Emerson and Kipling: On Conformity and Self-Reliance

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion: it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of the solitude."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --
("Self-Reliance")

 "A man must consider what a blind-man's bluff is this game of conformity," Emerson wrote in his great essay on Self-Reliance. And if this was so in Emerson's nineteenth century New England, circumscribed as it was by local conditions and custom, by distance and distinctiveness, how much greater the challenge today when we live in a mass society assailed on all sides by messages of conformity?

Today, unlike in Emerson's age, we are met each day with a barrage of advertising on just how we should live, on just what we should consume, and just what we should aspire to. Today, perhaps more so than in any time past, we rely not on ourselves but on others to define just who and what we are. But is this not its own form of madness? Is this not an injurious game of bluff and folly as Emerson observed?

"For non-conformity," he pointed out, "the world whips you with its displeasure." Yet, is it not the person who refuses to conform - a Ghandhi, a Churchill, a Mandela, an MLK Jr. - who ultimately shapes both our ideals and our destinies? In the end, are we not all forced to be self-reliant or perish under the weight of our circumstances, seemingly misunderstood by all?

Perhaps this message is best captured by another Victorian,  Rudyard Kipling, in his immortal poem on self-reliance:

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!

 "A foolish consistency is the hobgobblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines," Emerson observed. "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," he urged, "and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day."

"Is it so bad then," he asks, "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."

Thomas Merton: On Action and Acceptance

In his study of Eastern religious and wisdom traditions, a study cut short by his untimely death, the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, delved deeply into the heart of those traditions, finding the common ground that each shares with his own Christian faith  Not surprisingly, in his reflections on Hinduism (taken from his pithy book, "Thoughts On the East") he identifies the relentless pursuit of one's own self-will as the primary obstacle to spiritual growth and lasting happiness.

"The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone," Merton points out. "We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to Krishna consciousness or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness."

"The Gita," he notes, "sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is what he had "made" for himself - it is his karma."

"In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is," Merton writes, "man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences on a superficial level, as "his own will.""

"It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in itself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

An anonymous writer made the following observations about the challenges and hazards we create in refusing to accept life on life terms, and about the spiritual benefits that come to us when we do:

"(A)cceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation - some fact of my life - unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment. Nothing absolutely nothing happens in God's world by mistake. . . . (U)nless I accept life completely on life's terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and my attitudes."

"Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women mere players." He forgot to mention that I was the chief critic. I was always able to see the flaw in every person, every situation. And I was always glad to point it out, be ause I knew you wanted perfection, just as I did. . . . (A)cceptance (has) taught me that there is a bit of good in the worst of us and a bit of bad in the best of us; that we are all children of God and we each have a right to be here. When I complain about me or about your, I am complaining about God's handiwork. I am saying that I know better than God."

Beyond Perceptions and Conceptions to 'Acceptive Consciousness'

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

In our ordinary consciousness we see the world as a manifested reality of "things" - animal, mineral and vegetable. But at the smallest levels, physicists tell us that our "world" consists of granular, distinct quanta (or, sub-particles) of energy, which are "realized" by the act of observation. Because of this, it has been said that modern physics has become "the study of the structure of consciousness."

Humans, with our many layers of consciousness, are capable of "envisioining" our world at both levels. In his most personal writing, "Some of the Dharma" Beat-writer, Jack Kerouac, set this out rather poetically:

---FORM IN THE NORM---
 Instead of bothering with one side of the coin
  or the other, throw it away---in the same way,
   instead of either bothering with arbitrary conception
    of manifested phenomena or non-manifested non-phenomena,
     the coin of existence,
                                       throw it away----
                                                                  Rest beyond conception.

Richard M. Bucke (1837-1902)

Richard M. Bucke, one of the first Westerners to attempt a "scientific" explanation and synthesis of the mystic or enlightenment experiences recorded in the world's wisdom traditions, discussed four progressively higher states of consciousness in his iconic work "Cosmic Consciousness" (sometimes referred to as "The Hippie Bible.")

At the lowest state of consciousness, the simplest animal organism will respond to stimuli. This receptive consciousness, may be illustrated by a simple earth worm recoiling from the prick of a needle. 'Reception' of the stimulus begets a reaction.

At a higher level of consciousness, what Bucke called perceptive consciousness, the "perception" of a stimulus will provoke a reaction. Thus, the second time you take your dog to the vet for its shots, your dog will react when it merely sees the needle.

At the higher level of ordinary human consciousness, what Bucke called conceptive consciousness, the mere "idea" of the stimulus will provoke a response. If you tell a child that he or she is going to get a shot, that the doctor will poke a needle into her arm, the mere thought (or "concept") causes a "response," most often tears.

Bucke speculated that there is yet another higher level of consciousness beyond 'ordinary' human, "conceptive consciousness" - a level he called cosmic consciousness - and he compared the recorded experiences of saints and sages, from Lao-Tze to Jesus, and from Paul, Mohammed, St. John of the Cross and Shakespeare to his mentor, Walt Whitman - in order to outline the parameters of what this higher state of consciousness is. He theorized, like so many before and after, (see, "Pain, Sex and Time" by Gerald Heard, or the "evolutionary enlightenment" teachings of Andrew Cohen), that humankind is inexorably evolving towards this higher state of consciousness and awareness.

In that higher state (known in the West as "enlightenment" and in the East as 'samadhi,' 'moksha,' 'nirvana' or, simply, "liberation") ordinary consciousness, with its "conceptions" that crystallize the world, moves to a higher all-inclusive awareness that is beyond stimuli. For that reason, I call it "acceptive" rather than "cosmic" consciousness. It is in this state of "acceptive consciousness" - beyond the labelling and attachments of our egoic conceptions - that the spiritually adept has an experiential realization and radical acceptance of both the 'manifest' and 'unmanifest' realms or worlds. It is "the ineffable" or what, I believe, the Buddha pointed to as "suchness."