life-which was pretty lively-there are some significant entries having to do with Paul Brunton.
Zohmah apparently came to London at the urging of the photographer Edward Weston for whom she was a model, but that she quickly found herself living hand-to-mouth as a typist in a small advertising firm. To supplement her income, she took in extra typing and shared a room in a rooming house with another typist-who just happened to be the recording secretary of a professional medium. It also happened to be the case that Paul Brunton (then still Raphael Hurst) took rooms in the same lodging house and hired Zohmah to type at least one of his early books-A Search in Secret Egypt.
Zohmah also got interested in seances as well as making the odd pound as a recording secretary of these gatherings, some of which were attended by Brunton. Zohmah must have been quite the personality, as she was courted by two sons of Augustus John (one of whom committed suicide over her), she was painted by Augustus, as well as by a painter she referred to as "Red Beard." While we don't know the full extent of the relationship between Zohmah and Brunton, it was intimate enough that he invited her first to Egypt and then to India (she didn't agree, but did stay in touch with him for at least a few years). Other than PB's letters to his son and a few autobiographical notes, we really don't have much information about his activities or relationships prior to the late 1930s, so these scraps from Zohmah are of particular interest-and she also tells a good story of a young woman on her own in interwar Britain.
PB IN INDIA
We also know from PB's own writings that he studied with Subramanya Iyer, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and "the Mongolian Adept" whom he met at Angkor Wat in the 30s or 40s. He had contact with His Holiness Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, two Popes, and interviewed literally hundreds of individuals involved with spiritual or occult pursuits. He rarely passed judgment on an individual without meeting them, but once he made up his mind, he was not shy about giving his support or criticism to that person. At various intervals gurus tried to claim him as their own-starting with Meher Baba and ending with Mahesh Yogi. As to why we don't know more about some of these individuals, perhaps the following anecdote will shed some light: PB was asked by a Swedish seeker (in my presence) if it was possible to attain enlightenment without a teacher, even as Sri Ramana Maharshi had. PB replied: "But Sri Ramana was taught by three sages who preferred to remain anonymous." The Priest (for such he was) objected: "I've never heard about these teachers," to which PB responded "That is generally what is meant by anonymous." So, while we have some inkling of who PB met and studied or studied with, it is very probably not a definitive list.
While PB is often linked with Ramana Maharshi and vice-versa, they followed very different paths, and neither claimed a lasting student-teacher relationship with the other. Both eventually became spiritually advanced individuals, and remained indirectly in contact until Ramana's death. As mentioned above, Ramana's brother really hated PB and many other western visitors to Ramana and even went so far as to invite PB to Ramana's funeral and then hire a sniper to take him out. Fortunately, someone else at the Ramana Ashram got wind of this and PB was not even able to go to the funeral (he was already half-way from California when he got this news and aborted the trip).
JANINA BRUNTON
At the outset I mentioned that PB had three wives, and that is the case. He was first married to Karen Tottrup, with whom he had his only child, Kenneth Hurst. He was then very briefly married to Janina Brunton. All we know about her (including information from Evangeline Glass) is that they met in India and were married for only a few months. It took about three years for the marriage to be annulled, something that is mentioned in PB's correspondence with V.S. Iyer. We also have correspondence reporting that Janina is being cared for by a Curate in France (she was French), and that PB contributed towards her upkeep throughout her life. Evangeline mentioned that there was some question about Janina's sexuality, but we have no information regarding the reason for the marriage or its dissolution.
PB'S EARLY STUDENTS
There was a small group of individuals who knew-or were at least were aware of-each other and who called themselves students of PB in the 1950s and 60s. This included Evangeline Glass, Anthony Damiani, PB's son Kenneth Hurst, Jacques and Bernard Masson (and their wives); Jim Covell; Norma Hutchinson, Fred and Clara Wagener; Ione Fagan, Arthur Broekhuysen, Dan Frantz, Edward (Ted) Spicer; Sherry Wesselman; Nora Briggs; and several others. Of these the three most important are Evangeline Glass, Anthony Damiani, and Kenneth Hurst.
EVANGELINE GLASS
Evangeline and her daughter Melody Talcott have contributed substantially to this collection, both materially and spiritually. As the last surviving individual who was a true adult during PB's lifetime, her memory of his activities and his relationships is the keystone to our bridge into his private life. Her own story is worthy of a biography itself: she grew up outside of Cleveland, Ohio; her father was a drunken abusive Irishman, and her mother a gentle homemaker with strong roots in Theosophy. Evangeline trained as a classical singer from an early age, and was touring the country as part of a light-opera company right out of high school. She also evinced a strong interest in mysticism and Eastern thought from an early age, writing her senior thesis on Yoga. At some point in her youth, she began to have powerful mystical experiences-hardly the norm for northern Ohio! Desperate to understand what was happening to her she scoured her local library and came upon the books of Paul Brunton, whom she promptly wrote. After a few cordial but formal exchanges, she persisted in requesting an interview with PB. By the time he agreed, they both happened to already be in California and staying in the same hotel. So, the interview happened, and they became interested in seeing more of each other. The upshot was that after about six months they chose to marry, in spite of their vast age difference (she was 19 to his 52). As her journals show, and her later life confirmed, this was a difficult but authentic choice for both of them. They remained married for seven years, by which time Evangeline was anxious to start a family, and PB, now 60, most certainly was not. They divorced amicably, and remained actively part of each other's lives until his death.
Evangeline soon married her accompanist, Beaumont Glass, and they had a child, Melody Glass Talcott. Beaumont directed operas around Europe while Evangeline split her time between parenting and continuing her career in opera. During the greater part of PB's life the Glass family was located in Zurich, and he usually spent a few months in their company, even being the Godfather of Melody. Beaumont was supportive of his wife and daughter's interest in spirituality, though preferred the world of music for himself. The year that PB died (1981) the Glass family relocated to Iowa, where he taught for 17 years until his retirement in 1998. In 2009 he fell victim to ALS and died in 2011.
When I first became aware of Evangeline, and realized her age difference to PB, I was more than a little skeptical regarding the viability much less the motivation for their marriage. However, upon meeting her, her natural mystical presence and maturity made it clear that this was as healthy a marriage as any, and as 'normal' as most. When her own mother learned of their engagement, she flew out to California to meet this older man-and promptly asked to become his student! Throughout their marriage-according to her notes and diary-PB was glad to offer her his guidance and make suggestions, but he refused to tell her what to do, even when she asked him. Since theirs was an unusual liaison by practically any standards, we have included a large portion of Evangeline's diaries and notes in hopes that this will help context their relationship. We also benefitted from her recollection of her time married to PB-and their subsequent visits.
KENNETH HURST AND KAREN TOTTRUP
The next person to discuss is Kenneth Hurst, his son with his first wife Karen Tottrup. We know only a little about Karen. We know that she was Danish, and immigrated to England where she met PB and other individuals interested in Eastern thought, spiritualism, and related matters. She married young-PB and she were the same age-and they started a family a couple of years later. At this time PB was working with Michael Juste to produce a magazine (that failed) focusing on "New Thought" and "Positive Thinking;" PB was also best friends with Leonard Gill, who founded Atlantis Bookstore in London. PB also traveled onto the continent to meet various spiritual and spiritualist individuals. His long absences did not serve his marriage well, and Karen began an affair with Leonard Gill. When PB found out-they told him-he was devastated (according to Evangeline Glass). "He always thought the best of people and could never really understand when they fell short," she said. In order to give his son Kenneth a stable home life and to make a clean break with Karen, he divorced her, claiming infidelity on his part (not true), so as to guarantee that Kenneth would remain with his mother-something both parents agreed upon. As the years went by the scars faded, and PB established friendly relations with Karen and Leonard. Kenneth himself also maintained regular contact with his mother and arranged for her care in her last years. The KTH Letters show a tragedy here-Karen's doctor wrote Kenneth a letter advising him of his mother's rapid decline and need for full-time care. Unfortunately, he put the wrong postage on the letter and it took eight months to get to Kenneth-by which time Karen had deteriorated to the point of being bed-ridden, and she died soon after. While PB didn't go to the funeral, he and Kenneth donated benches in memory of Karen and Leonard to a park near the home Kenneth grew up in.
As mentioned in the discussion of the letters, the correspondence between Kenneth and PB is doubly valuable as it is the one collection which includes letters from both parties, and it spans nearly fifty years. Of course, we are aware that PB was selective regarding what he kept of Kenneth's letters, and Kenneth did the same with what he chose to share with PBPF from PB-but such is the nature of source material. Throughout their lives Kenneth had a lot to do with managing PB's logistics as he moved from one location to another. He also managed PB's copyrights and other details of publishing his books; those contracts and business correspondence which happened during PB's lifetime we have included in the collection; the post-mortem contracts have not been included. While PB and Kenneth discussed his business arrangements during his lifetime, that was obviously not the case after his death. In light of the small ocean of material related to PB's associates, we have tried to be discriminating regarding what extraneous material has been added to the collection from Kenneth, Evangeline, et al. We do not intend an archive of "PB and friends," but we do wish to provide some contextual information about these various figures in PB's life where useful. Kenneth's relationship, unlike that with either Evangeline or Anthony Damiani, was often acrimonious, as Kenneth often sought to trade of his father's name for his own advancement amongst PB's followers-usually with disappointing results for all concerned.
One curious feature of this correspondence basically amounts to PB repeatedly telling Kenneth "Don't marry that girl." Since PB himself was married to three different women, he seldom counseled celibacy or monastic life as necessary for spiritual advancement. In fact, he agreed with Sri Ramana Maharshi and others who observed that if monasticism was essential to spirituality, it would invariably breed spirituality out of the human gene pool! While PB did not approve of excessive sexual activity or promiscuity, he treated most relationships on their own merits-and getting him to advise one on this point was like pulling teeth. Thus, in the context of PB's basically liberal views on sexuality (including homosexuality), and his life-long reluctance to interfere with other people's life-choices, his adamant and frequent disapproval of Kenneth's romantic adventures is notable. After PB died, when Kenneth was in his late 60s, he married a woman (Kenneth was perhaps her sixth elderly husband); within a year of their marriage, she had sold off or pawned all of his rather large art collection-and then trundled him off to an inexpensive old age home where he sat out his last years. From all this, it seems most likely that PB viewed him as a poor judge of character, and tried to protect him (and/or possibly his intended) from unneeded misery. Kenneth was viewed as problematic and lacking in much understanding of his father's philosophy by both Evangeline Glass and Anthony Damiani (the next person discussed)-and myself when it comes to that. If we consider his patient assistance in his father's relentlessly quixotic moves, Kenneth was a saint; if we consider his relationship to a mature spiritualist-not so much.
ANTHONY DAMIANI AND HIS STUDENTS
Perhaps by coincidence, I happened to be present at the last meetings between PB and Kenneth, and then with his student Anthony Damiani. (My first wife was also present, but did not record her thoughts on these matters before her death in 2004.) When Kenneth contacted PB for his visit, PB simply told me to find the most expensive hotel in an adjacent town and to book a suite for Kenneth there. When Devon and I offered to prepare their food, PB adamantly refused, saying he wanted to keep most of his meeting time with Kenneth in public, where it was more likely to be confined to a more civil exchange. By contrast, when Anthony Damiani contacted him, PB himself came to the modest rooming house occupied by Devon and myself to see which room might best suit Anthony. As it happened, the rooming house was undergoing renovations and we were its only remaining occupant. PB went through all nine remaining rooms and selected a lamp from one, a table from another, and a chair from a third-all so that Anthony's room would be comfortable and pleasant.
While Kenneth quickly climbed the corporate ladder in publishing, ending up as President of the International branch of Prentice-Hall publications, Anthony started life as a dockworker and ended it as a toll-booth collector. He almost aggressively eschewed worldly success (for which PB actually chided him), focusing his energies largely on his studies and meditations. By his early 40s Anthony had gathered around himself some 250 students in Ithaca New York. This group-much reduced in size-still exists as the members of Wisdom's Goldenrod in Valois, New York.
Anthony was born with a double passion for classical music and philosophy-but his extreme poverty put him to work on the docks alongside his extended Italian family from an early age. Eventually he broke from the clan and took a job at Brentano's Bookstore in Manhattan. One day he was in the window arranging a display of books by PB when he suddenly realized that the author himself was staring at him through the window. This was in 1946, on PB's second visit to America (the first being in 1938). Neither man (so far as I know), ever questioned their relationship thereafter, and Anthony became a lifelong devotee of PB, while continuing his studies in other philosophies and traditions, particularly Advaita Vedanta, Zen Buddhism, and Neoplatonism.
It was a lifelong dream of Anthony's to create a school of philosophy that would study a variety of philosophic paradigms and cross-reference them analytically rather than synthetically; even so, he always used PB's books as touchstones for himself and his own students. In 1978, the year after PB's last visit to America (including Wisdom's Goldenrod), Anthony convinced PB to accept assistance from his (Anthony's) students, and so a sequence of individuals came to serve as PB's butler or secretary according to their abilities. My first wife, Devon Cottrell and I were the penultimate assistants, and Paul Cash-also from Wisdom's Goldenrod-was present at PB's passing. It was only after his death that Paul and I learned that he had willed the legal title to his papers to his son, Kenneth, the physical possession of them to Anthony Damiani, and responsibility for evaluating them for publication to Paul and myself! (If I had known what was coming, I sure would have asked him a lot of questions!)
One thing that happened during the period of these young assistants from Wisdom's Goldenrod was that Ed McKeown spent nearly every day with PB going through each and every file cabinet, notebook, and box of papers. According to Ed, and as noted in his journal in this collection, PB shredded entire file cabinets' worth of private papers week in and week out. Since PB did not continue this work with either Robert Geyer (who came next) or with myself, it is reasonable to assume that any papers which PB did not want made public were destroyed by him, and that all the remain papers were to be preserved in some form or other. We have not taken this as an implicit mandate to preserve every piece of paper, especially the near-inexhaustible supply of paras on food!
LORRAINE STEVENS AND THE MASSONS
Two or three more individuals bear brief mention: Lorraine "Romaine" Stevens, and the Masson families. Our knowledge of Lorraine's relationship to PB is fragmentary; I did know her in her later years, as she took up residence in a nearby town before entering eldercare. She remained close to Ella May Damiani, Anthony's wife, throughout their lives, and also had a deep bond with Gayatri Devi, a teacher of the Ramakrishna order. Lorraine was ever eager to help PB, and he acquiesced to her pleas from time to time, with mixed results. She typed many of his dictated statements from discs sent to her, but she had the habit of adding a comma or other punctuation whenever PB paused in his dictation-which was frequently! The result was a manuscript literally peppered with commas, and semicolons after practically every word. This problematic behavior has been rectified in the relevant Word documents, but not in the originals. She wanted to imitate PB in every possible way, even to the point of imitating his handwriting-something which we have largely addressed and resolved in the relevant Word documents, but which could be misleading for someone only reading the pdfs. Lorraine appears to have been of some independent means, spending most of her life around one ashram or another, including the Ramakrishna Mission in Cohasset, Massachusetts. She visited PB from time to time in their later years, and they seemed to have an amicable relationship for the most part.
The Massons are quite another matter. The two brothers, Jacques and Bernard were both devotees of PB, and the former would sometimes host PB in his home. Both men were married, and Jacques at least had a son Jeffrey, who wrote a tell all book about PB titled My Father's Guru. This book should be taken with a large grain of salt, as Jeffery was a teenager when he last encountered PB, and he has made a profession out of muckraking. A rebuttal of much of Masson Jr.'s book can be found in our archive. What we know regarding the senior Massons is that they came to mix hedonism with their spirituality to the extent that Jacques and his wife had several lovers living with them in their home in South America in the 1950s and thereafter. Evidence of this lifestyle choice can be found in their correspondence with both PB and Evangeline Glass.
PB dropped his association with them when they opted for this path (while not a prude, PB did not see any form of sensual dissipation as spiritually worthwhile). They, in turn, felt that he had betrayed them with his unfounded warnings about a nuclear war. Prior to their falling-out PB stayed with them, as evidenced by his use of their letterheads for scrap paper!
PB AND WORLD WAR THREE
Throughout his life PB was actively interested in current events. When I knew him, he read the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, several Swiss and French papers on a weekly basis. He even kept up with the local "Pennysaver" publications of events in whatever town he was living in. He was particularly concerned with conflict and peace-hardly unusual for a European survivor of two wars!
As regards that, we have found his own notes about his experiences in WWI and WWII. In the first case he enlisted in the Tank Corps and was about to head off to France when his commanding officer noticed he was writing something to himself in shorthand and promptly reassigned him to the Signal Corps. So far as we know PB never saw action at the front in WWI but served Great Britain for the duration. By the time WWII rolled around PB was stuck in India-all transportation having been commandeered for the troops-and this time was drafted at the ripe age of 42. His friend and sponsor, the Maharajah of Mysore threw a lavish going-away party for PB on eve of his induction, and the General in charge of drafting Brits living in India was in attendance. When he learned that PB was to be sent to the front (Burma), he rescinded the induction on the spot, noting that Britain needed his vision more than his service as a soldier.
Sometime after that, perhaps in the late 1950s PB became obsessed with the probability of nuclear war (in February, 1942, as reported by Jacques Masson, PB predicted a war in twenty years). PB had some vision regarding a coming conflagration, and for a few years it influenced his behavior dramatically. He tried to get all his family (including his ex-wife and her husband) to move to New Zealand or Bolivia, which he believed would survive a nuclear winter. The Massons and a few others went so far as to either move to South America for a while, or to set up fallout shelters in their homes. Then somewhere in the early 1960s, after the Bay of Pigs (April 1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (February, 1962), PB acknowledged that his preoccupation was just that, and withdrew from pushing people towards relocation. Even so, as late as 1977 he still believed that it was a possibility, that the tensions between the U.S. and Russia would eventually come to violence-not that we've had any such indications lately!
Conclusion
By now you are probably sated with PB information and slightly bewildered by our organizational choices. We can only say that as you actually read the material, this interwoven and truly vast history of a single individual's spiritual journey will begin to show its organic order to you. It does have an order, and it does have distinct elements-but like any organism, these elements are not absolutely separate from one another.
We could have archived simply PB's writings on the Ideas and have done-but that would not be honest. PB's philosophy was a philosophy of life, of travel, of people, of adventure and exploration. While it became more restrained in his later years, when most of us knew him-he was as comfortable bivouacking in a tent in the Sahara or in the Himalayas, so long as he had his pen, paper, and a proper cup of tea!
We who created this archive hold PB in high regard as an example of modern spiritual wisdom; while it is not necessary to do so-and he himself insisted upon being critiqued by both common sense and reason-it is something worth keeping in mind. All the paper in the world cannot truly communicate the life-force of any human being, but it is at least one starting point.
==Timothy Smith, 11/1/2018==
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
This project could not have been done-something often said as a formula, but in this case an absolute reality-without the help of Evangeline (Brunton) Glass and her daughter Melody Talcott. These amazing women sought us out and opened their homes, hearts and resources to us. After very careful discussions they decided to donate many thousands of pages of Evangeline's notes and correspondence with PB to this archive. They also spent many weeks with us explaining their material, items from our own files and identifying many individuals which we otherwise had no hope of recognizing. We thank you both for all your gifts to this effort.
We also owe thanks to the community of Wisdom's Goldenrod; the Damiani family (particularly Louis Damiani who gave us permission to incorporate the Readers' Letters into the collection); and to the "Ohio Group" of PB students, several of whom are on the PBPF board-and of course the aforementioned PBPF board itself, under the leadership of Cleta Rudoph. I want to especially thank Jeff Cox, who arranged for phenomenal financial support from a friend. This contribution alone has paid the lion's share of our staff wages for the past five years!
As to that staff, it began with David Shumway who patiently scanned 80% of the material day after day for several years. He was succeeded by a team of employees led by Lydia Dempsey: her organization abilities and skilled team management created order out of chaos and kept morale up whenever we encountered serious obstacles (which was frequent). Many individuals worked briefly for PBPF or volunteered for it-the full list is available at Paulbrunton.org. However, our final team really brought this project home. They are: Jessica Elkins & Emily Rothenbucher (the Letter Ladies), Hannah Sumner & Zoe Anderson (the Photo team), and Joshua Orkin (who teamed up with Lydia to deal with the Biographical material). Neither PBPF nor PB's students-and critics-would have anything to study but his long-published books were it not for these dedicated, competent and amazing individuals.
In the end, I want to thank PB himself; this project has provided a focus for my life, it has brought philosophy out of the books and into action, and it has ever been guided by PB's own example of humor, wisdom, adventure and inquiry.
About myself: I began studying philosophy at a very early age, having read Plato before entering high school. I met Anthony Damiani at age 17 when I entered Cornell and promptly started studying with him. By my senior year I had redirected my studies to Neo-Platonism, Hinduism, and Astrology, which latter became my profession these past 50 years. I first met PB in 1974 as one of many students of Anthony Damiani invited to spend a week or two in his company and giving some small assistance. In 1980 my first wife, Devon Cottrell and I spent 7 months as PB’s secretaries, and continued in that capacity even after our return to Ithaca. At the time of his death, PB left instructions that Paul Cash and I were to manage his posthumous writings. We became founding members of the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation to that end, and published selections of his unpublished works over the next decade. At that point Paul redirected his energies towards publishing more current authors, while always remaining supportive of my continued work with PB’s material. As time passed, computers got cheaper and PBPF got richer, allowing it (and me) to undertake the archive we are now donating to Cornell. I consider myself a lifetime student of PB, but as I told him in 1980, I am equally a student of the writings of Plotinus, Adi-Shankara and the Buddha. It has been and remains my honor to be involved with this project, and I hope I have a been a good steward.
