Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hinduism, the Old Testament, and the Oversoul
In “Picasso Was Right,” I quoted Picasso’s beautifully articulated observation that “the purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life from our souls.” After writing that blog, I found myself continuing to think about Picasso’s words, and that led me to think about what we mean when we talk about having a soul.
Of course, not everyone believes that human beings have souls. By definition, the soul is immortal. Some people believe we exist only as long as our physical bodies do, that each life starts with birth and ends with death. To believe that we have a soul, we have to believe there is a part of each of us that we cannot perceive through our senses and that has eternal life.
I am Jewish, and while I was growing up I never heard a rabbi, my parents, or other family members talk about the soul and eternal life. I learned the Ten Commandments and about loving strangers—foreigners—as myself. I also learned that it is important to live an ethical life.
My religious and familial education taught me that we should be compassionate and ethical because God is pleased when we treat other human beings respectfully and compassionately and displeased if we don’t. I’m not an expert on Jewish theology, so I don’t know if the soul is part of Jewish doctrine; I know only that I was never taught about it.
Yet as far back as I can remember, I knew the word soul and understood it to describe an immortal, invisible part of us that religious people believe in. I also knew that the soul is connected to God. Somehow it seemed true to me that each of us has a soul, even though no one had ever formally addressed the subject with me.
The first time I remember discussing the soul was in high school when we studied transcendentalism and read a poem and an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Transcendentalism, our teacher explained, was a philosophy that emphasized going beyond the physical world we generally think of as the “real world” and using our intuition to find spiritual truth. Emerson put it this way: “What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
The poem we read was “Brahma,” named after the Hindu god of creation:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Emerson’s poem expresses his belief in the immortality of the soul—that death is not really death (“If the red slayer think he slays, /Or if the slain think he is slain, /They know not well the subtle ways / I keep, and pass, and turn again”). It also expresses his belief in the unity of all things, even those that to our earthly perception appear to be opposites (shame and blame, the slayer and the slain, far or forgot and near, shadow and sunlight).
Emerson’s essay “The Over-Soul” defines the oversoul as the spirit that connects the soul of each of us to all other souls and to God. Although the term oversoul isn’t mentioned in “Brahma,” the concept is intrinsic to the poem’s meaning because it is the oversoul that unites all and everything and, like the individual souls it unites, it is eternal. The poem is written in the voice of this eternal unity.
From the moment I read “Brahma” and “The Over-Soul,” they spoke to me. I found Emerson’s writing inspiring. I loved the language of the poem and felt Emerson was expressing what I’d always felt: that there is something beyond the material world that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear. Just as in my childhood I’d felt that each of us has a soul, on learning about the concept of the oversoul I felt that there is a spirit connecting all of us to each other and to God.
Indeed, I believe that the existence of the oversoul is the spiritual basis for the Old Testament’s instruction to love strangers as ourselves. Leviticus says we (the Jewish people) must do this because we were strangers—foreigners—in Egypt. This shared experience should make us kind and empathetic to all strangers. But the reason we need to love strangers as ourselves is not only because we have been strangers and know the need for kindness and empathy; we must love strangers as ourselves because on the deepest level we are part of each other: “Love the stranger as yourself” because the stranger is yourself.
