Heading to the great outdoors this summer to recharge your batteries? You can thank a transcendentalist for the idea. Turning to nature for spiritual sustenance might seem like an obvious thing to do, but a mere century and a half ago it would have struck most Americans as pretty farfetched (the woods used to be considered a place of danger and darkness).<\/p>\n
How about the statement \u201cI\u2019m spiritual, but not necessarily religious\u201d? You\u2019ve probably heard that from a fair number of people. Again, it was the transcendentalists\u2014Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and a handful of others\u2014who initially popularized this idea. Even the concept of positive thinking itself had its first champions in this small, short-lived, yet incredibly influential group of New England thinkers.<\/p>\n
What exactly were the transcendentalists trying to get at? Start with the word \u201ctranscend,\u201d which means to move above and beyond ordinary categories and the limitations that come with them. At heart, that\u2019s what the transcendentalists were going for. Living in a land that was redefining what a nation could be, they saw themselves as seeking a new, and greater, definition of what a human being could be.<\/p>\n
None of them worked harder at this task than their most famous and influential member, Ralph Waldo Emerson. America\u2019s original positive thinker, Emerson was a tireless promoter of the basic transcendentalist idea that human beings are larger\u2014infinitely larger\u2014than they think they are. \u201cA man,\u201d he wrote, \u201cis the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.\u201d What we need to do is overcome the self-imposed habits of thought that prevent us from fully realizing this potential. Or as Emerson put it, \u201cThe only sin is limitation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shedding old ways of thinking sounds fine on paper. But anyone who\u2019s tried to change, truly change, knows that in practice, it\u2019s a whole other matter. How do we go about doing it? Through his essays, Emerson has given us three keys for unlocking the wisdom and goodness within.<\/p>\n
Believe in Yourself<\/strong> And that, so often, is what gets in our way. An unwillingness to have faith in our true potential is the single greatest setback to achieving it. \u201cTo believe your own thought,\u201d Emerson wrote, \u201cto believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men\u2014that is genius.\u201d Next time you catch yourself slipping into a distorted thinking pattern, stop and do a reality check. Things just aren\u2019t going my way right now.<\/em> Then act like a genius and give yourself some credit. I might have made some mistakes along the way but what I accomplished is something to be proud of. <\/em><\/p>\n Peak Moments<\/strong> The problem, Emerson realized, isn\u2019t so much how to reach these peaks. It\u2019s how to trust what we learn during them. \u201cOur faith comes in moments,\u201d he wrote. \u201cOur vice is habitual.\u201d The unavoidable humdrum aspects of daily routines dull our memory of how things are when we\u2019re at our best. \u201cSo much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man\u2019s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s why we need to burn the lessons of those few hours into our minds. We have to hold on to the perspective and clarity we achieve at our peaks and let them sustain us when we\u2019re less inspired. \u201cThere is a depth in those brief moments,\u201d Emerson wrote, \u201cwhich constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.\u201d The sheer vividness of those highs should make it easier to recall them. That doesn\u2019t mean living in the past. Rather, think of your moments of energy and inspiration as fuel packets. Tap into them whenever you need a boost to move forward.<\/p>\n Positive Is Practical\u2014and Powerful<\/strong> Consider Emerson\u2019s famous adage: \u201cHitch your wagon to a star.\u201d Advice that \u201csounds impractical if beautiful,\u201d Richardson notes. \u201cBut it turns out to have an unexpected grounding in the real world. Emerson was thinking\u2026about the tide-mills that used to exist along the East Coast. The incoming tide would turn the wheel one way, the outgoing tide would turn it the other; both ways ground grain and sawed wood, and it was all done by hitching the mill to the tides which are hitched to the moon. So Emerson means his spiritual advice literally.\u201d<\/p>\n Don\u2019t be intimidated by Emerson\u2019s high-sounding language. Take his use of the word \u201csoul.\u201d \u201cThe soul is not an organ,\u201d he writes, \u201cbut animates all the organs;\u2026is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but is the master of the intellect and the will.\u201d It is \u201cthe background of our being\u2014an immensity that cannot be possessed.\u201d He isn\u2019t talking about some daunting metaphysical abstraction. He\u2019s talking about your true self\u2014the person you are when you\u2019re at your best, your boldest, your most alive and real.<\/p>\n Emerson believed that \u201cthe learned and the studious\u2026have no monopoly of wisdom.\u201d Much as he admired scholars, he knew they were often less likely to find their way to an experience of the authentic self than an ordinary person was. \u201cGreat is the soul, and plain,\u201d he wrote in that populist spirit that one of his early readers, Walt Whitman, so loved and celebrated. \u201cIt is no flatterer, it is no follower\u2026It always believes in itself.\u201d In this and so many other ways, Emerson is the quintessential American philosopher: deep yet democratic, sophisticated yet simple as a glass of cold water on a summer day.<\/p>\n His views didn\u2019t always play well with his contemporaries. He came from a long line of clergymen and started out as one himself. That made the churchmen of his day particularly critical when his thinking diverged from theirs. They found in Emerson\u2019s rhapsodies on the mystic soul the evidence of a troublingly unorthodox sensibility.<\/p>\n
\nThere is in each person, Emerson wrote, a \u201cvast-flowing vigor,\u201d an energy that we can rely upon in any circumstance. Every one of us can tap into this bottomless spiritual reservoir. But we have a tendency to deny it. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by stress and thought, Things never go my way? <\/em>Beaten yourself up over your mistakes? Deflected a compliment by saying, \u201cOh, it was nothing\u201d? These are all examples of self-defeating thoughts, also known as stinking thinking.<\/p>\n
\nAll of us have experienced times when we\u2019re deeply in tune with life and with ourselves, when everything comes naturally. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, father of the human potential movement, called these \u201cpeak moments.\u201d More recently, psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has used the term \u201cflow\u201d to describe this state of total engagement. Athletes call it being \u201cin the zone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nFor Emerson, a positive attitude wasn\u2019t a passive thing, a mere lens for viewing a sometimes difficult world in a kinder light. He believed it held a genuine practical power. Emerson scholar and biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr., explains this aspect of Emerson\u2019s thought in a wonderfully concrete way.<\/p>\n