"What am I? & What is?
asks the human spirit with a curiosity new-kindled,
but never to be quenched..."
- Emerson
I've been reading Emerson at night, of late.
He puts forth, in his essay "Nature," a fantastic blueprint for understanding our relationship with Nature & the Universe at large.
He says of our age, that it "is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.
It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes."
Then he asks a pertinent question to (early American) Transcendentalism:
"Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?"
I began to ask myself what it was that disappointed me most, from the futile religious groups & "spiritual" movements I've examined.
The answer appeared to be, for each, that I could never get an original, relevant, & therefore viable relationship from them.
There is no relationship with the Buddha, long-dead (or reincarnated);
Only a set of decent principles.
Christ never answered my pleas;
(Though he promised the door would open if I knocked).
& Muhammad...perhaps well-intentioned;
But I distrust anyone who "restores" a faith with violence.
& so on, the list goes...
Faith in personhood seems misplaced.
Nature is everywhere, Universal.
{"Historical Christianity has fallen into the error that corrupts all attempts to communicate religion.
It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.
The soul knows no persons.
It invites every man to expand to the full circle of the Universe,
and will have no preferences but those of spontaneous love..."}
Emerson points out that we are "embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature..."
"Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe?
The sun shines today also.
There is more wool and flax in the fields.
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts.
Let us demand our own works and laws and worship."
I think this is ultimately the ground I am approaching.
I will (after a Lewisonian fashion) trust the "perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy."
Rather than trust the static corpus of some past event(s), I will look to my own condition; my own dynamic interaction/relationship with Nature & the Universe at large.
Is not my condition (life-process) a coded answer to my own questions?
As Emerson says of man, "He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."
"In like manner, nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, describing its own design.
Let us interrogate the great apparition, that shines so peacefully around us.
Let us inquire, to what end is nature?"
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