Book Review - Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet, and popular philosopher, and considered the leader of the Transcendentalist movement.
He studied and lectured on various subjects and from that he wrote a number of essays that were influential not only in his country for generations but also in Europe.
After having read this essay, Self-Reliance, I would have called it Self-Trust or Self-Loyalty, because the message I got from it was not so much about being Self-Reliant and not needing anything from other people but more about being honest and loyal to oneself and trusting on oneself no matter what.
These are the top ideas I got from this essay:
1. He talks about a voice that we all have inside, that speaks from our heart and some thoughts emerge from that, and a genius is the person who believes in that voice. In our times, we may find ourselves surrounded by so much information that influences our thinking and makes us believe what we want that we ignore that voice. However, that voice keeps coming back to us.
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost...”
2. These words are, to me, what captures the essence of the essay:
“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide…”
One common experience most of us have in our careers, in our personal development journey, in personal relationships or even in our relationship with money, is that we fall for admiration for somebody that we consciously or unconsciously perceive as superior, wiser, better or more enlightened. This is when we start acting like them, repeating their exact words or habits.
Other times we may feel envious of their life, what they do, have or their personality.
One expression of this imitation is when some people go from program to program, from course to course, in a way that is not sustainable.
In either case, we are not honouring who we truly are as we are. We all can definitely learn from others, but instead of becoming their followers we can integrate those learnings into our unique expression of wisdom. We can’t easily tell when we are in that envy or imitation state until we wake up and realise that we’re not being authentic.
“We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents”
3. Many times when we are by ourselves we think and feel what we would our lives to look like, what we would love to become and do, but then when we interact with the world those thoughts become hindered by learned limitations such as: that won’t make you any money, you need to be popular in social media, you need a degree, you need a lot of money, you’re not an expert, etc.
So, we end up conforming to what already exists, a more conventional way of living at the expense of our own dreams.
“These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood (individuality) of every one of its members…
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso (whoever) would be a man must be a nonconformist.... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”
4. Emerson talks about his own nature being what’s truly sacred to him and expresses clearly his view on “good” and “bad”. This is a great lesson for us to notice in our everyday use of language because normally what people call “good” or “bad” is probably based on what society, religion or another perceived authority defines it as.
“No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature…
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong (is) what is against it.”
5. One of the biggest challenges we face when we acknowledge our authenticity and want to live congruent with that is our immediate environment, and setting boundaries around us may not be welcomed by those who are the closest to us.
“I shun (ignore) father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me… we cannot spend the day in explanation.”
In my experience coaching clients, I’ve noticed this is more common in women, and in some cases they may have been married for 20+ years and making a radical change involves consequences that they are not willing to face. They may choose to edit their dreams or be apologetic when they take time to do that thing that fulfills them, and often this comes from their deserve level learned in childhood.
Emerson sounds to be committed to explaining himself to be himself.
6. We all have heard so many times ‘don’t do what other people think, be yourself’, and I’ve said it myself but there are situations where it’s not that easy to follow that. If we started a new school when we were teenagers, for example, we wouldn’t have wanted to stand out, we wanted to blend in, at least at the beginning, while gaining more confidence and learning our way around. Also as adults, sometimes we do group thinking without realising.
We can’t easily live 100% isolated from the outside world, we benefit from engaging and interacting with others, in many ways.
“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Emerson says that there’s greatness in the man that can protect his independence even in the middle of a crowd. To me, that needs to be preceded by deep and solid knowledge of oneself and then being congruent with that.
7. It is easy to fall into the trap of being loyal to past versions of ourselves, which may or may not involve external opinions, but we may be attached to an old version of ourselves because that’s not comfortable but at least is a place we know.
“The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word...
Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
To be great is to be misunderstood”
If we are in a self development journey, that will require us to break through that self imposed barrier and to be willing to sound contradictory to others because it could just be part of our development to learn something and our old ideas become obsolete.
He cites the examples of great people who have been misunderstood, such as: Pythagoras ,Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.
8. Emerson talks about Intuition, he says it’s the primary wisdom and that everything else are things that we learn. He seems to believe that Intuition doesn’t always make sense to the rational mind.
“We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.”
Many of us were not taught in our upbringing to listen to our intuition and what we then find confronting as adults is that we don’t know the difference between the voice of intuition or something we learned from somebody else. Also, when we finally learn to listen to our intuition, it doesn’t always sound logical so we disregard it.
9. Emerson believed that time and space came from our psychology, which is something we experience when time flies while we are enjoying ourselves but slows down when we are bored or are somewhere we don't want to be. He also talks about the soul, which is something he talks about in other writings. I agree with him in that where we put our soul it feels light, illumination, and when we don’t it can feel dark or grey.
“Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night…”
10. This idea from Emerson is something that has become more popular for us as mindfulness and meditation movements have too. Again, they are some of those words that we repeat but don’t always practice.
“...man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
It’s a great exercise to consider, every time we feel nostalgic or anxious, we can ask ourselves if we’re fully present and appreciating what is, as is.
11. In these words, Emerson talks about how the soul is almost seeing cause and effect from above, which we can’t always understand when we are acting out passion and emotions. We all have had this hindsight experience when we realise “if this terrible thing had not happened I wouldn’t have achieved this…” .
“The soul raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.”
Instead of always reacting to events or people, I’ve suggested clients to pause for a second and ask ourselves, what’s the lesson I need to learn here?
12. He expresses this idea in different ways in the essay, which is about trusting the being with ourselves in silence, listening to our own voice and letting that be the guide instead of a preacher’s. Many of the judgments that we have today about how we should live, how family and relationships should be come from religious beliefs that we may not be aware of.
“We must go alone. I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
13. Emerson says that it’s up to us to set the boundaries in our relationship with others, and that people will cross those boundaries as much as we allow them to. I see this is particularly true in what we do with our time, if we are not protective about it we waste it and then we become resentful with ourselves.
“Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at once at thy closet door, and say, ‘Come out unto us.’ But keep thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man can come near me but through my act. “What we love that we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love.”
14. Here, once again, Emerson talks about individuality and that a firm self-reliance may disrupt the world around us because once we hear that inner voice that speaks from our heart, the cost of following what we hear may differ or go against set structures for religion, education, ambitions and other areas of life. And as I see it, this is the reason why many people prefer to stay where they are, they don’t want to pay the price of chage.
“It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.”
15. This could have been controversial at the time he wrote this because he was raised in a religious family. He’s basically saying that some people who pray are asking for something on the outside to bring a miracle to their lives. Again, he’s advocating to, instead, connect with their inner guide and take actions.
“In what prayers do men allow themselves! That which they call a holy office is not so much as brave and manly. Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous.”
16. Emerson says that offering sympathy to others, and lamenting with them about something that happens is not helpful. In our modern times, we’d say that that behaviour creates a victim mentality which is ultimately not helpful compared to gaining back trust in oneself.
“Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is the want of self- reliance: it is infirmity of will. Regret calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our sympathy is just as base…
We come to them who weep foolishly, and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more in communication with their own reason.”
After reading this essay, I have no doubt the powerful influence this had on many people because for many years people have been trying to express their individuality while they may have been treated like sheep where they all follow rules until the day they wake up.