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."

Circles, Horizons and Depths

"Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

"The eye is the first circle," Emerson observes, "the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."

[Emerson, "The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson," p. 252]

In a classic series of sermons, the great 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, observed, like Emerson, that there is a fathomless depth to our being, a depth so great and infinite that it is the ultimate Ground of Being.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "The Shaking of the Foundations," Scribners, pp. 56-57.]

Thus, our lives are circumscribed by the orbits of the stars and the horizons of time and space, but beyond each such horizon we see there exists yet more distant horizons, including some we can never see. Similarly, there are depths within that delimit our knowledge of who and what we are; yet, they, too, are infinite and each depth yields to a further depth; and even underneath the depth which we must take to be the ultimate of all depths, a lower deep needs open. Such is the nature of the universe and our Being within it.

Emerson's Harvard Divinity School Address: Reflections on the Sublime

The dean of the American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was in many ways the forefather of the spiritual awakening that many people feel arising in our times. Heavily influenced by the first widespread introduction of Eastern wisdom teachings to the West, Emerson was a champion of the universality of religious teachings and a non-dualist, as the following excerpts from his renowned address to the Harvard Divinity School show.

The site of Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Harvard Divintiy School address.

His address, delivered in the inner sanctum of the Unitarian Church's highest seat of learning, the Harvard Divinity School address was in many ways an heroic stand that Emerson made for his then radical beliefs. Shortly thereafter, he resigned as a Unitarian minister, and although lecturing to receptive audiences worldwide, he was not invited to speak again at Harvard for another thirty years.

Some 175 years later, Emerson's observations on the nature of God and man remain as clear and relevant to our times as they were then. Indeed, they are perhaps more so today, given the current conflicts we see between and among fundamentalists of all faiths, and the spiritual awakening one nonetheless senses amongst both persons of all faiths, and of no one faith in particular. ("As we are, so we associate," Emerson observed. "The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.")

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)

In addressing his audience at the Divinity School, Emerson observed:

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. . . . If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. . . . The man who renounces himself, comes to himself by so doing."

"These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool, active; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere baulked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. "

In pointed and specific, yet beautiful and poetically transcendent language, Emerson observes that mankind's religious or spiritual sentiments are universal, arising in the East, yet giving truth to the 'Being' in each individual. Thus, he notes:

" . . . The perception of this law of laws always awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. . . . It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity. But the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures, and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy."

" . . . This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.

" . . . 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. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me also to emancipate myself; to resist evil to subdue the world; and to Be."

The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Perhaps it was the first exposure of Western cultures to the scriptures of India's millennial old wisdom traditions that sparked a lively interest in 'experiential transcendentalism,' or the possibility that there is a higher and more expansive consciousness above humanity's ordinary 'self' or 'egoic' consciousness and awareness. (The respected 20th-century theologian, in giving the prestigious Gifford Lecture at St, Andrew's College, Scotland, best expressed what is meant by "experiential transcendendalism," when he observed that, "Individual selfhood is expressed in the self's capacity for self-transcendence and not in its rational capacity for conceptual and analytic procedures.") Certainly "Brahma," perhaps the most famous of poem by the 'dean' of the "American Transcendentalists," Ralph Waldo Emerson, was inspired by his reading of that most-famed of Hindu scriptures, the "Bhagavad Gita."

The American Transcendentalists were followed by the birth of what was called the "New Thought" movement, characterized by the writings of Christian Science founder, Mary Baker Eddy, the Chicago-based Emily Tompkins, as well as James Allen and Ralph Waldo Trine in the United Kingdom.

The English public schools between the two World Wars birthed another wave of English spiritual seekers, such as Allen Watts, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Gerald Heard, whose presence and influence in America reached heights in the immediate post-World War II 1950's and early 60's. They would influence and collaborate to a greater or lesser extent with Huston Smith, and two young Harvard professors Richard Allport (who would re-emerge as spiritual teacher Ram Das) and Timothy Leary in their research into whether psybicillin (and later L.S.D) could trigger the mystical experiences and higher states of consciousness reported by so many of the world's great wisdom traditions.

Transcendentalism and the search for expanded or higher consciousness may have hit its heights in the 'psychedelic' '60s. With the maturation of the 'hippies' of the '60s into today's 'baby-boomers,' and the disillusionment of the "Me-Generation" of the 1970s and '80s (followed by 'Generations X, Y, and Z'), the search for enlightenment and higher consciousness gave way to the passion for "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll." Now, however, with the aging and pending retirement of the "boomers," the maturation of the "Me-Generation, and the disillusionment of their following generations, it appears that the search for transcendent experience is once again waxing rather than waning. But what exactly is meant by "transcendence" and "transcendentalism?"

Gerald Heard (1889-1971)

"Beat-era" spiritual philosopher Gerald Heard in his classic exploration of these rarified stages of transcendentalism and consciousness, "Pain, Sex and Time," discusses the nature of what he calls mankind's  ordinary "fissured consciousness" and its "ego-impulses," as compared with the evolutionary potential of the "undilated unconscious" and its potential to cause an "interior reintegration for the brave souls who are true aspirants after "higher consciousness" and spiritual awareness.

Written in 1939 and long out-of-print, "Pain, Sex and Time" was, it seems, before its time. A classic outline of how humankind's evolutionary progress and potential for ever greater and higher states of consciousness, Heard's treatise was finally re-published in 2004. It's republication, perhaps, is an indication of a groundswell of interest in man's spiritual and evolutionary potential - a groundswell, aided too no small extent, by the realization that material success and achievement is not only ultimately unsatisfactory to our inner needs, but is damaging to the Earth herself. As Heard, naively and perhaps prematurely (as it turns out), observed in 1939, only months before the onset of the cataclysm that was World War II:

"It is now obvious that men cannot live much longer the life of irrelevant distractions. We are becoming too acutely conscious and aware of time. Any stimulant, however pleasant at the beginning, repeated [often enough] becomes hateful."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p.193.]

This warning - written nearly 75 years ago - seems eerily prescient in our times, although it shouldn't. For, when we look back at the history of 'transcendentalism,' we have been on a crash course with the limitations that time has on humanity's consciousness throughout what may be called the '"Scientific Age" (which has now rapidly morphed seamlessly into the "Information Age"), and the need for a change in our consciousness has always been readily apparent, if only to the few. As Heard remarked, a handful of generations ago now:

 "There are . . . three great stages in man' evolution; the appetitive animal, the intelligent human (Nietzche's "transitional creature"), and the being who once more knows itself to be a part of the Whole, but this time is clearly aware that the Whole is a comprehensive consciousness."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p. 153.]

Now, however, rather than an early warning, Heard's remarks may represent the clear statement of an evolutionary imperative and warning. Even the incomprehensibility of man's inhumanity to man, as demonstrated in the Second World War, was unforeseeable to Heard, it seems. How much more incomprehensible would the current challenges we face with what has become a 24/7 global worldview- a population boom, environmental degradation, mass extinction of species, growing rather than shrinking poverty and hunger - have been?

Heard writes that, "Without silent recollection the mind cannot recognize its own unity, still less the wholeness of that into which it would expand."

[G. Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," p. 181.]

Now, it seems - with our growing awareness of the limitations of our old consciousness and the problems caused by it - that there is an ever-growing recognition that we must strive individually and collectively to meet what is our evolutionary imperative, our call to transcend the collective state-of-mind that has created the problems we face. For, as Heard also notes in "Pain, Sex and Time," those species that fail in continuing to evolve almost inevitably perish.

Poetic Transcendentalism

Nobody says it like a master poet. And William Wordsworth ( (1770-1850) - who has perhaps the most fitting name of all the bards - is without question a master poet. His work transcends the ordinary and reaches the Divine.

In his Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Wordsworth enters the sublime with his intimations of the transmigration of the soul and his explicit recognition of  a universal "home" in the Godhead.

William Wordsworth

“ … Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God who is our home. ”

(William Wordsworth, from his poem, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.")

 The two poems that seem to approach the same spiritual heights as the above passage from Intimations are William Blake's The Tyger and Emerson's Brahma. Blake (1757-1827) was one of those rare individuals to experience wholesale spiritual enlightenment, according to Richard M. Bucke in his groundbreaking treatise on Cosmic Consciousness, while Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) provided a good deal of the impetus to the American Transcendentalist movement that centered around his Concord, Massachusetts home.

William Blake

"Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

Richard M. Bucke

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?


Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

(William Blake, The Tygre, 1794)

And last, but not least, is Emerson's Brahma, which reflects the impact that the introduction of Eastern wisdom traditions had on Western religious understanding,  particularly on the development of Emerson's Unitarianism.

If the red slayer think he slays,
  Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
  I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near, 
  Shadow and sunlight are the same,
The vanished gods to me appear,
  And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
  When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
  And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
  And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
  Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

 (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Brahma," 1856)