Self-Reliance and Other Essays: “There is a relation between the hours of life and the centuries of time.”

Psychology Today heralds the gut as something that must be trusted for three reasons: 1) Your intuition is shaped by your past experiences, and your existing knowledge which you gained from them; 2) Your intuition is encoded in your brain like “a web of fact and feeling”; 3) Your intuition connects you with all the nerve  cells in your body. First published in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance and Other Essays asserts the importance of following one’s own instincts, and avoiding conformity and false consistency at all costs. According to Emerson, if we do not, so to speak, stand in our truth, “We shall be forced to take with shame our opinion from another.”