What is Real?

"THE VICTOR: Man is spirit--this is all man needs to know; and spirit is triumphant over matter."
White Eagle, The Quiet Mind

Another past life flashback: The details of this story are a little fuzzy around the edges, but the gist is clear.

Some of my favorite books as a young girl were the Louisa May Alcott classics. I read and re-read Little Woman, Jo's Boys, All of them. I was all of the characters. I knew all of the characters in real life. I guess that is one thing that makes a classic.

Later I got politically excited by Thoreau, but never warmed to his as a person. Emerson's poetry wasn't for me (I loved Whitman), but Emerson's essays had that perfect blend of intellectual, rebellion and something different.

The 'different' was the idea of the direct connection to the spirit. I encountered Emerson at the same time I was meeting Eastern Religions and philosophies. I couldn't get enough. And even in those days of the early sixties, ante-internet, all the original sources were readily available to me. When Emerson and Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller and Channing, and the original members of the Concord School of Philosophy met in the barn behind the Alcott house, the meeting of East and West was rather profoundly revolutionary, and Transcendentalism was born.

Meeting the work of Rudolf Steiner and having the opportunity to know John Gardner and Francis Edmunds and even walk Walden Pond with them and my father, brought me closer and closer to understanding that I was a Transcendentalist.

Louisa' story, Sewing our Transcendental Wild Oats, was the story of the disaster at Fruitlands. The transcendentalists, joined by some utopian Europeans, decided to make a self-sustaining community, with perfect lofty communal ideals, growing all their own food, bringing together thee best minds and so on. Certainly a precurser to the communes of the sixties.

Emerson abstained. He couldn't see it working. They did it without him. A whole group of families and single men made their utopian farm and were it not for the generosity of  Emerson, they would have starved to death the very first winter. It sounds like instead of harvesting the grain on the right days, they were involved in deep discussions about philosophy.

Emerson's brilliant comment which I remembered many times in the sixties was 'If one man can't get his practical life in order, then how could it possibly work better to have ten or a hundred of such men doing the same together?' (that is a paraphrase)

So, one day I was living in southern New Hampshire and a friend from Emerson College was coming to his Groton School reunion. I was picking him up at his mother-in-law's house and then bringing him to NH for a visit. I got lost in the woodsy suburbs. Finally finding her house, near Concord, I arrived earlier than my friend. I went out for a walk and had a total strange out of body experience. I was seeing the history of the land that I was walking on.

Returning to the house, I asked the woman, "Where am I?' she kept telling me the address and saying it was the right house. "No, Where is this?"  I persisted. Finally she gave me a look, and said "This whole suburb was once, for a short time, a community called Fruitlands and they chose this land because it had been sacred to the Indians who previously inhabited it. I almost started to cry. I had certainly been there before.

Sometimes I meet new people and have the flash "Transcendentalist. Happy to see you again after all this time."

I would suppose this is a fairly common experience. You?