I come to writing this essay in a melancholic mood, and as ever, I come in search of that elusive something. It is Advent 2021. Advent is the season for waiting and expectation, and I, at this moment in my life find myself waiting. Waiting somewhat against my will. Waiting for the next chapter of my life to begin.
In Christian terms, Advent is when we performatively await the birth of Christ, and eschatologically wait for his second coming. This is the Christian expression of a seemingly archetypal pattern, the pattern of perpetual longing after a communion with the eternal. That feeling that seems to be a universal, that we are all intrinsically alone, and longing not to be, longing to be connected in some ultimate sense to that great totality beyond. It seems that though this longing is a universal, communion remains ever illusory. It seems that Advent is only ever glimpsed and striven for, but never realised.
Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay Nature (1836), draws a sharp distinction between Soul and Nature. For the thirty-three-year-old Emerson, Nature was everything outside of the Soul, which is to say, everything that’s “Not me”. This “Not me”, is the “I” within, the “I” that lies beneath flesh and blood, beneath the known persons of Emerson and of course myself, Lewis. Everything that’s “Not me” encompasses everything your interior “I” observes. Progressing outwards, our “I” meets with thoughts that slouch up from some unknown place, emotions that colour perception, an external persona, and beyond that the whole populated world.
Emerson’s model (at least at this early stage of his life) was a dualistic one, it is two-fold, with an observer, and everything else being observed. Here the Soul is a solitary figure, a “transparent eye-ball” peering out at the cosmos on the other side. Despite this division, it was Emerson’s sense that the Soul was always seeking for unity and oneness. Seeking a final sublimation into transcendental unity, or in Christian terms seeking oneness in Christ. Which is to say seeking the Great Advent.
Gradually however, Emerson did away with this dualistic model and instead emphasises the unity of everything. A unity evident in the entanglement, interrelationship, and interactions of all things in Nature. In rejecting his own dualistic model, he moved away from a separation of Soul and Nature, himself from all that “Not me” beyond. There was no “Not me”, but rather an absolute unity. In ‘Over-soul’, Emerson writes:
“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… We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.”
Emerson’s original conception of Soul, which was akin to Jung’s conception of ‘Ego’, my interior “I”, is ultimately seen by Emerson as too limiting and singular. Do we not contain, as Whitman said, ‘multitudes’? We are all a part of something larger, an ‘Over-soul’, and as such we cannot as Emerson originally assumed set ourselves apart from Nature.
This shift is perhaps best expressed in the Emerson quote, “I am God in nature.” A conception far from his original “transparent eye-ball”, separate and alone. Now Emerson is one with and in all. Not a part of something larger, not a separate something observing the whole, the divine, rather the whole and divine is inextricably within. All sense of separation is illusory.
It is difficult to reconcile this non-dualistic Emersonian conception with the Christian Advent, at least as it has been expressed in orthodox terms. Advent makes more sense alongside Emerson’s original dualistic model; it invites us to recognise our own separation, our estrangement from that transcendental unity, and hope for an ultimate unification at the eschaton. It reinforces duality. And in so doing, it seems to reinforce my own pessimistic sense that the Great Advent will never be realised. Non-dualism invites us to reject the season of Advent, or to put it another way, to recognise that Advent is already within.
Where does this leave us? That it has always been this. It will always be this. There has never not been this. And further, that this cannot even be known intellectually, rather it is intuited as reality. One cannot learn non-duality, it just is, whether you perceive it to be or not. It is difficult to know where to go from here. One leans into this intuited sense of things and feels gratitude.
We of course still operate as it were through the lens of our limited self, the illusion of dualism. But in recognising it as an illusion, we can be at peace in knowing that everything in this moment is always as it should be. The drama continues to unfold. The drama is part of the whole. The drama is perfect.