The Authority of the Soul: Finding God in Emerson
Emerson's vision of God is secular, and at times can be seen as pantheistic; however, even this is too narrow an interpretation. The "Unity of God" found in his Unitarian beginnings blooms into a self made reality where "appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature contains all the powers of nature," and is thus, the "hidden stuff" of an active God.
Naturalistic Chinese philosopher, Hsun Tzu (300-230 BCE) asserted that "each of the thousand things attains its harmony, and thus grows. Each obtains its nourishment, and thus achieves full development. We do not see their activities but we do see their results. This is what is called spirit." Emerson's unity is not wholly new, it has its roots in ancient Chinese Naturalistic Confucianism as well as other predecessors. When Emerson speaks of "following one's nature" and the spontaneous flux of nature, he is echoing their philosophy in one respect, and yet he strays from all tradition.
We don't have Emerson speaking of meditating on God in order to ignore or shut out the world of appearances (as we do in, say, certain schools of Buddhism and Vedantic Yoga) but rather, we have a delight in nature and the senses as shown in his essay The Poet: "Every line we draw in the sand has expression; there is no body without its spirit or genius." Emerson regards nature as the soul of the body: "We stand before the secret of the world, there where Being passes into Appearance and Unity into Variety." Nature and all that comprise reality in the universe are but "externalizations of the soul." Emerson asserts, quite clearly, the self-existence of nature and the soul in Self-Reliance: "Where there is he, there is Nature," and that, "Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the souls is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night." Thus, the result is an intrinsic connection to our "being" and the "becoming soul."
Nature sets the groundwork for Emerson's concept that, "the beauty of nature shines in his own breast" and therefore, God is an unknowable and mysterious "essence" What is he really telling us? If the world is a "divine dream" then it does not account for matter. "It leaves God out of me." So the "nature of things" must be comprised equally with the "soul and the world." He makes this claim in Compensation: "An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests the other thing to make it whole..." But where does God fit into this dualism? Emerson gives us, like Hsun Tzu, an account of the invisible force behind nature, for "spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of a tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pours of the old." Emerson tropes nature, claiming that it "reflects the spirit," and that "all of nature is but a metaphor of the human mind." So, the dualism is simply the "whole" in a state of dependent flux and change - a dualistic unity, if you will.
If nature, the mind, and the soul are changing constantly, then that is the ultimate law of God. Those who are bound by tradition, by the past's attempts to know God, will fail. As Emerson writes in his journal prior to the Divinity School Address: "there are parts of faith so great, so self-evident, that when the mind rests in them, the pretensions of the most illuminated, most pretending sect, pass for nothing…" Emerson is claiming that there is a secular way to know the soul, and ultimately God, which relies solely upon individual insight. Yoga meditation has been described by Swami Sivananda (1887-1963), as "the extinction of all functions of the mind, the art of emptying the mind and making it a blank page." However, we should not interpret Emerson's faith to be an ultimate by-product of meditation, but that’s no reason to dismiss it entirely. The simple control of breath has been considered for ages to be a vehicle to peace of mind.
In the book Christian Yoga by J.M. Dechanet, the author asserts that with breath control one "directs the energy towards the centers where the true self will come to realize its own real nature." Dechanet's reasoning is that the Christian can utilize the methods of Yoga without accepting the religious and philosophical beliefs of Hinduism. Emerson goes further because he claims no loyalty to Christianity as a dogma any more than other faiths. "The instinct of man," he states in Circles, "presents eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of the book itself," that even "the Son be subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all." Emerson, in his constant experimenting admits that the words of God are as "fugitive as other words," and that is because "this surface on which we now stand on is not fixed, but sliding" and that "Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit."
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