Dr. Paul Brunton

  Dr. Paul Brunton researched spiritual techniques and programs for five decades. He took careful notes of his observations. Here is an exceptionally valuable chapter from one of his books. There is potential for growth in a group with genuine value; however, more people are harmed than helped largely because they lack the vital information you are about to receive. Spiritual groups are a fertile field for manipulators. With this information you can make the most of a good opportunity while maintaining safety from clever manipulators --which can be both students and instructors!

Dr. Brunton's most widely read work is probably: Quest of the Overself

   1. Should he join an organization, a community of students, or a group of seekers? Some are hindered by such a move, others feel they are helped; all in the end will have to come to themselves, will have to look inward rather than outward.

   2. The usefulness of organizations makes them a necessity. The appointment of men to administer those organizations is unavoidable.

   3. In the arrangements of human society, there is a necessary place for human institutions.

   4. In his earlier years, the seeker may try one kind of institution of a religious or mystical character and then move to a different one if it does not fulfil his expectations. In this way he may experiment with different creeds and different forms of practice. This may be useful so far as it exposes him to the influences which are needed to balance one another. But it may be bewildering if he overdoes it.

They have their limitations, and at a certain stage may prevent further advance. -- Dr. Brunton

   5. Most traditional forms, or the newer organizations which have some sort of spiritual teaching, are useful in the beginning to most people. But this is not to say that they're going to be useful always. They have their limitations, and at a certain stage may prevent further advance.

   6. But those who can stand alone are always smaller in number: most persons will frankly admit that they cannot, certainly most young and most old persons. This is the justification for the need of organizations, groups, churches, and priesthoods. They offer what seems fixed support in life, stable in doctrine, superior nobler holier and wiser than what the ordinary person finds in himself. This is why philosophy attracts the few, those who are, or who can be trained to become, strong enough to walk a lonely path.

   7. I have never forgotten the statement made to me somewhere in India by a young man who had recently joined the Society of Friends and had been sent out to what was then a famine-stricken tropic country on a Quaker relief project. "Why, when you admit to all these queries and doubts, and feel you are searching, do you then make yourself a member of a sect, admittedly one of the noblest and finest of all, but still a sect, with all the limitations which go with it?" I had asked him. He thought for a while and then broke the long silence to reply: "I quite understand and admit what you say about sectarian limitations. But I feel my youth and inexperience and weakness. At my age there is need for some kind of support from outside, some group to give me not merely fellowship but also a feeling of solidity and stability, something to lean upon, in short." What he said taught me a lesson and made me understand sympathetically that the love of independence to ensure a free search, and the desire for self-reliance do not belong to everybody, and that others, certainly most people, have other needs, prefer other ways, for which there is also room in human life.

   8. Despite these criticisms, however, he sees also how organizational life was helpful to his early efforts and guided his early steps. He knows that there is a place for it, but he also knows that that place is a preliminary one. If the final work of a seeker is to be done for and upon himself, that does not displace the necessity of an institution in assisting him to do the preparatory work. Therefore, even the advanced mystic, who has no need of its services, cannot in principle be hostile to an institution. He readily admits its necessity and denies only its all-sufficiency.

   9. These groups led by a guru may be quite useful to a beginner who is stumbling in the dark. But to join one without knowing the limitations and dangers would be foolish.

   10. Membership in a group, be it a vastly spread religion or a small minor sect, gives each member a feeling of correctness in their joint beliefs; each supports the others. But this may begin to weaken when some drastic and unexpected event may prove hard to bear.

   11. The strength of such a group must lie in its quality and not in its numbers. It must be the result not of propaganda activities but of the spontaneous association of like-thinking people.

   12. It is true that there are many eccentrics among these believers but there are also many serious sensible and well-behaved people among them.

   13. Religious followers begin to organize themselves either quite spontaneously when unled, or quite obediently when a leader appears, for several good understandable reasons. The coming together in a compact group affords some protection, offers them a mode of expression and the teaching a mode of preservation.

   14. There is nothing wrong with the group idea if its members meet for fellowship.

   15. If he joins a monastic order he will usually have to take a vow to practise certain restraints and renunciations. To a lesser degree this also occurs with joining certain groups and circles in the world outside such orders. The value of the vow is that it sets up a standard to be followed, a course to be travelled, and a goal to be reached. He may fall from the standard, deviate from the course, and fail to approach the goal, but their existence may help him come closer to the object of the vow than he might otherwise have come. On the other hand, the layman who is not interested in vows but simply resolves to improve himself lacks their stimulus. There is nothing but the inner force of his own ideal to keep him from abandoning the self-imposed rigours of his discipline. He depends on the power which he will have to summon up from somewhere within himself. The weakness of binding himself to the new regime which he himself has imposed is that it can easily be shirked at any time, that if he yields to the inclination to do so, the restraints upon it will be weaker and fewer.

   16. Whatever church, organization, or cult to which he commits himself, he should always make for himself at least the reservation that he should retain the freedom to leave and go elsewhere or to cease seeking among outer organizations and to search within.

   17. But there is a place and a need for the cohesion of a group, for the sustained teamwork of an organization, and for the discipline imposed on individuals by a church.

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