![]() ![]() ![]() I had no faith in a divine creator, was opposed to most organized religions, and considered myself a firm agnostic. In the secular America where I’d grown up, God was off-limits as a serious topic. ![]() The idea that we are spiritual beings first, personalities second, that no real separation exists between human life and God, cast a sacred light on existence that I had never seen before. These were eye-opening insights for me, opposed to everything I had been taught. Following the crowd is a mistake, and changing your mind is a very good thing. His insights were radical and paradigm-shifting: human life has a spiritual purpose (to recognize our true nature, evolve from ignorance to self-knowledge) we are each endowed with unique purpose and genius, and our mandate is to unfold our character as passionately, originally, and bravely as possible.Įmerson taught that pain, loss, suffering, and conflict are teachers and guides in disguise, crucial for our awakening and that nonconformity, inconsistency, introversion, stubbornness, quirkiness, and a “little wickedness” are beneficial virtues for self-realization. His big ideas challenged my puny worldview and exposed me to a vision of human potential I had never known existed. I knew very little about Emerson at the time. My job was to hunt down out-of-print reference books, excavate ancient newspaper clips, and transcribe notes from blurry microfiches onto multicolored three-by-five index cards. Professor Packer needed a flunky to do the grunt work on a manuscript she was late in delivering, a study of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s major essays. I was also chronically out of cash, which is what led me to apply for a research assistant’s job working for a visiting professor from Yale named Barbara Packer. Emerson taught that pain, loss, suffering, and conflict are teachers and guides in disguise. Yet what that elusive thing was, exactly, I could not say. When that fall semester started, I was as frustrated, angry, and self-punishing as I had ever been in my life, suffocating in academia, bereft of inspiration, holding my breath-hoping for something important to happen to give me a purpose. I told myself that an advanced degree would help to boost my drooping self-esteem, but that was a fantasy. I acted the part of an all-American overachiever with a promising future ahead of him while inwardly I was a miserable train wreck. The grown-ups juggled alternating masks in different surroundings and I was a two-faced deceiver myself, concealing who I really was-an angry, fatherless, damaged boy. Everywhere I turned, duplicity and hypocrisy were obvious to me as a boy. I’d struggled with confusion since childhood. I was a heartsick twenty-two-year-old graduate student, floundering in academia, panicky about my future, overwhelmed by self-doubt, and terrified I would never discover who I was-really-or why I’d been put on this baffling planet. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.I first fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson at a crisis point in my own life. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. ![]()
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