Ralph Waldo Emerson was not one of our founding fathers; however some have called him "our founding thinker." (Emerson and the Dream of America, by Richard G. Geldard) Indeed, his influence on our country and our culture goes far beyond the two names we most usually associate with his way of thinking, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, to include a whole host of great thinkers, philosophers, poets and statesmen. That list includes Robert Frost, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, Friedrich Nietzsche and William James, to name a few. In a letter from prison, Gandhi advised a follower to read Emerson: "The essays to my mind contain the teaching of Indian wisdom in a Western garb." Bartlett's Familiar Quotations has more pages for Emerson than for Lincoln, Jefferson or Franklin.
Where did Emerson learn his way of thinking, his world view? From the Veda. From the Upanishads, the Puranas, the Bhagavad Gita. All of these he studied, digested, wrote about, quoted from, passing ideas and concepts along which in turn were passed along--Emerson to Whitman to Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan; Emerson to Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.
And what are these ideas that come from the East, that inspired this flow of brilliance, non-violence, beauty, poetry?
The central message Emerson drew from his Asian studies, says Robert Gordon, was that "the purpose of life was spiritual transformation and direct experience of divine power, here and now on earth." from American Veda by Philip Goldberg
This is an 1837 journal entry by Emerson:
I behold with awe & delight many illustrations of the One universal Mind. I see my being imbedded in it. As a plant in the earth so I grow in God. I am only a form of him. He is the soul of me...A certain wandering light comes to me which I instantly perceive to be the Cause of Causes. It transcends all proving. It is itself the ground of being; and I see that it is not one & I another, but this is the life of my life. That is one fact then; that in certain moments I have known that I existed directly from God, and am, as it were, his organ. And in my ultimate consciousness Am He. quoted in American Veda by Philip Goldberg
Happy Independence Day. Remember that all of us are free to be, free to love, free to give of ourselves, and that the best of us--all these men and women mentioned above--indeed are the best of us. Individual expressions of this oneness, this "One universal Mind" that is me and that is you, that is all of us together and each of us individually.
(I am grateful to Philip Goldberg for his book, American Veda, for bringing together the ideas and connections referenced above, as well as the Gandhi quote. The book is quite wonderful and will be of interest to all students of the Veda. Mr. Goldberg himself was at one time a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. Today his blog on religion may be read at the Huffington Post.)  Flags in the Neighborhood, Studio City
All material copyright Jeff Kober |
