Hushed by Beauty: A Neoplatonic Practice to Restore Ourselves to Soul

Michael Wakoff

Plotinus faced the same problem we face today: how can we restore to soul the value and worth
we should accord it, given its divine origin? For example, most of Ennead 5.1 is concerned with
demonstrating the “high birth” of the soul and the nature of the divine principles immanent in it.
At the end of the tractate, he asks, “Why don’t we consciously grasp these divine realities since
they exist also in ourselves?” To remedy this lack of awareness, he advises us to “turn our power
of apprehension inwards and make it attend to what is there.” He compares it to listening intently
for a desired voice, ignoring all other sounds, so one will catch it when it comes: “We must let
perceptible sounds go [as far as possible] and keep the soul’s apprehension pure and ready to
hear the voices from on high” (5.1.12).
In this passage, Plotinus has provided us with an important clue as to how we might
restore ourselves to soul: we should interiorize our attention. By letting attention rest within, we
can cultivate a vital awareness of the soul’s presence and its filiation with the divine.
There is a second clue to be found in what Plotinus says about the power of beauty to
stimulate longing for the divine. It’s clear that he was sensitive to the beauty of this world and
was moved by it. Speaking in the metaphor of a Platonic dualism, the aesthetic beauty of this
world stirred him because of its continuity and connection with beauty’s source in the heavenly
nature within himself: “For how could there be a musician who sees the melody in the
intelligible world and will not be stirred when he hears the melody in sensible sounds?”
(2.9.16.39–41). Further, “Will anyone be so sluggish in mind and so immovable that, when he
sees all the beauties in the world of sense . . . he will not thereupon think, seized with reverence,
‘What wonders, and from what source?’ If he did not, he would neither have understood this
world here nor seen that higher world” (2.9.16.49–56, my emphasis).
How can we recover this Plotinian sensibility about beauty? Is there a way to cultivate
these moments of remembrance so that we too will be seized with reverence? Yes, by following
these two clues, we will arrive at the rudiments of a technique that will restore ourselves to soul.
However, this technique is only hinted at in Plotinus’s writings. To find a more fully
articulated practice that makes use of these two elements, I turn to the work of the twentieth-
century mystic philosopher Paul Brunton. After saying a bit about who he was, I will discuss a
general technique to interiorize attention in response to the presence of beauty that Brunton
describes in his book The Quest of the Overself.1 Next, I will discuss a particular application of
this technique, a meditation on the sun at dawn or sunset, which he presents in a later work.
Practicing these techniques will enable those of us who find Neoplatonism so intellectually
satisfying to nourish our heart and move toward an authentic and vital realization of the soul’s
presence.
Paul Brunton was a twentieth-century British author who first published books in the
1930s on his travels in India and Egypt in search of spiritual enlightenment. He is famous for
introducing the Indian guru Sri Ramana Maharshi to the West in his best seller A Search in
Secret India. Later in the 1940s, Brunton reconstructed the wisdom tradition that he found
scattered throughout Asia and presented it in a new form for Westerners in his two books The
Wisdom of the Overself and its companion volume The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga.
Although he stopped publishing books in the 1950s, he continued to write daily. At his death in
1981, he had amassed thousands of pages of material. Selections from his notebooks have
subsequently been published in sixteen volumes as The Notebooks of Paul Brunton.

The Spiritual Culture of Finer Feelings

Who has not been hushed into silence by the tranquillity of the sun setting over the glittering
expanse of a mountain lake? Who has not felt something heartrendingly delicate about the
poignant sonorities in a late Beethoven string quartet? At these moments, when our feelings have
been charmed and our thoughts forgotten, we stand at the threshold of the way that leads deep
into our inner nature. However, it is essential that we first recognize the opportunity. If we savor
the feelings and nourish them with attention, they may deepen into a deep state of interiority,
maybe even a transcendent moment of clarity, a glimpse of heaven. Attention will reverse itself
almost without our effort. The gradient is already inward, and we need only not resist or allow
ourselves to be distracted.
The technique is to cultivate these finer feelings by honoring them with a relaxed yet
unwavering attention. The first thing we must do is notice these feelings when they start to arise:
As Brunton suggests, “One must set oneself to watch for and cultivate certain fragile moods of
the heart. Such moods come into most people’s lives at different times, often casually and
unexpected, but generally for the shortest of periods, and being uncultivated are thrust aside and
much of their value lost. These moods are most frequently evoked unconsciously through
aesthetic pleasures” (The Quest of the Overself, 123). Not realizing that these feelings could be
harbingers of the soul’s presence, we often hurry on to the next thing or continue with the
activity we were engaged in. Instead we should stop and tune in to the feeling, listening intently,
as Plotinus says, to the voices from on high. Brunton advises us that “whenever such a mood of
powerful charm, intense awe or utter peace is experienced it is necessary that one should keep all
one’s mind upon it and recognize it as an important messenger and listen to its message. . . .
Because such moods do not come to us labeled with the name of the country of their mystic
origin, we are apt to under-value their worth” (123).
The next point is that we need to cultivate a way of paying attention to these moods that
give them the space to develop without also inwardly commenting on or analyzing them. Those
who have practiced meditation on the breath, for example, are cultivating such a spacious
nonjudgmental awareness. Noticing the breath as it moves gently in and out without thinking
about it is like feeling a mood without thinking about it. In the Quest of the Overself, Brunton
also describes a breathing exercise, a gazing exercise, and a meditation on the heart, and
recommends that at the height of one’s aesthetic response to nature, art, or music, for example,
one should begin these practices and go through them briefly but consecutively. These practices
are designed to calm mental activity, concentrate attention, and then draw this focused attention
down and inward toward the heart. In some sense, this is what would happen naturally if we
weren’t conditioned to ignore or resist these delicate moods, and so these practices help deepen
and interiorize our aesthetic response to beauty by helping us surrender to the mood evoked.
In his notebooks, Brunton calls these unforgettable moments of uplift and clarity
“glimpses,” which he describes as a “a transitory state of mental enlightenment and emotional
exaltation.”2 Countering the view that such mystical experiences are unusual and only the few
are destined to experience them, he writes:

The glimpse in its most elementary form does not come only to specially gifted
persons. It belongs to the portrait of every human being as a natural and not a
mysterious part of his life-experience. It is simply a part of the feeling for Nature,
 to whose system he belongs, and for the Sun which is Nature's supreme
expression. The sun's glory, beauty, power, and benignity arouse reverence.
[Asian] faiths mostly recognized this and made prayers obligatory at dawn and
twilight. (Notebooks 4.44)3

Here we see that a meditation that makes use of our aesthetic and emotional responses to the
beauty of the sun, especially when it is at its most glorious, sunrise and sunset, would be an
application of this technique of consciously cultivating the feelings aroused by beauty. It is to
such a meditation that I now turn.

A Nondual Metaphysics

Brunton describes an exercise called “A Meditation on the Sun” in chapter 14 of The Wisdom of
the Overself, “The Yoga of the Discerning Mind.” Since this exercise is given near the end of the
book, it might be helpful to contextualize the chapter. One of the chief aims of the book is to
remove the obstacles to the reception of truth posed by a materialistic metaphysics by presenting
and arguing for the truth of an immaterialist nondualism that he calls “mentalism.”4 Mentalism
reverses the priority that would make separate bodily things the primary things and awareness of
them an effect. Mentalism boldly asserts the primacy of awareness as the source of all: the
source of things and our consciousness of them: the world is primarily the thought of formless
divine mind.
By the time we get to chapter 14, much ground has been covered: how the world appears
at periodic intervals as a vast thought out of the apparent nothingness of an all-embracing mind
that he calls “World-Mind” and is transformed into perception by the workings of individual
minds; the true immortality of the deathless soul, called “the Overself”; Mind-in-itself as the
ultimate reality and hidden unity that embraces everything. (Note the parallels here to the three
principles of Plotinus: Soul, Intellect, and the One.) Chapter 14 then presents seven meditation
exercises that Brunton labels “ultra-mystic” because they go beyond mystical or yogic methods
of transcending thought by incorporating the use of an understanding of mentalism and the
creative power of thought. The meditation on the sun is the first of these.
A Meditation on the Sun

The sun meditation is both a preparatory exercise and one that the most advanced practitioner
may still engage in. Brunton says that the reason it is so valuable for beginners is that it purifies
them of their self-centered attitude by making them vividly feel their connection to the cosmos,
of which they are just a part, and to its source. Also, by invoking and worshipping the “supreme
power which has manifested as this universe,” they invite a descent of grace that can remove
obstacles, inner and outer, to living in harmony with the universe.
There are two times at which the meditation can be practiced, dawn and sunset; more
precisely, “in the morning between the time when the starlight begins to wane until the sun has
just risen, and in the evening between the time when the sunlight begins to wane and the stars
have just appeared.”5 These two periods are considered especially auspicious times to practice
meditation because there is a pregnant pause then in nature’s activity, similar to the pause that
occurs between the inhalation and exhalation of the breath and vice versa. Yoga manuals suggest
that this pause in the motion of the breath offers an opportunity for insight into reality because
the mind becomes still as the breath stops. Similarly, the pause or “neutral point” in nature’s
activity at dawn and sunset offers an opportunity to harmonize with nature and enter its inner
silence.
Imagine that you have risen early while the stars still shine brightly. The birds have not
yet begun their serenade to the sun. You sit facing east in the darkness and settle body and
breath, gazing at the eastern sky. It’s hard to tell when it begins, the first glow of light on the
horizon. The foreground remains shadowed, but the sky is brightening. Since your mind is still,
the dawning seems to be taking place within; the light seems to radiate from your heart, and so
too, the joy of well-being that is inseparable from it. Now the clouds are becoming tinged with
pink, and the birds are raising their choral song of joy. Despite this outward activity, within you
feel a deep stillness, a sense of gathering power mingled with utter calm. It seems to reach its
utmost intensity just before that first point of light suddenly darts forth as the sun rises above the
horizon. That light raying forth, is it from without or within? Your heart and the sun seem
inexplicably united. Love thus kindled, inseparable from the light, shines upon all, bringing
blessing, joy, and peace. Imagining all blessed by light seems as natural as sunlight setting the
landscape aglow, transfiguring it into incandescence.
 I hope this gives you a feeling for what might happen when doing the exercise. Now I’ll
discuss the instructions Brunton provides in a more step by step fashion.
One begins by sitting in an unobserved place, facing the sun, “with legs uncrossed and
slightly apart and hands unfolded and resting on the thighs” (230). This posture (unlike a cross-
legged posture that is recommended for willed concentration exercises) is adopted because it
enables one to be receptive and passive to the mystical energy of the Sun behind the sun, the soul
of the universe.
The meditation has three stages. In the first, you “fix [your] gaze upon the rising or
setting sun or the colored sky” (230). Here you let the beauty and tranquility of the scene work
its magic on your feelings, uplifting them, as the light passing through the eyes heals and restores
your body. As you savor the exquisite, shifting colorings in the sky, the dawning light, or the
deepening shadows, something resonates deep within. You should surrender to that.
In the second stage, you try to feel and participate in the growing stillness by letting your
personal thoughts subside. This inner silence allows you to commune with, and receive the inner
light from, the Sun behind the sun, the mystical Light of the World-Mind.
In the third stage, you expand with the “outspreading or waning light till [you embrace]
the entire planet” (231). Visualize or imagine that you are formless consciousness and strive to
“identify sympathetically with the life of all beings, whether plant, animal, or human. [You]
should make the conception as alive as possible by permeating it with faith and conviction, and
by holding the sense of countless creatures existing everywhere” (231).6 Brunton notes that the
imagination, the creative power that has bound us to the belief that we are nothing more than
body, is here being used to free us from that belief. The truth is that we are one with the cosmos
in being part of it, and we are one with life in an even more intimate sense, in that life cannot
really be divided into separate, isolated units.7
The goal of this stage is reached when you feel in complete rapport with the universal
being and you are no longer aware of the physical scene at all. Attention has been wholly
interiorized. This sense of rapport is often felt as an all-embracing love at the heart of the
cosmos, as it is also at your own heart. Brunton notes that this feeling of love might arise within
ten to twenty minutes if you are a moderately experienced meditator. Once this loving response
is felt, you should begin to share it compassionately and unselfishly with others. Again, you use
the creative imagination to see others “suffused with its warm light and sublime peace” (231).
Given the unity of all life, and given the deep Mind that is the ground of all existence, such
imagination has creative power. Especially when vivified by the real power of the World-Mind
shining in you as the immortal Overself, imagining others graced with light and peace might
have real efficacy. You should first direct your love to those close to you and any individuals you
would like to help, then to humanity in general, which really is “one great family,” and finally to
individuals who are hostile to you, for by exposing your faults, they are your teachers (231).
If you wish, Brunton suggests that you can end the exercise with a personal prayer, using
dawn to ask for “strength, light, truth, understanding, inspiration, and material help, whilst the
eventide exercise is used to ask for peace, calm, freedom, unselfishness and opportunity to
render service” (231–32).
Thus, meditation on the sun combines aesthetic perception, reverential feeling, mystic
stillness, creative imagination, and metaphysical understanding to enable us to realize and
experience our intimate connection with the source of all Life, the Sun behind the sun, the
cosmic soul. In doing so, we are following Plotinus’s advice to “turn our power of apprehension
inward and make it attend to what is there.” Hushed into silence by the beauty of nature at one of
her most glorious junctures, dawn and sunset, we may restore ourselves to soul.

Conclusion

By cultivating intimate experiences of ourselves as immaterial soul, we allow the reality of its
wondrous power to transform our lives. When our actions are inspired by this deeper source, we
can become, as Brunton writes, “an unhindered channel for a power light and being superior to
[our] own.”8 Doing so has consequences not just for ourselves, for in restoring ourselves to soul,
we take the first essential step toward restoring soul to our culture. This is the key to solving all
our other problems. Writing in 1943, in the midst of the horrors of World War Two, Brunton
stresses how fateful are our intentions:

If we can quickly produce a sufficient minority of men and women who will
dedicate their inner life to one of the three stages of the quest of the Overself for
the sake of the common welfare not less than their own,…[mankind’s] safe
passage into a brighter new age will be assured. Every [person] who makes a
 deep irrevocable choice whether he will live only for selfish and sensual aims or
whether he will live for altruistic and purer ones is affecting not only his [or her]
own fate but also the immediate destiny of our civilization.9

We who wish to see the notion of soul restored to philosophy and our culture must take the
decisive step of dedicating ourselves to becoming fit receptacles for its presence. The ancient
practice of turning toward the sun is at once an enactment of such dedication and a practical
expression of it.10

1
Paul Brunton, The Quest of the Overself (London: Rider, 1970).
2
Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Vol. 14, Inspiration and the Overself (Burdett, N.Y.: Larson
Publication), 4.1. The Notebooks are available online at the website for The Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation,
http://paulbrunton.org/notebooks/.
3
Of course, it wasn’t just Asian faiths that made prayers obligatory at dawn and twilight. For example, in Plato’s
Laws, the Athenian Stranger cites the prostrations and invocations that are made by Hellenes and barbarians at the
rising and setting of the sun and moon as part of his evidence of the near universal belief in the existence of the
gods. See my “Contemplation of the Sun: A Plotinian Spiritual Exercise?” (paper presented at the International
Society for Neoplatonic Studies, Cardiff, June 2013) for an argument that Plotinus and his circle practiced such a
meditation.
4
If I had more time, I would discuss how mentalism synthesizes and reconceives the South Indian teachings about
Brahman, Atman, and Maya, and Buddhist teachings about emptiness, dependent origination, karma, and buddha
nature. Although it doesn’t aim to incorporate Neoplatonic teachings, I think the parallels with the Plotinian insight
that all levels of reality are contemplation and the result of contemplation are there as well.
5
Paul Brunton, The Wisdom of the Overself (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970), 230.
6
Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 5.1.2, where Plotinus explains how to creatively imagine that Soul, the source of all life,
embraces the entire cosmos and enlivens all living creatures, as the sun illuminates a dark cloud and gives it a
golden color.
7
In an alternative version of the exercise published in the Notebooks, he explains that at this stage you should
“picture a great globe growing larger and larger within [yourself] as a formless consciousness mentally dissociated
from the physical body, until it assumes GIGANTIC SIZE.” You hold the sense of countless creatures existing
everywhere and then reverse the process, picturing the globe getting smaller and smaller until it encloses your own
body alone. Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, Vol. 3, Part 2: Relax and Retreat, 7.18.
8
Brunton, The Wisdom of the Overself, 123.
9
Ibid., 167.
10
I would like to thank audiences at the Prometheus Trust conference “Philosophy: Restoring the Soul,”
Warminster, UK, June 2013; and Wisdom’s Goldenrod Center for Philosophic Studies, Hector, N.Y., for helpful
discussion of earlier versions of this essay. I would also like to thank the Paul Brunton Philosophic Foundation for
funding my travel to the Prometheus Trust Conference.