Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Page 12

We can all tell the difference between the voluntary acts of our mind and our involuntary perceptions, and we know that we can have complete faith in the latter. We may err in our expressions of them, but we know that these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed.

My conscious actions are just meandering.
But my idlest daydream
and my faintest genuine emotion
command my curiosity and respect.

Thoughtless people are just as willing to argue with a statement of perceptions as an opinion—actually, even more willing—because they don't distinguish between perception and conception. They imagine I choose to see one thing or another. But perception isn't whimsical; it's inevitable. If I see a quality, my children will see it after me, and eventually all humanity—although perhaps no one has seen it before me—because my perception of it is as much a fact as the sun.

Soul

The relationship of the human soul to the divine spirit is so pure that it's profane to try to interpose guidance. It must be that when God speaks, he communicates not one thing but everything; he fills the world with his voice; he scatters around light, nature, time, and souls from the center of the present design, updating and recreating the whole.

Whenever a mind is simple
and receives divine wisdom,
old things pass away—
strategies, teachers, temples fall;
the simple mind lives now,
and absorbs the past and future
into the present moment.

All things are made sacred by their relation to the simple mind, one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their source. In the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear.

Past-Worship

So if someone claims to know God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some moldy old nation in another continent, in another world, don't believe him.

Is an acorn better than an oak, which is its fullness and completion? Is a parent better than the child into whom he has poured the benefit of all his experience? Where did this past-worship come from, anyway?

The centuries are conspirators
against the sanity and authority of the soul.

Time and space are just physiological colors that the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, it's day; where it was, it's night. History is irrelevant if it's anything more than a cheerful account or parable of my being and becoming.

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