_______________________________________________________________________________ | File Name : BRUNTON1.ASC | Online Date : 09/14/94 | | Contributed by : Jerry Decker | Dir Category : BIOLOGY | | From : KeelyNet BBS | DataLine : (214) 324-3501 | | KeelyNet * PO BOX 870716 * Mesquite, Texas * USA * 75187 | | A FREE Alternative Sciences BBS sponsored by Vanguard Sciences | |-----------------------------------------------------------------------------| 147/162 05 Sep 89 18:00:56 From: Mike Carrillo To: Everyone Subj: The Intellect Attr: ------------------------------------------------ The following are a few thoughts on the intellect taken from The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume 1... -------------------------------------------------------------------- Most of us move from one standpoint to another, whether it be a lower or a higher one, because our feelings have moved there. The intellect merely records and justifies such a movement and does not originate it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Intellect, reason, and intelligence are not convertible terms in this teaching. The first is the lowest faculty of the trio, the third is the highest, the second is the medial one. Intellect is logical thinking based on a partial and prejudiced collection of facts. Reason is logical thinking based on all available and impartially collected facts. Intelligence is the fruit of a union between reason and intuition. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Logic is always beset by the serious charge that its so-called truths are fallacious ones. For instance, it insists on the law of contradiction, the law which says that a statement of facts cannot be true and false at the same time. But the careful study of illusions produces conclusions which falsify this law. We do not mean by this criticism to declare logic to be useless. We mean only what we have elsewhere written, that it is a good servant but a bad master. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Right thinking is not only an intellectual quality; it is almost a moral virtue. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Shallow thought, superficial reasoning, is the means to bondage, but hard thinking, deep reasoning, is the means to freedom. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Reasoned thinking may contribute in two ways to the service of mystical intuition and mystical experience. First and commonest is a negative way. It can provide safeguards and checks against their errors, exaggerations, vageries, and extravagancies. Second and rarest is a positive and creative way. It can lead the aspirant to its highest pitch of abstract working and then invite its own displacement by a higher power. --------------------------------------------------------------------- It is fallacious to believe that clear and precise intellectual expression is inimical to, and hence unable to accompany, inspired and flashing mystical experience. It is true that many mystics have been intellectually hindered and limited and that this simplicity made their ascent easier. But it is not true that such a one-sided development will be the end of man's story. It is the whole of life which has to be experienced, and which the universal laws force everyone to experience in the end. The growth of intelligence -- of which intellect is a limited but necessary part -- can only be put aside or avoided for a time, not for all time. --------------------------------------------------------------------- We do not overcome our doubts by supressing them, we do not meet our misgivings by denying them, and we do not refute falsehood by shirking questions which happen to be inconvenient. --------------------------------------------------------------------- When intelligence is applied so thoroughly as to yield a whole view and not merely a partial view of existence, when it is applied so persistently as to yield a steady insight into things rather than a sporadic one, when it is applied so detachedly as to be without regard to personal preconceptions, and when it is applied so calmly that feelings and passions cannot alter its direction, then and only then does a man become truly reasonable and capable of intellectually ascertaining truth. --------------------------------------------------------------------- PEACE/Mike --- * Origin: WeirdBase * St. Louis, MO * 1-314-741-2231 * (Opus 1:100/523) SEEN-BY: 101/192 102/862 104/422 109/114 128/50 301/9 304/1 3 SEEN-BY: 308/60 343/22 30163/150 148/162 05 Sep 89 18:32:22 From: Mike Carrillo To: Everyone Subj: The Intellect II Attr: ------------------------------------------------ The following are a few thoughts taken from The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Volume 1... --------------------------------------------------------------------- Intellect can perceive what belongs to reality, not reality itself. The metaphysician deludes himself into thinking that he has seen the world in all its varied aspects, but what he has really seen is the world in all its intellectual aspects only. Moreover when he thinkings that he has put together the results of one science with another, uniting them all into a harmonious whole, he omits to reckon that such are the limitation of human capacity and scientific knowledge, that no man could ever combine all the multitudinous results. He could never acquire an intimate knowledge of them during a single lifetime. Therefore he could never develop a complete philosophy of the universe as a whole. The intellect fulfils itself practically when it discovers that each idea it produces is incomplete and imperfect and therefore passes on to replace it by a further one, but it fulfils itself metaphysically when it discovers that ever idea which it can possibly produce will always and necessarily be incomplete and imperfect. Now so far as they are almost entirely metaphysical works, these two volumes have no option but to make their appeal chiefly to reason alone. And expounding the special and unique system called the metaphysics of truth as they do, they have to start where possible from verifiable facts rather than mere speculations. But whatever other importance they ascribe to reasoning as an instrument of truth-attainment applies only to the particular stage for which it is prescribed, which is the stage of metaphysical discipline and certainly not beyond it. Although the status bestowed on reason in every metaphysical system beginning with science must necessarily be a primary one, its status within the larger framework of the integral hidden teaching can only be a secondary one. This teaching possesses a larger view and does not end with science or limit itself to the rational standpoint alone. How can it do so when metaphysics is merely its intermediate phase? We must rightly honour reason to its fullest extent, but we need not therefore accept the unreasonable doctrine that the limits of reason constitutes the limits of truth. Our senses can perceive only what they have been formed to perceive. Our reason similarly cannot grasp what it was never formed to grasp. Within their legitimate spheres of operation, the deliverances of both sense and reason should be acceptable to us, but outside those spheres we must seek for something that transcends both. But the basic cause why reason is insufficient exists in the fact that intellect -- the instrument with which it works -- is itself insufficient. Reason is the right arrangement of thinking. Each thought thus arranged depends for its existence on another thought and is unable to exist without such a relation, that is, it suffers from relativity. Hence a thought cannot be considered as an ultimate in itself and therefore reason cannot know the absolute. The intellect can take the forms of existence apart bit by bit and tell us what they consist of. But such surgical dissection cannot tell us what existence itself is. This is something which must be experienced, not merely thought. It can explain what has entered into the composition of a painting but, as may be realized if we reflect a little, it cannot explain why we feel the charm of the painting. The analytic intellect describes reality sufficiently to give some satisfaction to our emotions of our intelligence, but it does not touch this bafflinf elusive reality at all. What it has dissected is not the living throbbing body but the cold dead image of it. --- * Origin: WeirdBase * St. Louis, MO * 1-314-741-2231 * (Opus 1:100/523) SEEN-BY: 101/192 102/862 104/422 109/114 128/50 301/9 304/1 3 SEEN-BY: 308/60 343/22 30163/150 149/162 05 Sep 89 18:51:44 From: Mike Carrillo To: Everyone Subj: The Intellect III Attr: ------------------------------------------------ When reason tells us that God is, it does not actually know God. The antennae of intellectual research cannot penetrate into the Overself because thinking can only establish relations between ideas and thus must forever remain int he realms of dualities, finitudes, and individualities. It canot grasp the whole but only parts. Therefore reason which depends on thinking is incompetent to comprehend the mysterious Overself. Realization is to be experienced and felt; thought can only indicate what it is likely to be and what it is not likely to be. Hence Al Ghazzali, the Sufi, has said: "To define drunkenness, to know that it is caused by vapours that rise from the stomach and cloud the seat of intelligence, is a different thing from being drunk. So I found ultimate knowledge consists in experiences rather than definitions." The fact that metaphysics tries to exlain all existence in intellectual terms along tries to force human nature into conceptual molds, causes it to suppress or distort the non-intellectual elements in both. The consequence it that metaphysics along cannot achieve an adequate understanding. If it insists upon exhalting it own results, then it achieves misunderstanding. ... There is more, but I'm out of time and I'm sure many of you are getting bored, so I'll end this post on The Intellect... Peace/Mike --- * Origin: WeirdBase * St. Louis, MO * 1-314-741-2231 * (Opus 1:100/523) SEEN-BY: 101/192 102/862 104/422 109/114 128/50 301/9 304/1 3 SEEN-BY: 308/60 343/22 30163/150 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------