Magical Spontaneity

The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves, like all ripe fruit, from our experience and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows wither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, and so is society, and so is the world.

The soul looketh steadily forwards, creating a world for her, leaving worlds behind her. She has no dates, no rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. The soul knows only the soul; the web of events is the flowing robe in which she is clothed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1841 essay, The Over-soul. As we travel on this physical journey, we know the fruit of all of our relationships will ripen and then change into something else.

Emotions pour through us as we react to these changes. We forget the spontaneity of our soul and try to use reason to justify the sense of cause and effect we create. We overlook the discipline within our own spontaneity, and overlook the spontaneity of nature.

We feel the miraculous spontaneity of the sun, and watch the magical spontaneity of flowers, bees and the earth in all its glory, but we take them for granted. Nonetheless, spontaneity has its own discipline. It is truth in action. That discipline is the robe Emerson talks about.

So where does the wind of the soul blow all these fruits of spontaneity? Religion paints a shadowy picture. Faith, they say, will be the vehicle that puts that fruit back on our barren emotional trees of life. But there is more to us than faith in fear. Perhaps most of our fruity relationships never leave us. Perhaps the fruit is born again and again in the magical spontaneity of an individual reincarnational cycle.

Perhaps the materialization of our physical personality, and all other personalities is just one layer in that cycle. The other layers are not readily known to our ego, but our inner self retains the identity and knowledge of those layers, and uses them with the multidimensional discipline that exists within us.