The definition of the word ‘Transcendent’ is to extend beyond the limits of ordinary experience. It has also been described with similar definitions such as the act of going beyond one’s limit and for one to rise to a superior state. The definition that is the most intriguing and inspiring to me is the state of being free from the constraints of the material world. The purpose of this blog is to advocate this idea of freedom from material attachment, and that only through this freedom can one truly achieve inner contentment and peace.
If one researches the origins of Transcendentalism as a movement, one would quickly realizes that it was founded in the early 19th Century in Boston by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson toegether with ‘The Transcendent Club’ American intellectuals such as Henry David Thoreau were strong believers of the potential of the individual and that fundamentally all people are good within. However, people’s conscience is clouded by the material external world, specifically institutions and political parties that corrupt the ‘purity of the individual’. It is believed that Transcendentalism was influenced by Eastern Philosophies and Religions such as Hinduism. Thoreau makes a number of references to Vedantic philosophy in his book Walden referring to the idea of ‘oneness’ or non-duality as shown in the following extract:
In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”
– Extract from Walden by Henry David Thoreau
In this blog I hope to share the works of these great men and women who have led this movement, together with the Eastern Vedantic philosophies that they were most influenced by. Their messages to the masses is as relevant now as it was back then.
The Transcendent 