The Inner Sky, The Inner Light

The Inner Sky

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition

shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner—what is it?

if not intensified sky,

hurled through with birds and deep

with the winds of homecoming.

– Rainer Maria Rilke –

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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What follows is a excerpt from portions of an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul.” Philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson was a lead figure in the American Transcendentalist movement of the 1800s and an influence on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and many others. Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond was built on land owned by Emerson, and Emerson delivered the eulogy at Thoreau’s funeral in 1862.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles.

Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one.

… All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie, — an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.  From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson –

Photo by Alex Caceres on Unsplash