Available in full here –
https://archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/emerson/essays/selfreliance.html
(It’s ok to click “Agree”!)
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.
The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. …
We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. … God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise, shall give him no peace.”
I am not ashamed. I believe we are all GodShards, but we have been inculcated to believe otherwise.
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors or invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”
That sounds like a call to Greatness to me. One that it is easy to feel when reading it, alone and focused. Harder to hold on to, in the “busyness” of life and the expectations of the world. Or as Emerson says –
These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.”
Meditation is the solitude, the required quiet moments. But taking it out into the “Real World” is the hard part. You are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time. EVERYBODY has their expectations of you. Nobody knows what’s going on inside. And it eats away at you when you don’t live up to that God-like, highest aspiration. Well, it does me anyway!
If we want to be able to trust ourselves, we must know ourselves. But finding the Virtuous Mean, the Buddhist Middle Path requires us to know which vice of excess we tend towards, and edge toward the other bank to compensate.
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,—”But these impulses may be from below, not from above.” I replied, “They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.” No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”
But remember –
“For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure.”
…and…
“And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a taskmaster.”
We must remember the God within, but this is how society tames us.
“Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all.”
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what your duty is better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
I want to be a Great Man, I am not ashamed to say this. Why would I aim for mediocrity? Apart from perhaps to make other mediocre people feel better about themselves? Personally, I’d rather be an Iconoclast. I can probably handle the whipping?!?
When lecturing, Maslow would ask his classes, “Which of you inside this room intends to be a great leader? Who will be a great saint? Who will be a great psychologist? Who will be a great writer?”
As recorded in his writings, his students would typically react with embarrassment.
Generally, everybody starts giggling, blushing, and squirming until I ask, ‘If not you, then who else?’ Which of course is true.
Maslow was not trying to pressure his students into achieving superficial fame. Instead, he was challenging a psychological phenomenon he called the “Jonah Complex”—the tendency for people to fear their own greatness, run away from their talents, and self-sabotage their potential due to a lack of confidence or fear of the unknown.
By asking “If not you, then who?”, Maslow wanted his students to realize that the “great people” of the world are simply regular people who wipe their bottoms in the same way we all do, but they have actively decided to fully cultivate their unique capabilities, and have followed thru with consistent action.
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict something you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. ’Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Being able to form your own opinions is kind of a prerequisite to being able to change them. As opposed to the dogma of conformism.
Flexibility of thinking, changing your opinions when new data comes along, seems quite a good idea to me. Or you can let others, and your Old Self think for you?
Embrace failure & being wrong, course correct, crack on. Because…
“The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.
See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now. Greatness appeals to the future. If I can be firm enough to-day to do right, and scorn eyes, I must have done so much right before as to defend me now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appearances, and you always may. The force of character is cumulative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and the field, which so fills the imagination? The consciousness of a train of great days and victories behind. They shed an united light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible escort of angels. That is what throws thunder into Chatham’s voice, and dignity into Washington’s port, and America into Adams’s eye. Honor is venerable to us because it is no ephemeris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day because it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, because it is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, self-derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even if shown in a young person.”
Habits cumulate into Character. Good ‘uns & bad ‘uns.
Be content to change, fail, learn, adjust.
Zig & Zag.
Always progress.
If that is a struggle at the moment, act AS IF…
“That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.”
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