Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in sorcha_sorensen's LiveJournal:

Sunday, November 14th, 2004
2:15 pm	A Circle of My Own, Part I I promised in notes elsewhere to talk about deciding to start up my own spiritual circle. I have a rather eclectic background. I was raised Protestant, and I was extremely serious about my faith. Although my family was devoted to church and always said grace at meals, there was no talk of religion, God, or spirituality. When I was about 12 or 13, I began reading the Bible daily. By the time I was a freshman in high school, I was having a great deal of religious yearnings, but there was an emptiness. I prayed, studied the Bible, went to church twice on Sunday, and went to prayer group during the week. Still, something was missing. In the summer between my junior and senior year in high school, I had a "born again" experience. The denomination that I was born into didn't teach "born again" experiences, but that's definitely what I had. I went on a four-year plunge into Christian Fundamentalism with great fervor. I was ecstatic. But, gradually, the ecstasy wore off. I was plunged into a deep depression, and I wandered around in a spiritual wasteland, depressed, for years, over a decade. Finally, a kindly minister suggested that I read The Christian Agnostic by Leslie Weatherhead. After reading that book, slowly, I began to build my own faith. Weatherhead's book led me to others. Instead of focusing on what I couldn't believe, I began to look at what I could believe. At first, there wasn't a lot, but I found that I could believe in some sort of higher power, which I called God. Also, I believed that God was basically good. I wasn't too sure of much of anything else, but at least I could start focusing positively, on what I could believe rather than on what I no longer believed. The first leg in my journey to build a circle of my own had begun. Sorcha (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 23rd, 2004
1:21 pm	Each Age Its Own Books After Nature, Emerson believes that the Past is the scholar's best teacher. He feels that books, particularly literature, is perhaps the best way to access the wisdom of the past. "The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded theron; gave it the new arrangement of this own mind, and uttered it again. . . . Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing." I love this! Have we all not read books where the words seemed to sing in our hearts? Have we all not read books where the words seemed muddy and heavy? Books are only as good as the original thoughts and the ability of the writer to convey his/her thoughts to others. Emerson continues: "As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought" Exactly! Emerson himself was a product of his times, and his works show this. His work is sexist. However, I cannot discard his work because of his sexism. Instead, I read his works, translating them into the language of my own age. He wrote in his age; I read in my age. "Each age, it is found, must write its own books." So Mote It Be. We learn from the past; we study the past, but we do not live in the past. We live in the now and write our own books. Sorcha (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 12th, 2004
12:19 pm	A Dream Too Wild? Continuing with Emerson's "The American Scholar" (One could study this essay for a lifetime and not exhaust its riches!): "One is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? A thought too bold; a dream too wild. . . .He shall see that nature is the opposite of soul, answer to it part for part. One is seal and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind." Experienced alchemists and Hermeticists may see resonances between this passage and "The Emerald Tablet" by Hermes Trismegistus: "True, without falsehood, certain and most true, that which is above is the same as that which is below, and that which is below is the same as that which is above, for the performance of miracles of the One Thing. And as all things are from the One, by the meditation of One, so all things have their birth from this One Thing by adaptation." Emerson continues his telling connection to Ancient Wisdom in his essay "Beauty": "Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the system. Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him, and he felt the star. However rash and however falsified by pretenders and traders in it, the hint was true and divine, the soul’s avowal of its large relations, and, that climate, century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography. Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct. Alchemy which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power,—that was in the right direction. All our science lacks a human side." Simplified, what Emerson is saying is that knowledge is worthless in and of itself. Knowledge has value only insofar as it leads us to wisdom, to a connection to the Divine, to a realization that All is One. Emerson was a lifetime student. He had a sizable personal library and was widely read. Still, he said that books are for a scholar's idle times. In this essay, the first teacher is nature. The second teacher is the past, and books are considered the best teachers of the past. Too many of us turn to books first. Today, too many of us turn to the internet first! We don't stop to think, to reflect, to observe. Emerson continues: "'Know thyself' and the modern precept 'Study nature,' become at last one precept." In other words, to know oneself, study nature. So Mote It Be. Sorcha (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 21st, 2004
1:11 pm	Circles and Emerson The concept of circles is important in Emersonian writing. In fact, Emerson wrote an entire essay called "Circles." In "The American Scholar," Emerson wrote: "There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning unto itself." I've been reading a text on Chinese Traditional Medicine, and this concept of a circle returning to itself strikes me as very similar to the Tai Chi symbol of the yin and yang energies folding back into themselves and with each wave of yin having a drop of yang and each wave of yang having a drop of yin. It is known that Emerson did read some in Chinese philosophy. I'm not sure exactly what he read or studied. I'm not even sure what was available during his lifetime, certainly not nearly as much as is available today. Let me look back at the quote and examine it. No beginning. No end. All circling back, endlessly. Emerson continues: "Therein it resembles his [God's] own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find,--so entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without center, without circumference,--in the mass and in the particle, Nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind." So, just as God has no beginning and no end and no boundaries, so Nature. Many of the Transcendentalists believed that the human mind could not fully grasp the concept of God, but they believed that Nature was a reflection of God and that by careful study, communion, and meditation, we could learn from Nature, and, by learning, "grokking," Nature, we could come to know God. How do we do this? Emerson explains: "Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds out how to join two things and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together. . . .It presently learns that since the dawn of history there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind?" Newborn infants do not understand that they are separate from their environment. They "discover" their hands and spend hours studying these hands. They do not understand that mother is separate from self. These concepts are learned. However, if one travels the path of wisdom, one learns that the newborn infant was right. Mother and self are one. All is one. So, we begin life unified, then learn to classify, and, if we open ourselves to wisdom, learn to go back to our beginnings and to see that all truly is one. Sorcha (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 9th, 2004
5:40 am	Emerson a Pagan? Some have said that, at heart, Emerson was a Pagan. Indeed, there is much in his writing to support this allegation. He was raised a Unitarian and served as a Unitarian minister but later left the church. Continuing with my musings on "The American Scholar," Emerson says of nature as the first influence on the scholar, "Every day, the sun: and, after sunset, Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. . . . What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning unto itself." Years ago, when I studied Emerson in school, we were given a list of various Emersonian philosophies. I have scribbled in the margin of my text of this essay, "Openings, Emanation." These are two of Emerson's philosophies. Emanation is a belief that creation emanates from a creator. Spirit and nature are fused, and nature reveals spirit. This is in some ways similar to the maxim, "As above, so below." I no longer have my notes from my college course, only my textbook marginalia. However, the doctrine of openings seems to be something along the order of that knowledge of God, through nature, is available to all who would "open" themselves to it. For some background information on Emerson and American Transcendentalism, see American Transcendentalism. For online copies of many of Emerson's works, see The Online Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sorcha (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 8th, 2004
9:50 am	Introduction: Woman Thinking "In the right state [the scholar] is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" I strive to be Woman Thinking rather than a thinker or parrot of the thinking of others. I do not always succeed, but this is my goal. "Is not indeed every man a student, and do not all things exist for the student's behoof?" --R. W. Emerson, "The American Scholar" I strive also to be a life-long student while I also strive for the maturity and wisdom which come through age and reflection. "Is not the true scholar the only true master?" R. W. Emerson, "The American Scholar" The day that I stop learning, is the day that I begin to die. My only hope in this life time of any degree of mastery is in study and scholarship. On the schools for the scholar, Emerson states, "The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature." And this is as it should be. Nature is our first and best teacher, the school or standard or rule against which all other teaching must be tested. More later. (4 Comments |Comment on this)