Who is Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson knows and says it, there is no death. It cannot be said too often. There is no death. The Son of God is free. You are free. You cannot die, no matter what you think or believe. Death does not work. That is freedom in God.

That does not mean that he did not struggle with the death of his first wife and of his son. We all go through our conversion and trials. Yet truth is true, and nothing else is true. Imagine death would be real. What a God would that be!!! Death and God are not both possible. And yet all the world believes in death. It even thinks God sent His Son to be killed for my salvation. Love does not kill to save. And so we can overcome death as Jesus did, because it is not true. It might seem real, but it isn't. That is what Emerson learned.

"Nothing is dead: men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive: nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go." (Nominalist and Realist, see: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics))

Emerson loves and knows Jesus. The world does not. That is fact. The world will never understand Jesus. But you can, if you want to. If you do so, and follow him, you will change the world. You become the way, the light and the truth with him.

"When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakspeare were not." (History, see: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics))

"Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They cannot unite him to history, or reconcile him with themselves." (History, see: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics))

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.--'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'--Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood." (Self-Reliance, see: Essays & Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Barnes & Noble Classics))

Emerson loves life and truth. He knows that life and truth have nothing to do with a limited self-identity that is the expression of fear in separation.

"I am my brother and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate them in my own conscious domain. His virtue,--is not that mine? His wit,--if it cannot be made mine, it is not wit." (The Over-Soul, see: Essays & Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Barnes & Noble Classics))

Emerson tried to and did conquer and incorporate things he admired and envied by love. He that loves makes his own the grandeur he loves. What a cool idea! In that sense he that loves is really rich by the experience of the power of his mind. He that accumulates lots of things without giving, has no idea what Emerson was about. How different is that from the America we see today.

Emerson is a very honest man. Read his journals, and his integrity and honesty will inspire you.

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled. He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least admixture of a lie,--for example, the taint of vanity, the least attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance,--will instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.

These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Address to the Divinity Class; see: Nature and Selected Essays (Penguin Classics))

When Emerson writes about the fallacies of religionists in his journal entry for September 8th of 1833, he says "that they do not know the extent or the harmony or the depth of their moral nature; that they are clinking to little, positive, verbal, formal versions of the moral law, and very imperfect versions too, while the infinite laws, the laws of the Law, the great circling truths whose only adequate symbol is the material laws, the astronomy, etc., are all unobserved, and sneered at when spoken of, as frigid and insufficient."

What has to be referred to as a philosophy of totality or singularity, basically stating that there is nothing outside of oneself, and that all responsibility for what he sees, belongs to man as he is created by God, Emerson expresses with great maturity what later in the 20th century finds a magnificent theoretical framework in A Course In Miracles. It is the idea of God being in everything I see, and God being in everything I see because God is in my mind.

Emerson writes for the same day: "Let us hear this new thing. It is very old. It is the old revelation, that perfect beauty is perfect goodness, it is the development of the wonderful congruities of the moral law of human nature. Let me enumerate a few of the remarkable properties of that nature. A man contains all that is needful to his government within himself. He is made a law unto himself. All real good or evil that can befall him must be from himself.... The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live to the future as described to him, but to live to the real future by living to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man."

(The Heart of Emerson's Journals, Edited by Bliss Perry, page 79)

"The opposite of what you call Existentialism is a very popular philosophy called Transcendentalism. While it reduces to God-In-Nature -- say Walden Pond, Longfellow, Emerson are great Transcendentalists -- they say that my reality is finally based on the transcendental association that I have with everything. It was so obvious to me that Transcendentalism does not involve a specific god. Transcendentalism involves the entirety of the admission that God is in everything."

Here he refers to Emerson's essay "Circles":

"If you've drawn a circle and you've got cancer and you're going to get old and die and you're going to lose all the things you love and you're satisfied with that, you don't need me. Why the hell do you need me? You will stay in that circle. But that is not to say that there is not another circle surrounding you ... offering you entire relief from your own enclosure.

You know perfectly well you're trapped in space/time. When I was ten years old, I knew that. I knew that I was trapped in the past and future and didn't know where I was or where I was going - that I was in that containment. This is Emerson: I also knew that if I was contained or in prison, I had to know that there was freedom. Otherwise, how did I know I was contained? How did I know that I was locked in space/time? So I invented God as the solution, although there already was one. I invented a God to justify my containment. I literally constructed or replicated eternity and called it space/time, which is what it is. Is it a perfect replication? Yes, if there were such a thing as a perfect replication. Can you hear this? Certainly it will be perfect in your mind or you wouldn't be here.

The problem you have is you think you can tell the difference in your own perfection. I couldn't give a poop less whether you're perfect in space or time or in eternity. It's not going to make the slightest difference. What the hell difference does it make? If you're perfect in time and believe it to be time, you will sequence it in your own association and die of your own eternity - which is nonsense. But you can't die anyway. All you can do is see other things die around you while you're forced to be eternally in crap. I don't know if you can hear that. I'll do that once more for you: You can't die. You can see everything else die. Can you die? Sure. Well, let me see you do it. Everything else is dying. You see it die around you, but when you die, you won't tell me what it's like."

Make your own lens about what you care and want to share. If you don't have the time to blog, this is a good way to go. Yes, I have an idea.

You might be surprised. It can be quite fun, but also quite addictive.