Ralph Waldo Emerson was a deep thinker and a beautiful soul. Below you will find some short excerpts from the book entitled ‘Self-Reliance’. The short quotes from Emerson are emboldened and give a brief insight into the deep thinker that he was.
“Every person is capable of direct access to the Universal Soul and thus to universal truth. The most important task in life––indeed, perhaps the whole point of life––is for each of us to strive to develop that access so that the insights it provides will govern all our thoughts and actions.“
As Whelan states: Spiritual growth and personal development are inherent in every life that is lived in awareness of the divine spirit working through us. The great adventure of life is to discover how the spirit will express itself through us and along what paths it will lead us. And as Emerson says of every person: “The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”
Emerson believed that every individual soul is an inlet of the Universal Soul, and every person is a vessel of the divine light, even if he or she doesn’t allow that light to shine forth. “The highest revelation is that God is in every man.” When we pay attention to the promptings of the soul in the present moment––when we act in a way that recognises the divine spirit in ourselves and in every other person––we invite the spirit to act through us. These are poignant words offered by Whelan.
As the author suggests, Emerson taught that the divine spirit manifests itself through our evolving circumstances. Therefore, the enlightened life is a constant process of responding intelligently to the immediate specifics of reality. Each of us should always attempt to focus on the good that the present moment has to offer. “Without any shadow of doubt . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, acting as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. A little reflection on what occurs around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our little will regulates events . . . that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong.” By centering ourselves in this way we learn to work with the divine.
The awakened soul that was Emerson had no interest, according to Whelan, in fabricating an elaborate philosophical history. Instead, he was content to examine a few vital truths––those that apply to life as we actually live it. When we live more in the light, we understand that life’s greatest joy is to be able to see the extraordinariness of what may appear to others as ordinary, to see all history and human nature in the everyday, and the divine spirit in the mundane. We should therefore, as Emerson put it, “attempt to dwell in the earnest experience of the common day––by reason of the present moment.”
Kudos to the awakened soul that was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and gratitude also to Richard Whelan for bringing into the light some wonderful gems of thought that surfaced in the mind of Emerson over 200 years ago.
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