Paul Brunton

Paul Brunton, born Hyman Raphael Hurst in London in 1898 and dying in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1981, was a British philosopher, journalist and traveler who helped introduce Neo-Hindu spiritualism to Western readers and, above all, the figure of Ramana Maharshi. His thought belongs to the esoteric currents of early twentieth-century Western culture, although he preferred to set his doctrine apart from the subjective idealism of the European tradition.

The son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, he worked as a bookseller and journalist and was a partner in an occult bookshop in Bloomsbury. In 1930 he travelled to India and in 1931 visited Ramana Maharshi's ashram. His book A Search in Secret India, published in 1934 under the name Paul Brunton, became a bestseller and was translated into more than twenty languages.

His doctrine, which he called Mentalism or Oriental Mentalism, holds that ultimate reality is mental in nature and that the true self, the Overself, can be reached through meditation and inner inquiry. He set it out in The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga and The Wisdom of the Overself. By the 1950s he had largely stopped publishing books and devoted himself to essays and notes, which appeared posthumously in sixteen volumes. His influence persists in spiritualist circles and through the archive that preserves his legacy.