Daily Inspiration Quote by Paul Brunton

Brunton’s line lands like a scalpel: worry isn’t framed as a reasonable response to uncertainty, but as a failure of perception. Calling it “spiritual short sight” reframes anxiety from a personality trait into a cramped field of vision. Short-sightedness doesn’t mean you’re stupid; it means you’re stuck reading life inches from your face, mistaking the immediate for the whole. The insult is quiet but decisive: worry is not depth, not vigilance, not care. It’s a kind of metaphysical myopia.

The pairing of “spiritual” with an almost medical metaphor is doing strategic work. Brunton wrote in a period when Western audiences were newly hungry for Eastern-influenced mysticism, self-mastery, and inner technique. He’s offering a diagnosis that sounds modern (psychological, clinical) while keeping the cure firmly in the realm of inner orientation rather than external control. The subtext: the world will remain unstable; the only dependable lever is the mind’s relationship to meaning.

Then he tightens the screw with “intelligent faith.” He refuses both easy exits: no naive optimism, no anti-rational piety. “Intelligent” signals discrimination, practice, an earned steadiness; “faith” signals surrender, trust, a willingness to live without total proof. The intent is to rehabilitate faith for skeptical moderns by branding it as a disciplined cognition rather than a blind leap.

There’s also a subtle moral pressure here. If worry is shortsightedness, it’s correctable. Anxiety becomes not just pain to endure, but a posture to outgrow. Brunton isn’t comforting you; he’s recruiting you into a philosophy of expanded attention.