(August 18, 2021 at 12:59 pm)HappySkeptic Wrote:(August 18, 2021 at 12:46 pm)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: ‘Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson
BTW, great quote, by a leading theologian, philosopher and abolitionist activist from the 1800s. He was Unitarian - and still considered an important part of my UU church's roots (though the UU is no longer Christian).
Emerson believed in something called "The Oversoul" - an idea that we are all mystically connected, and this connection is his concept of God. Complete nonsense, but far more progressive than the Christianity of his time.
I love Emerson. (Are you a fan?)
From one vantage point, the Oversoul can simply be seen as a oneness that exists between everything. Like a tree. We tend to think of a tree as one discrete object. But it isn't. It can be divided into many, many subparts. But these subparts harmonize into a whole that we call a tree. Emerson thought that every separate "part" of the universe harmonized into a single whole like that.
"A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.... Of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation." --R.W.E.