We are an unlikely bunch of scholars—a ragtag team of college freshman, brought together weekly by our mutual love for Emerson. Though we are young and utterly untrained, there is something about our weekly rendezvous that makes us all feel like we are doing something important. It is a very introspective, thought-provoking hour. There is not much action involved at our meetings, but we read important things, say important things, and every once in a while…we come to important conclusions about life.
Emerson has helped us all to live more deliberately—to never let life passively wash over us, but to embrace every moment. This is a difficult thing, but I am glad to have a semi-weekly reminder of these ideas and ideals that I someday wish to embrace constantly.

In an effort to better record and remember our discussions, I have decided to write out a few of the items we discussed this past week.

Throughout all Emersonian discourse there tends to be this underlying idea that the mind is what contains all ultimate reality. People are foolish to believe that physical constructs and material goods are anything resembling definitive truth. There is this idea that people should not take these things for granted. They should not subject themselves to anything out of mere tradition or habit, but find the ultimate truth within them and obey only that.
In one essay Emerson even takes it so far as to say a person should not “not respect government, except as far as it reiterates the law of his mind.”
As a group we looked at this concept critically, and from a gospel perspective. What I was most concerned about regarding this line of thought was that it could be interpreted to mean that truth is subjective. There is the idea that if everyone searched within themselves for their own personal truth, everyone might find a different form, and then live their life according to their own personal concept. This would result in a disharmonious and clashing reality where anyone could be justified in any action so long as it satisfied their personal concept of truth or reiterated the unique “law of their mind.”

However, there is a truer and better message to be found within these ideas, and they need not be discarded so quickly. Paired with the idea of searching within for reality and truth, is the idea that there does exist a greater force guiding all things and that there is a predestined harmony to all things. Emerson does not always call this God in his writings—but that is what I know it to be. When predestined harmony comes into play, an ultimate truth and light to be found, the concept suddenly shifts from being something chaotic and troublesome to something altogether beautiful.

You see the first idea would look something like this:

People would look inside themselves and all find different shapes to the truth. And these shapes would not work together but collide and crash in a noisy, disruptive way. Lets call this war and contention and murder and thieving and every kind of conflict and unhappiness that exists in the world. All of this is caused because people are operating on all sorts of different planes and falsely embracing different disharmonious elements as their truth. They live passively and sensuously and accept flawed constructs of truth as their reality.

The second idea would look like this:

Everyone can and should seek out the truth within, and everyone who successfully does this will find a unique manifestation within themselves, but at the same time it all fits into a greater fabric—a giant puzzle. Everyone’s unique part fits harmoniously and beautifully with everyone else’s. Creativity, diversity, the beautiful individuality of each person can still be maintained even when all people embrace what I call “the light of Christ” within them.