Start at the beginning: Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 1
No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never the wiser, - the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an estate. God screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened; then we behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a dream.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride. "Earth fills her lap with splendors" not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and Rome are earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as good earth and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting!
People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon and the trees; as it is not observed that the keepers of Roman galleries, or the valets of painters, have any elevation of thought, or that librarians are wiser men than others. There are graces in the demeanour of a polished and noble person, which are lost upon the eye of a churl. These are like the stars whose light has not yet reached us.
He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of our waking knowledge. The visions of the night bear some proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are exaggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evil affections embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps, the traveller sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that every gesture of his hand is terrific. "My children," said an old man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, "my children, you will never see any thing worse than yourselves." As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world, every man sees himself in colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil. Every quality of his mind is magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of his heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts five, east, west, north, or south; or, an initial, medial, and terminal acrostic. And why not? He cleaves to one person, and avoids another, according to their likeness or unlikeness to himself, truly seeking himself in his associates, and moreover in his trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and drinks; and comes at last to be faithfully represented by every view you take of his circumstances.
He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire, but what we are? You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out; you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as secure now the book is Englished, as if it were imprisoned in the Pelews' tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good company. Introduce a base person among gentlemen; it is all to no purpose; he is not their fellow. Every society protects itself. The company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of them, though his body is in the room.
Read Some Emerson - Spiritual Laws, Part 7
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
From the Archives
What's Your Drama?
Ok, I'll go first. My drama has been to allow my pain-body to take over my thinking in the context of a love relationship. No...
Popular Posts
-
I went to a religious college for my undergraduate degree. I remember a professor in the Philosophy department answering a question from a s...
-
What a liberating feeling! I've learned to avoid dramatic people! I used to fall pray to their painful whimsy because I used to be dra...
-
Christianity--and probably most religions--can be broken down into two component parts. On the one side you have its mythos. This is the b...
-
This is a section of a much larger article called The Philosophy of Success. Aristotle lived about 300 years before Jesus, but Alexander the...
-
The core principle of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, the granddaddy of all success literature, is the building of self-confidence ...
-
This is the final section of an article called The Philosophy of Success . So Jesus had his say and then he was crucified--most of us know t...
-
You know that feeling you get when you first fall in love? You might feel it all over your body or it might be localized in your heart or...
-
Are you fully committed to feeling great? Your (quite logical) response to this question might well be, "Of course , I'm fully co...
-
Self-confidence is the key to all success. So what is it exactly? We have already said that self-confidence is "the bond that connect...
-
The term, Pain-body was coined (as far as I know) by Eckhart Tolle in his first book, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment ....
If the machine just offers you k occasions the payout for k cash, it doesn't matter when you use the maximum number of cash. And when you play the maximum number of quarters , a 777 results in 1,000 credits. You can see that taking part in} 4 quarters at a time offers you a greater likelihood of profitable a lot bigger|an even bigger} pot in the long run|the lengthy term} comparability with} taking part in} a single quarter at a time for 4 consecutive tries.\r\nWhat about penny slot machines? Although these profess to require solely a penny for a spin, you get this rate solely if you want to|if you wish to} bet one penny at a time. The machines entice you to bet means multiple penny at a time; in reality, on some machines, you'll be able to|you probably can} bet greater than 1,000 cash on each spin — $10 a shot right here, folks. Because these machines take any denomination of paper bill, as well as|in addition to} bank 다파벳 cards, your cash can go quicker on penny machines than on dollar machines end result of|as a result of} you'll be able to|you probably can} shortly lose observe of what you spend.
ReplyDelete