I have been studying American Literature lately (and again I guess, since I kind of majored in English in college) and have just finished a series of lectures on Ralph Waldo Emerson...
One of the lectures was based on his essay, Circles and has a very similar premise as Indra's Net. Read this for yourself and let me know what you think.
"THE EYE is the first circle; the horizon which it
forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is
repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the
world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose
centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our
lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we
have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory
character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace,
that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship
to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there
is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always
another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."
"Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet."
ReplyDeleteI've seen this quote before, just never knew where it came from.
Emerson has some pretty cool things to say. +1 for Concord, Massachusetts.
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