Emerson, mystical humanist

Did you know this about Emerson?   Please don't be put off when you see it is a discussion of Esalen and its presence in the final episodes of the tv show Mad Men.  The glimpses it gave me into Emerson's thoughts on spirituality might be familiar to you but they were new to me. 

"I once had the pleasure of teaching for a year at Harvard Divinity School. My office was on the same floor and just three doors down from the little chapel where the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his famous Divinity School Address on July 15, 1838. In this sermon, originally read to just six graduating students, their families, and faculty members, Emerson denied the unique divinity of Christ, affirmed the divinity of the "infinite Soul," and celebrated the inspiration, indeed revelation, of contemporary religious experience. He called on his listeners to “live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind" and to refuse the temptation of traditional authority: “Let me admonish you, first of all,” he exhorted the graduates, “to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those which are sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil.”

Emerson was inviting his listeners and readers to move beyond “historical Christianity,” an institution whose perverse mythologization of Jesus as the only divine human being and whose slavish reliance on the Bible as somehow final and complete he found particularly odious.

More positively, what he wanted was a democratic, individualized form of spirituality that is fundamentally open to present and future revelations, not just past ones. The goal of the religious life for Emerson was not Christianity. It was consciousness, or what he would later call the Over-Soul. “Man is a stream whose source is hidden,” he wrote in another essay. “Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.”

Despite charges of impious offense, atheism, and blasphemy following Emerson's speech, his mystical humanism and transgressive individualism were never effectively silenced, and they have since had a long run in American religious history: most immediately among Emerson’s own

Transcendentalist circles, but also among countless individuals who have lived under the broad, generous sky of what the historian Catherine Albanese has called “metaphysical religion,” that immense swath of mystical, gnostic, and esoteric traditions that encompasses everything from the early Swedenborgians, the Mesmerists, Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, and Theosophists, to the contemporary human-potential and New Age movements. There is more, it turns out, to American religious history than evangelical fervor and denominations."

The above quote is from an article on the dailybeast. Here is the link. Don't be put off by the photo of Mad Men's Don Draper. It is an interesting article, with more about Emerson than Esalen or Mad Men.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/23/inside-don-draper-s-big-sur-nirvana-the-esalen-institute.html?via=desktop&source=facebook

A former friend wrote his doctoral dissertation on Emerson. At the time I first met him, other than his faculty committee, no one had read it. I read it. It was about Emerson's political thought. I don't remember much about Emerson's spiritual ideas, although I bet this former friend was, and is, aware of Emerson's untraditional spiritual views. Emerson was, after all, a renown Transcendentalist.

I think it is interesting. I think Emerson contributed to a discussion of cultural evolution related to spirituality.  Plus the guy was a beautiful writer, even a poet.