If you could have a conversation with anyone..

[vulcanlogician]

I would talk with Henry Thoreau about his otherwise vague religious ideas.

I think I'd pick Thoreau, too.

I don't think his religious ideas were all that vague. He was a mystic. But unlike most mystics (who have extraordinary experiences of God or divine spirits) he had extraordinary experiences of nature. To Thoreau, the natural world wass the divine object... just like (to the theist) God is the divine object. I actually like Thoreau's choice of divine object. Mainly because (unlike the aforementioned divine object) the natural world demonstrably exists. You just can't put a price tag on something like that.

Also, I think this bit of wisdom from one of my favorite poets speaks a lot about what was going on with Thoreau's mysticism:

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And some of you have called me aloof, and drunk with my own aloneness,

And you have said, “He holds council with the trees of the forest, but not with men.

He sits alone on hill-tops and looks down upon our city.”

True it is that I have climbed the hills and walked in remote places.

How could I have seen you save from a great height or a great distance?

How can one be indeed near unless he be far?

And others among you called unto me, not in words, and they said,

“Stranger, stranger, lover of unreachable heights, why dwell you among the summits where eagles build their nests? Why seek you the unattainable?

What storms would you trap in your net,

And what vaporous birds do you hunt in the sky?

Come and be one of us.

Descend and appease your hunger with our bread and quench your thirst with our wine.”

In the solitude of their souls they said these things;

But were their solitude deeper they would have known that I sought but the secret of your joy and your pain,

And I hunted only your larger selves that walk the sky.





But the hunter was also the hunted;

For many of my arrows left my bow only to seek my own breast.

And the flier was also the creeper;

For when my wings were spread in the sun their shadow upon the earth was a turtle.

And I the believer was also the doubter; For often have I put my finger in my own wound that I might have the greater belief in you and the greater knowledge of you.





And it is with this belief and this knowledge that I say,

You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields.

That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind.

It is not a thing that crawls into the sun for warmth or digs holes into darkness for safety,

But a thing free, a spirit that envelops the earth and moves in the ether.

If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them.

Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end,

And I fain would have you remember me as a beginning.

Life, and all that lives, is conceived in the mist and not in the crystal. And who knows but a crystal is mist in decay?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58585/58...8585-h.htm

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