Associations
In the 1940s and 1950s, Brunton lived with American author and former psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, the son of a Jewish American friend of Brunton, as Masson's parents were among a handful of Brunton's close disciples. Masson published a memoir of his childhood under the title My Father's Guru. Initially influenced by Brunton, Masson gradually became disillusioned with him. According to Masson, Brunton singled him out as a potential heir to his spiritual kingdom. In 1956, Brunton decided that a third world war was imminent and the Massons moved to Montevideo, since this location was considered safe. From Uruguay, Masson went at Brunton's bidding to study Sanskrit at Harvard. Brunton himself did not move to South America, instead spending some time living in New Zealand. Masson subsequently became proficient at Sanskrit, and stated that Brunton did not have the facility with the language that he claimed.
Read more about this topic: Paul Brunton
Famous quotes containing the word associations:
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Writing prejudicial, off-putting reviews is a precise exercise in applied black magic. The reviewer can draw free- floating disagreeable associations to a book by implying that the book is completely unimportant without saying exactly why, and carefully avoiding any clear images that could capture the reader’s full attention.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self- Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)