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“Circles” By Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Emerson’s Essays” The Spencer Press, 1936 [Referencing some of Emerson’s other essays including “Self-Reliance”, Compensation”, “Nature” and “Intellect”.] When I watched my daughter being born almost thirty years ago, I recall that we are born through circles – the birth canal and vagina. Usually our head (a circle) appears first and we enter the circle of a family. And so the process continues for our entire life. We are evolving circles of awareness – we cannot be otherwise. Emerson’s essay describes this in minute and profound detail and yet if we only look to the children in our midst we see its manifestation in numerous forms. “What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text, in the face and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes!” When a child is first born, what does it seek immediately but eye contact to continue its evolution – “The eye is the first circle...” And as the child gains awareness does it not immediately scan its surroundings “… the horizon which it forms is the second...” The rest of the child’s life will be spent in expanding these circles to wider and wider vistas of consciousness. And just as the matter, which Einstein discovered could be neither created nor destroyed, that makes up this child is a constant, so also is all of nature with no permanence of any kind but rather a “fluidity” and “volatility” which powers our evolution. And so this child’s life will be a journey of discovering the truth about nature, the truth about itself as a part of nature, the truth about this planet being just a “transparent law”. When the child is first born, it has been born with only one belief which is that of its own innate genius, its own genetic belief in its’ capacity to learn in ever expanding circles of awareness. In fact, if you ask a very young child is they can learn anything or do anything, most will readily confirm to you that they can. This attitude is a manifestation of their inborn drive to expand their consciousness to higher levels of “power”, higher levels of self-appreciation. The people around the child offer challenge and support – love, which facilitates this rise in awareness. Having bought into other people’s perception of them as imperfect beings, the child will seek approval from significant others and yet resent the approver for loving them in ways that they have forgotten to love themselves. And so the dance of expanding circles of awareness of self and the perfection of the entire universe continues throughout the child’s life. Or as Emerson says it so eloquently, “The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which from a ring imperceptibility small, rushes on all sides outward to new and larger circles, and that without end.” The child is born believing in its’ limitless possibilities and seeks constantly to explore and expand itself and its world of circles. From the circle of the family it expands to the circles of extended family, neighbourhood, community, region, province or state, country, continent, hemisphere, globe, planetary/solar system, galaxy and universe. As Emerson notes “the only sin is limitation”. A child strives to avoid limitations since its’ soul is hard wired to expand each and every limitation or as Emerson puts it, “…the heart refuses to be imprisoned…” Parents often have the illusion that they can ensure that their child will only experience one side of life’s evolutions, the so called “good side” or “the right side”. However, nature does not have sides and constantly reaffirms itself by displaying this duality to each child. This enables the child to appreciate “that all nature is the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself.” Leaving the circle of walking, when a toddler runs and falls banging their knee they are provided with an opportunity to learn to appreciate both the pleasure and the pain of the running circle. The discussions between a child and parent are simply a conversation about this circle from unique perspectives. If the child only focuses on the pleasure of running by going farther and faster, they experience more pleasure from running and more pain from falling. If they only focus on the pain of falling by walking in lieu of running, they experience the pleasure of walking but pain from the loss of pleasure of running. If a parent encourages one side over the other, e.g. “Don’t run, you will fall and hurt yourself!”, and the child temporarily adopts their preference, then the child will avoid running until it experiences enough desire for pleasure to raise its awareness of its need to risk the pain of running to experience a sense of balance, a sense of control, a sense of inner peace. As Emerson said “Every precaution puts you in its power.” The child learns to run more selectively, being aware that there will be both pleasure and pain in which ever is chosen. The child becomes wise about running and then this circle becomes balanced and a new circle emerges to continue the evolutionary process. “Valour consists in the power of self recovery”, and it is this process in which Emerson states, “We learn that God is; that he is in me; and that all things are shadows of him.” In this way, we learn that the Grandly Organized Design of the Universe is that “no fact is sacred nor profane”, it just is and “no virtue is final” but just a transitory perspective in the growth of our own awareness. They are but transient phenomena that are part of a bigger whole, a bigger law of nature yet to be discovered and honoured. The real scary part of life, which we actually acknowledge annually in our culture with Halloween, is the fear of casting away our safety for the awareness of a bigger law of nature that is waiting for us to discover it. The child learning to run must control his fear of pain to experience the pleasure of running. In so doing he leaves the pain and pleasure of walking to seek the pain and pleasure of running which enables him to learn about the law of balance, or symmetry. Once achieved the child is then required to move on further to the pain and pleasure of running on different terrains and so on out into larger and larger circles of awareness, skill and wisdom. This continual state of “unsettlement” is our true nature and this makes “life a series of surprises”. As we watch a toddler we can see them “seek to draw new circles “with wild “abandonment and with heart” displayed all over their face. The sense of peace and oneness that parents often experience when observing their children learn such lessons of life and of nature is a manifestation and recognition of this evolutionary law of circles built upon circles. 
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