The New Transcendentalism

In Nature, Emerson introduces us to his experiences of "ordinary ecstasy":

Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God....

For the New Transcendentalist, the significance of such moments lies in the way in which they augment an individual's consciousness--endowing it with various degrees of capaciousness. "Transcendence" is not an escape from mortal existence; it is, instead, an expansion and intensification of it.

The revelation Thoreau achieved on Mount Katahdin, a revelation he clearly believed was one of life's "essential facts," stemmed from his acute sense of the inherent strangeness, the fundamental "otherworldliness" of matter. A seemingly paradoxical sentence in Walden precisely explains his experience on the mountain: "Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations"...Thoreau felt the prophetic impulse very keenly...But in Wild Fruits his brand of prophecy manifests itself in a unique manner: by bringing wildness out of the wilderness; or, more properly, by locating wildness within civilization, in "little oases," as he terms them in the book's "European Cranberry" section. In these holy places, these natural temples, each of us is able to implement the Transcendentalist's Imperative [articulated by Emerson in Nature's threshold question: "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?"] by learning life's great lessons ourselves, becoming our own prophet, and not having to rely on the mediated testimony of prophets from preceding generations. [from Bradley P. Dean's "Introduction" to Thoreau's Wild Fruits].

The somewhat casual and imprecise use of the term "prophet" in Transcendentalist writings goes back to the founding generation's reliance upon Christian as opposed to Islamic literature. By contrast, the majoritarian interpretation of the inherited dogma of Muhammad as the "seal" of prophecy obliged Muslim intellectuals and pietists to think much more creatively (if not accurately) about the definition of this term--perhaps none so creatively as Muhyi ad-Din Ibn 'Arabi.

Consequently, the New Transcendentalist is steeped in Islamic literature.

Here is a pair of books a New Transcendentalist would read in tandem: