Mindblowing Self-Reliance
INsights 080, Friday 13th June 2025

In the last few days I've been revisiting one of my favourite essays: Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson, written in 1841.

The resonance has been so profound for me this time around that I've felt like I need an outlet to talk about it with others in some detail.

So, in addition to this newsletter, where I'll simply introduce Emerson and share some short extracts, I'll be hosting a live webinar on Monday 16th June at 7:30pm UK time to provide some analysis and reflections on the profound insights from this famous work, as well as facilitate discussion and Q&A.

We’ll be touching on the key themes of God-centredness, intuition, authenticity, nonconformity, truth, courage and originality.

To register for the live session or for the recording, click here.

So who was Emerson anyway?

He was an American philosopher, writer, and former church minister who broke away from the religious and intellectual conventions of his time. Unlike many of his contemporaries, who relied on tradition, dogma, and external authority, Emerson championed the primacy of individual intuition, inner experience, and a direct, personal relationship with the divine. He believed that each person carries within them a spark of the universal spirit and that true wisdom comes from self-reliance - hence the name of the essay - not conformity.

Given his deeply Christian environment, Emerson's view of Jesus is particularly noteworthy. To Emerson, Jesus was not God, but someone who realised God - and that, he believed, was possible for every person. In his famous 1838 Divinity School Address, Emerson boldly rejected the dominant idea of Jesus as the final or exclusive revelation of God, criticising the church for turning his vibrant, inner message into a rigid, external religion.

If you're familiar with any of my work, then you might already start to see why I like this guy so much!

As for the essay itself, his prose is nothing short of poetic. His message is gripping. The implications are mindblowing.

I'll go into my full commentary - including how this is all relevant to us today - in Monday's webinar, God willing.

But I'll leave you with a selection of just three of my favourite extracts from the ~10,000 word essay.

The three titles as well as highlights are mine, and I've broken the passages up into smaller paragraphs for easier reading.

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Trusting and acting on your intuitions

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none.

This sculpture in the memory is not without preestablished harmony. The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made manifest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay [happy!] when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no muse befriends; no invention, no hope.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

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Not being afraid to change your mind in public

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. [...]

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. 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 to-day.— ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

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Cultivating absolute presence with God

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.

Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.

If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. 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; and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it satisfies nature in all moments alike.

But 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.

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If you'd like to read the full essay, especially if you're joining Monday's webinar, click here.

Until next time.

Peace.

Iqbal

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