Emerson's The Over-Soul

I read Ralph Waldo Emerson's short essay, The Over-Soul and found it very interesting and very much true to my experience.  Though very much based in a Judeo-Christian view of the world (unsurprising, given that Emerson was a Unitarian Minister), his transcendent, nature-based view of the divine and of religious experience very much resonates with my own.  For example, he says, "Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all thought to his heart; this, namely; that the Highest dwells with him; that the sources of nature are in his own mind", making nature out to be the (or at least a) revealer of truth. 

Moreover, when he says, "We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life," he is very much touching upon my own experiences of the divine -- the Other that is not other, the reconciliation of a false dichotomy that is accompanied by the most amazing feeling of connection to all things, and a joy at that connection.  This is even more pronounced when he says:

The soul gives itself, alone, original, and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that condition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow receptive of the great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and feel them to be the fair accidents and effects which change and pass.

"I, the imperfect, adore my own Perfect."   For in these feelings of ecstatic connectedness is a deep understanding of one's own flawed nature, but the perfection of that nature as well.  Akin to wabi-sabi, it is a concept that is immensely difficult, I think, for those of us who have not grown up with the concept, to grasp.  For how can this be?  Emerson answers: "I am somehow receptive of the great soul".  And if I should ever forget my part in divinity, there are reminders all around, for "the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh".