And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul”


THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL
a Wisdom of Oneness


For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

 


Our central conversation lies inward of our conversations with Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit, in the soul’s solitary communion with the “deeps of absolute and inextinguishable being.” There, in the solitude to which every man is always returning, we seek the wisdom of an original Oneness as the seed and microcosm of the World.


in·di·vid·u·al
1. one and indivisible; whole 

At the heart of our mission and of all modern life lies the revolutionary idea of the transcendental Individual: the individual human soul as one, indivisible, and whole, a microcosm of the world. We mark the beginning of a new age by declaring the independence of the individual, the freedom of the individual, the sanctity of the individual, the essential equality of all individual souls. In the soul originates all the powers of society, all that has been or shall be. The signal revelation of modern history is simply this:

The Individual is the World


Transcendental Individualism is embodied in the heroic ideal of “plain living and high thinking,” a New World wisdom tradition with deep roots among the Native American Indian peoples and the civilizations of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It rises on a trunk of immovable silence and simplicity, growing around a heartwood of infinite complexity and inward being. Nature and Craft, Thought and Spirit are its root and branch, leaf and seed. It unfolds into a conversation of many voices, seeking that harmony within us each we can all call home.

In America, this ideal is often associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the experiment in recovered origins undertaken by Henry David Thoreau on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond in 1845. The transcendentalists of the American Renaissance sought to individuate the truths affirmed as self-evident by the revolutionary founders in 1776. With the closing of the American frontier in the 1890s, that same ideal went to earth to give rise to the wilderness preservation movement in the West. It is one ideal in many guises.

 
 

Innermost House stands for that solitude that lies at the foundation of all true creation, all original thought, all legitimate leadership: an integrity of soul that is ever more difficult to achieve in a world made of, by, and for mass forces of distraction and dis-integration.

 
 

Innermost House constitutes a material and spiritual microcosmos to enclose a culture of individuation, dedicated to renewing a humanly authentic relation to wild nature in the Mythic Landscape, to creative art in the Archetypes of Craft, to original thought in the Ideals of the Mind, and to sacred experience in the Infinities of Spirit. We strive for a balance between Solitude and Society as each necessary to the other. We seek the renewal of our world, not by turning from it, but by turning inward of it toward the infinitude of the individual soul.

We stand as a pioneer outpost research station in human unity: the balanced and inclusive wholeness of the individual soul as the original of a just community. We are engaged in a continuing experiment of "Life in the Woods," undertaken to cultivate a deeper and richer expectation of Life in the World. We are building a culture of individuality where male and female, Black and White, rich and poor, North and South, East and West, young and old, Native and Colonist are truly one in the soul. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, we seek an abiding union in spirit as "the last best hope of earth."

 

I have taught one doctrine, namely,
the infinitude of the private man.

 
 
 


There is no great and no small
To the Soul that maketh all:
And where it cometh, all things are;
And it cometh everywhere.

 


There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. . . .

Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snow-storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones,—they alone with him alone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Illusions”