I’m reading a book about the elite group of men who have walked on the surface of the moon and looked back at the earth we inhabit – Moondust. As someone who was a young boy watching the moon landings and dreaming of a science fiction future I am enjoying the stories of these unique men. All of them were changed in some way or another. All of them could never look at life as something random and inconsequential. All of them would have some small idea about what Ralph Waldo Emerson refers to as the Over-Soul – that otherness that is both within and beyond us all. Something we rarely glimps and when we do it leaves us speechless and trembling with a sense of meaning beyond meaning – we understand without understanding. Here are a few quotes from Emerson’s essay The Over-Soul;

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not where.

and;

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. 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 do well to get out of ourselves whenever we are able – a walk in the woods, a plunge into the waves, a night beneath the stars, a walk barefoot on the grass. We are not the centre of our own universe. We are part of a whole – a greater thing than our individual selves. As such that is what makes us as individuals significant, unique, but – in the words of the great John Donne,

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as a manor of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In a world obsessed with trivia and celebrity we do well to remember that we are not it – we are part of it – and until we find some way to acknowledge this we live lesser lives. In the clip from Shawshank Redemption below we see perhaps the possibility of what I’m on about (albeit a somewhat romanticised version). Even a piece of music has the power to unite us in the power of the over-soul.

You can listen to the track here;