The Wisdom of the Overself by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton [Brunton, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
Published: 2018-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

1 The school of analytical psychology founded by the late Dr. Carl Gustav Jung must be exempted from these criticisms. It was learnt with pleasure during talks at Zurich with this gifted man that he disowned the materialistic views of his master Freud and that he had arrived at a view of man which took proper account of the mystical side.

CHAPTER X

THE WAR AND THE WORLD

The chequered surface of history is largely a tale of tears and chance but its depths are a revelation of evolutionary unfoldment working alongside of karmic readjustment. There is a just logic in the sequence of historic events but it reveals itself only if we examine them by the light of the doctrine of karma. We must recognize that there is a common national karma from which neither prince nor pauper is exempt. It is not outside the business of metaphysics to trace the historic workings of karma through the complicated web of world events from present causes to future effects and from visible consequences to invisible origins; to understand and reveal the general direction in which society and its systems are consciously or unconsciously moving at any particular period and to judge whether this trend should be resisted or assisted, retarded or accelerated. It is thus that philosophy—of which metaphysics is but a part—can prove its usefulness as being not only an enlightening explanation of life but also a practical way of life. The need of a metaphysical understanding of social existence is not felt by most persons and even despised by many persons. Yet they possess one all the same. Only because it has not been deliberately sought for and thought out, it has not come to a sun-clear consciousness of itself. And because of its unconscious character it is primitive, crude, imperfect, unbalanced and faulty. It is a comfortless but uncontradictory fact that the consequences of an erroneous and materialistic world-conception reposing on shaky metaphysical foundations which have been faulty to a degree, are to be witnessed everywhere in the hideous havoc and personal disasters it has brought upon our own epoch, in the wide-spread sorrows and unparalleled sufferings through which humanity is slowly beginning to learn how deceptive was its belief that it either understood or controlled life. We have witnessed this self-deception in its most arrogant and exaggerated form in the case of Hitler himself.

Hitler however has been only a monstrous symbol of the extreme growth of the materialistic tendencies of our time. His downfall must become a signal that materialism has exhausted its most useful potentialities. His affront to human dignity has brought the world to its most terrible predicament, but the severe crisis and supreme sufferings to which it has led are themselves signs of the disruptive forces which have arisen of their own accord within materialism and which will destroy much of it as they mature. Through Hitler’s instrumentality the worst of the latent evil in mankind’s character has been brought like scum to the surface, only the better to be recognized for the hideous thing that it is and largely removed.

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