' A Lover of Wisdom '...

People sometimes ask me to what religion I belong or to what school of yoga I adhere.

If I answer them, which is not often, I tell them: "To none and to all!"

If such a paradox annoys them, I try to soften their wrath by adding that I am a student of philosophy.

During my journeys to the heavenly realm of infinite eternal and absolute existence, I did not once discover any labels marked Christian, Hindu, Catholic, Protestant, Zen, Shin, Platonist, Hegelian, and so on, any more than I discovered labels marked Englishman, American, or Hottentot.

All such ascriptions would contradict the very nature of the ascriptionless existence.

All sectarian differences are merely intellectual ones.

They have no place in that level which is deeper than intellectual function.

They divide men into hostile groups only because they are pseudo-spiritual.

He who has tasted of the pure Spirit's own freedom will be unwilling to submit himself to the restrictions of cult and creed.

Therefore I could not conscientiously affix a label to my own outlook or to the teaching about this existence which I have embraced.

In my secret heart I separate myself from nobody, just as this teaching itself excludes no other in its perfect comprehension.

Because I had to call it by some name as soon as I began to write about it, I called it philosophy because this is too wide and too general a name to become the property of any single sect.

In doing so I merely returned to its ancient and noble meaning among the Greeks who, in the Eleusinian Mysteries, designated the spiritual truth learnt at initiation into them as "philosophy" and the initiate himself as "philosopher" or lover of wisdom.



— Notebooks Category 20: What Is Philosophy? > Chapter 1:
Toward Defining Philosophy > # 18 Paul Brunton