Highlights

Emerson was my entry point into the kind of creative, liberating, free and inquiring religious tradition that has sometimes, but not always, been expressed by individuals and communities connected with Unitarian tradition. This latter point is something that Emerson painfully and quickly discovered first-hand after he became a Unitarian minister in 1829.

by 1832, he simply had no choice but to leave the ministry and become the freelance essayist and lecturer for which he is most often remembered today.

"to go alone; to refuse the good models, even those most sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love God without mediator or veil."

This attitude so thrilled his hearers at the time that many of them went on to bring into being, not only a still influential philosophical movement called "Transcendentalism," but, later on, also something called the "Free Religious Association."

"To imitate others is suicide. To envy others is ignorance."

To imitate others is to abandon oneself and become someone else, essentially erasing oneself -- it's suicide. To envy others is not realizing the preciousness within oneself, which is ignorance.

We should seek within ourselves, not externally. Reading books and listening to lectures are indirect methods; they are not the true path to understanding the truth. We must grasp the truth directly through intuition, direct experience, and insight. It's similar to the enlightenment of Zen. A teacher is necessary, but we must reach enlightenment ourselves, not just by being taught by the teacher.

jiyū shūkyō (自由宗教), which can be translated as something like "a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion or spirituality."

one of the important characteristics of jiyū shūkyō, at least as it is expressed by both Emerson and Imaoka-sensei, is that it does not look to any figure who can be considered foundational in the way

Emerson and Imaoka-sensei -- they are absolutely not to be considered the founders of jiyū shūkyō!

the practitioner of "a creative and inquiring, free or liberative religion or spirituality" (a jiyū shūkyōjin 自由宗教人), is always someone who believes that, in principle, it is possible for everyone, everywhere to experience a direct, creative and liberating existential encounter with God -- or if you prefer it, the really-real, Buddha Nature, divinity or the Light. Another way Emerson put this was to proclaim very clearly that all people should, and could, find ways to "enjoy an original relation to the universe" ("Nature").

Thought: That's it. No more masters for me. Too many things to read and too little time. Jiyu shukyo will be my priority and calling moving forward.

What this means is that for the jiyū shūkyōjin, all the great spiritual teachers of humankind, such as Abraham, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- and also later figures like Emerson and Imaoka-sensei -- all of them were simply the most visible, pre-eminent and admirable examples of people who had enjoyed themselves just such an original relation to the universe.

following their profound experiences neither Abraham, nor Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad, ever intended then to go on and found a new religion. No! Not at all! This is because they were, I am sure, jiyū shūkyōjin who only desired that those whom they met could be helped to experience this original relationship to the universe without mediator or veil themselves

it is only this original, living relationship with the universe that could ever be considered as being the "founder" of jiyū shūkyō

But the consequence of this is that, although unlike a traditional religion or spirituality, jiyū shūkyō is never going to give you an easy, off-the-peg religion or spirituality, what it will gift you is a way of continually becoming ever more deeply immersed in the unfolding of the universe with all its ebbs and flows and endless capacity for movement and creative change. Jiyū shūkyō is, therefore, something that we can call a "practice of immersion" in the working of universe

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References

Brown, Andrew James. “We Are All Manifestations of the Great Spirit, Children of God, Containing Infinite Treasures within Ourselves . . .” Caute, 3 May 2024, https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2024/05/we-are-all-manifestations-of-great.html.