Unitarian minister Emerson developed the idea of nature’s shared consciousness — Daily Maverick
In the United States, Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson developed in the 19th century the idea that people, animals, plants, rivers and possibly the entire Earth are manifestations of a shared consciousness. As Daily Maverick reports, the thinker believed that the boundary between God, nature and the deepest part of the human self is not impenetrable.
Emerson was born in 1803 into a family of New England ministers, studied at Harvard Divinity School and was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1829. He took up the pulpit of Boston’s Second Church. Unitarians rejected the dogma of the Trinity and the Calvinist doctrine of innate human sinfulness, emphasizing reason, morality and the human nature of Jesus Christ.
Leaving the ministry
In 1832, Emerson left the ministry, in part because he could no longer administer communion in accordance with his own beliefs. In his view, Christianity had turned a living encounter with the divine into a religion about events of the distant past.
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In a 1838 address to graduates of Harvard Divinity School, he criticized “historical Christianity” for its excessive focus on the figure of Jesus. Emerson argued that such a tradition attributed a divine nature to one person while denying it to everyone else. The reaction from church circles was harsh: he was condemned from Unitarian pulpits, and Harvard effectively excluded him for nearly three decades.
The concept of the Over-Soul
In the essay “The Over-Soul,” published in 1841, Emerson described a universal reality in which individual consciousness participates. People may appear separate, but at the deepest level, according to his concept, the individual person exists within something incomparably greater.
Emerson viewed the usual notion of the personal self as a temporary manifestation of universal consciousness. He linked this realization to moments when the customary distinction between the observer and what is observed disappears. In this approach, polluting a river or destroying a forest would mean harming not an external object, but the broader life of which humans are a part.
