My Influences - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prelude

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts but spent most of his life in Concord. He entered Harvard College at the age of 14 and was ordained to the Unitarian ministry in 1829. Three years later, after grieving over the death of his first wife, he resigned the ministry.
Emerson traveled to Europe and met the British Romantics Carlyle, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Returning to the United States, he joined with other writers such as Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller to form a Concord literary group.
Along with Thoreau, Emerson helped promote American Romanticism and New England Transcendentalism. He died in 1882.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Self-Reliance

Through his writings such as Self-Reliance, the Harvard Divinity School Address, The American Scholar, and The Over-Soul, Emerson urged each person to turn inward and discover an inner authority, rather than rely on books and the speeches of others (compare with the internal locus of evaluation of Carl Rogers)—

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. (Emerson, 1983, p. 259).

Emerson proposed that books, even holy books, that were inspired in the moment of their creation cannot replace the creative act of each individual when he speaks for his own time and place (contrast this with the compulsive following of a book illustrated in Oh Divine Lobotomy). Instead of “the poet chanting,” or “Man Thinking,” the person addicted to quoting the words of others becomes the “bookworm” for whom the book he quotes has turned into a “tyrant,” substituting for his own ability to think and feel and judge (Emerson, 1983, p. 57).

Nonconformity

Do not be like the “multitude,” implores Emerson, but speak your own truth (that it is tempting to follow the path of others is illustrated in Last Wednesday I Walked on the Beach). In urging the lone individual to be “self-reliant,” he did not at all mean to suggest that a person should be selfish or self-indulgent. Instead he asked each person to resist conformity and trust himself: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist” (Emerson, 1983, p. 261).

I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you.... I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy. (Emerson, 1983, p. 273)

The Over-Soul

And so it is that Emerson argued that when we look deeply into ourselves we discover a divine inner voice—an Over-Soul—the same source that has inspired men and women of all time (compare with the Self of Carl Jung, the organismic valuing process of Carl Rogers, the self-actualizing tendency of Abraham Maslow, or the still, small voice of Eugene Gendlin)—

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across my mind, are not mine, but God's; that they had the like, and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. (Emerson, 1983, p. 82)

Trust the Over-Soul that speaks from within, advised Emerson. The “mystic” differs from the “talker,” he says, because the mystic speaks “from within” and not “from without” (Emerson, 1983, p. 395). Speaking from within, a person discovers that “we are wiser than we know” (Emerson, 1983, p. 391)—

It is the office of the true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake. (Emerson, 1983, p. 88)

Nature and the Mystic State

Emerson proposed that the experience for which the soul yearns, that which links it to the Over-Soul, requires separating oneself from the crowd and, in particular, getting around nature (as illustrated in Like the Snap of a Cucumber). In such a place, the mystic state is accessible (compare with the peak experience of Abraham Maslow)—

Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part or particle of God. (Emerson, 1983, p. 10).

Like many who are drawn to psychology, Emerson argued that the aim of life is best achieved when a person turns inward—

What is the end of human life? It is not, believe me, the chief end of man that he should make a fortune and beget children whose end is likewise to make a fortune, but it is, in few words, that he should explore himself. (cited by Richardson, 1995, p. 261)

From Ralph Waldo Emerson I learned to trust the Interior of myself.

References

Emerson, R. W. (1983). Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & lectures. New York: The Library of America.
Richardson, R. D. (1995). Emerson: The mind on fire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Photos

Emerson, R. W. (1983). Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & lectures. New York: The Library of America.
Richardson, R. D. (1995). Emerson: The mind on fire. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.