Emerson on Ecstasy

"Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear."

Glad to the brink of fear.  So ecstatic you can hardly stand it.  And from such an ordinary thing as a winter walk.

"Life is ecstasy," says Emerson.  Not euphoria--not that occasional feeling that overtakes us when some wonderful thing happens.  No, ecstasy--a feeling that emerges from within, in response to the ordinary events of life.

Emerson lived no charmed life in which all was smooth going.  On the contrary, his ecstasy came on the heels of terrible, terrible tragedy.  The death of Ellen, his first wife, whom he adored, when he was only twenty-seven years old and they had been married only two years.  And the death of his son, Waldo, at the age of five, which caused Emerson such grief as to cry out in a letter to his friend Margaret Fuller, "Shall I ever dare to love anything again?"

But Emerson did love again.  He came to love all of life, until everything around him awakened in him a feeling of rapture.  Doing nothing special, just going about his everyday affairs, he found his spirits spiralling into ecstasy.

Where do such rapturous feelings, such a sense of meaning, come from?

The cliche, "You are your own source of happiness," is a truth to which we all doff our hats.  One might equally say, you are your own meaning.  For Emerson it became a lived experience.

"Our first mistake," Emerson explains, "is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance." Do you catch what a reversal this is of the usual way humans think?  We look to people, things, events to make us happy.  What Emerson saw is that it isn’t circumstances that bring us joy.  It’s we who bring joy to our circumstances.  It is we who make our meaning.

Emerson quotes Henry David Thoreau: "Surely joy is the condition of life." We may be largely, even completely, out of touch with it, but there is deep within all of us an unspeakable joy.  Circumstances don’t create it, but circumstances, if we will allow them to, can awaken us to it.  Even when everything goes wrong, our circumstances can lead us to an awareness of joy as our basic condition.  This is what makes life meaningful.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Anna Quindlen reminisces about summers spent at the beach: "My fantasies of an endless summer always ended badly.  I went to dances at the local firehouse, with a consuming need shining so brightly from my light eyes in my tanned face that only the boldest or blindest asked me to dance.  Mostly I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life.  It never crossed my mind," Quindlen says, "that that person could be me."

Intellectually, I have known for years that no one could make me happy--that happiness can only come from within.  But for a long time, knowing this meant nothing in terms of my everyday reality.  Intellectually I told myself that happiness comes from within, but in practice I looked to people, things, circumstances to make me happy.
I was like a businessman who walks into a bar after a day at the office, sits down, and orders a drink.  He grabs a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the counter, and as he takes his first sip, he hears a voice say, "That's a beautiful tie, is that silk?  The women must love you."
Wondering who would make such a strange comment, he looks around and doesn't see anyone near him who could've been speaking to him.  With a shrug, he finishes his drink & peanuts and orders another.  Next he hears a voice say, "Those shoes are stylin', my man.  Are they Italian leather?  They look grrrreat."

He whirls around to again see no one near him.  He glances nervously around and then at his shoes, which he tucks self-consciously under the stool.  A little wierded out, he grabs another handful of peanuts and orders a third drink.  This time the voice continues with, "That suit looks fantastic.  Is it an Armani?  You are so G.Q.!"

He immediately calls the bartender over and says, "Look.  I keep hearing these voices telling me how great my tie, my shoes, and my suit look--What's up with that?  Am I going crazy?"
"Oh," the bartender nonchalantly replies, "those are just the peanuts."
"The peanuts?!?" the astonished man asks, staring at the bowl beside him.

"Yeah," replies the bartender, ". . . they’re complimentary."
You know, all the compliments in the world couldn’t make me happy.  In fact, they had just the opposite effect.  They made me more aware of my inadequacies.

When someone really praises you, do you find yourself feeling a little uneasy?  Do you experience a certain sheepishness, almost wishing they wouldn’t say such wonderful things about you?

For years I longed to be admired, thought well of, valued.  I wanted to be loved.  I thought this would give my life meaning.  But let someone be admiring of me, tell me how highly they thought of me, really value me, truly love me . . . and I suddenly found myself thinking not of my wonderful qualities but of my flaws.

Isn’t that a strange reaction?  Someone praises you, and what immediately comes to mind is a slew of arguments to prove you really aren’t that good after all.  It’s as if there’s something wrong with feeling ecstatically good about yourself.  You’re not allowed to feel that good.  It isn’t modest, isn’t humble, isn’t how you’re supposed to feel.

Why did it make me downright uncomfortable to feel really good about myself when someone complimented me?  Because although I talked about being my own source of happiness, I hadn’t ever actually done what Carl Jung advises: "Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. . .  Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens." Meaning comes from within.

"You are my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased," declares the heavenly voice.  Well, that’s okay as long as we’re talking about Jesus or the Buddha.  But what if the heavenly voice were to whisper within me that I am a beloved son who is well pleasing?  Why, that’s blasphemy!  Oh, if there’s a God, we hope that God is a little bit pleased with us; but God couldn’t possibly be well pleased.  It’s okay to feel "okay" about yourself, but it’s not okay to feel ecstatic.

If we are at all in tune with ourselves, we realize that there’s always been an inner voice apologizing for what we’re doing and how we do it--indeed, apologizing for who we are.  The moment any feeling of ecstasy arises within us, a little voice whispers that we really aren’t all that wonderful, all that lovable, and we don’t deserve to feel this good.  And so we go back to wallowing in the sadness and disappointment we grew up with, or at least to feeling mediocre.  Life loses its meaning.
It’s what we believe about ourselves that’s our problem.  Our refusal to believe in the ecstasy at our center stops it from spilling out into our everyday circumstances.  It robs us of meaning.

Emerson explained, "Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them." To accept the affirmations of the soul instead of denying them is no easy thing.  For one thing, it’s painful, because it means going against all of the training we’ve had in restricting our joy.  You have a real fight on your hands when you start choosing to feel good instead of feeling down or defeated.  It takes courage to go against that.

For years I wasn’t up for it.  I wanted to fight with everyone else, but not with my own feelings of despondency, my own disbelief in myself.  I was like a distressed person who came to a Master for help.  The Master asked, "Do you really want a cure?"

The distressed person responded, "If I did not, would I bother to come to you?"

"Oh yes, most people do," said the Master.

"What for?" asked the distressed person.

Said the Master, "Not for a cure.  That’s painful.  For relief."

Turning to his disciples the Master explained, "People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favor progress, provided they can have it without change."

"Be very careful what you set your heart upon," warned Emerson, "for you will surely have it." Set your heart on how imperfect you are, how many weaknesses you have, how inadequate you are, how unfortunate your circumstances are, what a tragic mistake your life has been--and that’s what you’ll live out.  Set your heart on how wonderful you are, and wonderful you will increasingly prove to be.  This is what faith is really all about.  What you set your heart upon becomes your meaning.

To fight the good fight of faith isn’t easy.  As Bruce Barton, the author, once said, "What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get people to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage."

It comes down to this.  What blocks happiness in us is our tendency to face into life’s shadows.  The trick is to walk toward the light.  If you walk toward the light, the shadows are always behind you.

But even when we at last tap into the happiness within us and can in large measure live the truth that we are each our own source of happiness, to let the ecstasy flow is another matter.  It’s a step beyond.

Emerson believed that ecstasy is the essence of our humanity--that to feel our own ecstatic center is life’s meaning.  The whole of reality served to awaken a rapturous response from his inner being.  The most ordinary things invoked an ecstasy that was already within him.  Yet he saw that instead of becoming joyously and deliriously drunk on it, at the very most we take a little sip every once in awhile.  The rest of the time we content ourselves with feeling pretty good.

I suspect many of us find ourselves holding back from letting the inner happiness we have come to experience fiz up into an efferverscent joy.  We allow a measure of it into our day, but we don’t yet live every day in a manner that’s ecstatically, rapturously joyful.

Emerson didn’t come to a state of ecstasy overnight either.  He hovered on the brink for a long time before he finally plunged into it.  He explained that although joy is our natural state, we are in the habit of crushing it, burying it, hiding from it.

Before ecstasy could become Emerson’s continuous state, he had to develop the habit of enthusiasm and practice a workaday embracing of delight.

As Emerson resisted his resistance to feeling fantastic and opted for delight, something shifted inside him.  There came a point when the experience of rapture burst into full consciousness.  This became the central insight of his life--an insight that not only never left him but, as biographer Robert Richardson says of him, "never lost its sweet urgency, its sensuous hold on him, its ability to lift the common moments of everyday life in the updrafts of awareness that readers are always wanting to call mystical experience.  At the core of Emerson’s life from now on is this willed surrender, this giving oneself over to the unregarded epiphanies of every blessed day." Emerson had found his meaning.

Living intensely, with all our channels wide open, takes willed surrender.  It takes giving ourselves over to the joy within, forming a habit of feeling rapturous, embracing ecstasy instead of contenting ourselves with feeling good.  This is what makes life meaningful.

It’s seeing, as did Emerson, every day as the day of creation and the day of judgment.  There’s no time to wait for "someday;" we must recognize that someday is today.  Now, in this moment, I either choose to surrender to the ecstasy at my core, or I choose a half-life.

Emerson once said, "We see God face to face every hour." In nature, in the people around us, in the circumstances of our lives--if we but opened our eyes, we would awaken to the sheer rapture of everyday life.  Or as he stated in a letter to Margaret Fuller, "Heaven walks among us ordinarily muffled in such triple or tenfold disguises that the wisest are deceived and no one suspects the days to be gods."

What stops us feeling the ecstasy of life is that, as Emerson explained in a letter to Walt Whitman, we trim our sails to the current breeze.  We fit in with the way things are supposed to be.  And to do so is, in Emerson’s words, to be "already dead."

Emerson disciplined himself to stop trimming his sails.  He learned to live three sheets to the wind.  As Richardson observes, "The words that come most readily and most frequently to Emerson as he describes his life in nature are ‘delight’ . . . and ‘wild.’ He uses the language of vision and rapture.  He speaks of light and delight, of wild delight, of wildness, of exhilaration, of gladness . . . ." Here is where meaning is found.  Emerson emphasized the beauty of the universe, says this biographer, "as a wild delight.  This inner wildness, this habit of enthusiasm, this workday embracing of the Dionysian is quintessential Emerson.  He is wild or he is nothing."

I know I’ve trimmed my sails a lot in life.  I’ve been afraid of wild delight and held back.  For years something in me balked at feeling this fantastic, at least for very long.  I mean, who goes around feeling like a million dollars all the time?  It’s something you just don’t do.  So I contented myself with feeling happy, with occasional bursts of ecstasy.
Yet ecstasy continues to knock at the door.  It beckons us to embrace it and find meaning.

Perhaps in the end we shall have to open it.  Perhaps we shall finally have to accept, as Emerson wrote to Sam Ward, that we belong to our life--it doesn’t belong to us.  And this sense of being captivated by our life is what makes it meaningful.

We belong to it, and ultimately it must claim us.  And when it does, we shall not only be glad to the brink of fear; we shall be enveloped in ecstasy.  Our life will have become meaningful.