ISBN: 1-931816-03-4
ISBN 13: 978-1-931816-03-8
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Excerpt from "Henry David Thoreau"

Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) is an archetypal figure. We have lived lives like his―or will. His is a universal quest pursued with fervent single-mindedness to pluck out from the heart of the universe the secret of its mystery. Alone―with no guru (Emerson disappointed him grievously because of his esthetic approach to life), no encouragement.

Thoreau is the grimly serious, impassioned, defiant young man who sets out on a pilgrimage to discover the meaning of life and is determined to let nothing stand in his way. He seeks to achieve perfection.

He becomes a pilgrim to himself―to his new self, to the life he has resolved to bring into being. He wants to discover all the possibilities of becoming new-born and to report his findings back to men. As he will do in Walden.

The journals he wrote in his early twenties anticipate the themes and spirit of his famous autobiography and reflect his first stirrings of spiritual hunger. From the outset we note this craving for the transcendental, for mystical knowledge. To begin with, his need for solitude:

It is the ego-self, the creature-consciousness, that he recognizes as the enemy. All his short life (he died at 44) he was struggling against it in this sharp, clear knowledge ... although sometimes, in hating it, he will turn his anger against men and their world.

People seemed to be living, he wrote, but are really dead. Even his once-esteemed mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, lived a shadow life. As he himself did. He did not exclude himself in the general fall. How can he awake? His two years at Walden was his attempt to awaken himself with his own hands....

Excerpt from "The Quest - Walden"

Did he attain his goal at Walden? No, but he had found a way of life which supported him in the years to follow. He had gained self‑knowledge, courage, conviction. As he put it:

This is what happened to Thoreau. As early as twenty he yearned to live in Walden and discover himself-discover a world he was not able to find at home. He goes on: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

This again is Thoreau to the life, a principle he followed not only at Walden but through his whole career. The mystic hears a secret music and obeys rhythms of his own. Gradually the music increases, the rhythms get stronger, and the inner symphony takes shape. But at the same time we cease to hear the music which our contemporaries are calling the truth.

We don't defy and negate them, lest they turn upon us and make our path impossible until we are strong enough to cope with them. In the early years, the early months particularly, we have to deal gently with our family and our peers so that they don't become riled at our strange ways and make it too difficult even to begin. We have to learn the art of accommodating ourselves to some extent, all along the way, to the people around us. Otherwise they may make things onerous and the mystical path is difficult enough....

Excerpt from Walt Whitman chapter,
"The 'Self' in 'Song of Myself'"

When Leaves of Grass appeared, it marked the emergence of a major talent, an authentic new voice in world literature. We have to assume, as already noted, that some momentous personal revelation accounted for the transformation in Walt Whitman's outlook-a mystical experience―which corroborated and vindicated him at the deepest levels of his being. And his "Song of Myself" would―inevitably―be a song of everyone's Self.

Already Whitman is taking his place in the long line of mystics who, age upon age, confirm and clarify each other's essential teachings.

To repeat: the "self" celebrated here is not the ordinary, phenomenal self of Whitman but the transcendental "I" consciousness, the Mystical Self, the Cosmic Mind. While the radiance is still upon him he writes down his revelation.

We cannot truly believe in something unless we experience it. Faith is not the same thing as conviction. And conviction does not come unless we know. This is the unique claim―the surpassing importance―of mysticism: that truths only conjecturable by the intellect are known by the suddenly awakened intuitive power. "You shall know the Truth," says Christ, "and the Truth shall make you free." Not know it by mere intellect, or as we know things by sense perception. Rather to know by supernal insight, immediate knowledge, directly and mystically arrived at. Then we shall be free.

The "argument of the earth" refers to the questionings and demonstrations of the empirical intellect, of which Whitman has had enough. The deeper insight comes from the depths of pure being, the wellspring of Knowledge Absolute of which the self he has now known is constituted....

Note: For additional excerpts see our "Words of Wisdom" archives under " Mysticism."