Can someone define transcendentalism in easy to understand English please?
Emerson was the originator of Transcendentalism in America, although I think that the Hindus also have a doctrine about it. Emerson didn’t want to limit his definition of God to the Christian God so he became a Deist, a person who believes there is a deity but it doesn’t have a name and it doesn’t intervene in human affairs. He believed in transcendant experiences, rather than Christian repentance. I think he wanted to change the vocabulary of faith to embrace other religions besides Christianity. In fact, many of our founding fathers were Deists (Thomas Jefferson for instance) and they wrote the Constitution to include all faiths and to assure a separation between church and state. They didn’t want one particular church to be in control of the government. Back in the sixties, Hindu Transcendentalism came into vogue when the Beatles went to India and started studying with a guru named Mahish Maharishi Yoga. That form of Transcendentalism was about meditating yourself into a state of bl
