Natural Abundance

Natural Abundance

Preface

The book you have before you is the third in a series called the Library of Hidden Knowledge. For this series I’ve taken powerful gems of wisdom written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and “translated” them into language and formats that are more comfortable for modern readers. This one, however, is different from the others. Wallace D. Wattles, who wrote The Science of Getting Rich, and Charles Haanel, author of The Master Key System, had written guidebooks for people seeking a path to prosperity. Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the other hand deliberately, hid his guidelines for action so that only “those with eyes to see and ears to hear” would find them.
 I must admit I was somewhat hesitant to play with the words of a man whose works are considered some of the greatest in American literature, but the idea had been growing on me for a while. I’ve long felt, as I did with all “my” authors (Emma Curtis Hopkins and Emilie Cady, as well as Wallace Wattles and Charles Haanel), that it was a shame that so many modern readers have been prevented from experiencing the riches Emerson had to offer by the complex language and lack of structure in his essays. And as Nature will always provide what we need, over the past few years, relative strangers have given me not one but two complete works of Emerson, as if to encourage the effort. Then, of course, my publisher asked for a new project for this series. What more push could Nature give?
 So I took on the project. The first step was to select those essays that seemed to most directly address living an abundant life. Like most Americans, I’d read several of Emerson’s essays in school—in high school English class, in college American Literature classes, and in seminary. I’d even taught a few of them to seminary students and delivered a few sermons based on them, so I felt that I knew enough to select the most relevant ones. Sadly, that meant leaving out a couple of my favorites (“History” and “Circles”), but they didn’t really address the topic at hand.
 Once I’d chosen the relevant pieces, I needed to interpret them. Now, Emerson didn’t write essays in the usual sense of the term. His published writings are more like collections of comments from his journals and lecture notes—a sequence of carefully crafted sentences and paragraphs, without a beginning, middle, or end to the piece. There are no opening overviews and no closing summaries—not even really a line of logic or reasoning—but simply a stream of thoughts and ideas regarding the topic at hand.
 So the first step was translating his ideas line by line, merely to find modern ways to express the most important and relevant ideas. In the process, I was amazed and delighted. Virtually every paragraph had glowing gems of metaphysical wisdom. Every essay brought a deeper understanding of how to allow Nature’s processes to support our fulfillment.

From Natural Abundance by Ruth L. Miller
Copyright © 2011 by Ruth L. Miller