For Emerson, self-reliance was more than the image of a family carving out a life on the frontier. Though he admired the do-it-yourself attitude and revelled in nature, Emerson's frontier, the place of real freedom and opportunity, was a mental landscape free from mediocrity and conformity.

Like his friend and protégé Henry David Thoreau (see Walden), Emerson thought it silly to run around reforming and bettering the world, even giving to 'good causes', before we had found our place in it. He famously observed that, 'All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man improves.' If we could not examine ourselves and identify our calling, we would be of little use. Lack of awareness would see us quickly moulded into shape by a society that cared little for the beauty and freedom of the individual. This is the path most of us take, happy to go along with society's programme in exchange for a level of status and reasonable material circumstances. Though we profess to break away from limitations, the reality is comfort in conformity:

We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents.

Our primary duty is not - ultimately - to our family, to our job, to our country, but only that which calls us to do or to be. Too often 'duty' hides a lack of responsibility in taking up a unique path. We can push aside a calling for some years, choosing obvious sources of money or satisfaction, or a more comfortable situation, but it will eventually make its claims.

Emerson was heavily influenced by the ancient Eastern religious texts (the Upanishads, Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita). Their philosophy is a revelation of the oneness of all things; life is full of illusions and false ties that prevent us from being reunited with what is eternal and unchanging. Through awareness of our own thought processes we might hope to clear the fog of self-deception and illusion, what we now call the 'scripting' of our lives by society. To be self-reliant is to not take anyone's word for anything

The people of his time saw Emerson as a sage or prophet, with fewer of the faults of human nature than anyone they knew. But Emerson had, as anyone, the hopes, the highs, the setbacks which life seems to consist of. What made him stand out was a belief that we did not have to have see-sawing emotional lives reacting to good or bad events. Emerson believed that all happiness, ultimately, was self-generated; it was not human nature to be permanently hostage to events - we are quite capable of detachment or transcendence.

What was Emerson's idea of success? His success was not about our steely Will against the universe, heroically overcoming obstacles. Rather, by becoming more fully aware of the patterns and flow of nature, time and space, by working with the grain of the universe, we are part of an infinitely greater power.

The principles he talked of in the quote above are not restrictive, but our creative, conscious response to the world; our lives should reflect this perfect universe, rather than being shaped by the crooked turns and boxes of culture. The self-reliant individual should be able to live in the world and improve it, not be just another product of it.