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Seven Pillars House of Wisdom > Tags > nature+meditation

Tag: nature+meditation

A Hidden Treasure

Imagine yourself floating in space with outspread limbs. Thus suspended in midair your recumbent form gives itself over to a delicious languor,  and one by one your senses close down. The eyes cease to see and the ears cease to hear. Smell and taste go dormant. Afterimages linger for a time, but in the absence of new stimuli the eidola that haunt the halls of memory slowly fade into oblivion. The void that surrounds you now pervades you. You are dead to the world—and yet you live.

Thoreau, Mystic of Walden and Beyond

Review of Letters to a Spiritual Seeker by Henry David Thoreau, edited by Bradley P. Dean, New York: W.W. Norton, 2004, 192 pp. In this essay, Coleman Barks, today’s leading ‘Voice of Rumi’ in the ‘West’, writes eloquently about Thoreau, as a great American mystic of the 19th century who is, sadly, often a mere historical footnote in a high school or college undergraduate course. More than a meditative man watching the intricacies of life of Walden’s frogs and ducks, more than a fierce proponent of civil disobedience, more than the occasional harborer of runaway slaves, as his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson put it:“ He [Thoreau] had a great contempt for those who made no effort to gauge accurately their own powers and weaknesses, and by no means spared himself, of whom he said that a man gathers materials to erect a palace, and finally concludes to build a shantee [shanty] with them.”* 

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