Emerson on the Bhagavat Geeta

From the book "Emerson in His Journals"

Oct 1? 1848
My friend and I - owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat Geeta. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spake to us, nothing small or unworthy but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age & climate had pondered & thus disposed of the same questions that exercise us.  

Oct-Nov, 1845
The Indian teaching through its cloud of legends has yet a simple & grand religion like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak he truth, love others as yourself, & to despise trifles. The East is grand--& makes Europe appear the land of trifles. Identity, identity! friend & foe are of one stuff, and the stuff is such & so much that the variations of surface are unimportant. All is for the soul, & the soul is Vishnu (God); & animals & stars are transient paintings; & light is whitewash; & durations are deceptive; and form is imprisonment and heaven itself is a decoy. That which the soul seeks is resolution into Being above form;..liberation from existence is its name. Cheerful & noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle & serene-- ; all his games are benevolent

Spring? 1859
When India was explored, & the wonderful riches of Indian theologic literature found, that dispelled once for all the dream about Christianity being the sole revelation--for, here in India---there in China, were the same principles, the same grandeurs, the like depths moral & intellectual. 

The Law of Affinity

The energy and attitude of the company we keep rubs off on us by what Emerson calls 'The Law of Affinity'. Their restlessness, greed, discontent and pettiness brings out like feelings in us. Their disease becomes our disease for the period of association. Such interactions must be avoided to the extent possible.

June-July 1847 Emerson in His Journals

"One other thing is to be remarked concerning the law of affinity. Every constitution has its natural enemies & poisons, which are to be avoided as ivy & dogwood are by those whom those plants injure.

There are those who, disputing, will make you dispute; and nervous and hysterical and animalized, will produce a like series of symptoms in you; though no other persons produce the like phenomena in you, & though you are conscious that they do not properly belong to you, but are a sort of extension of the diseases of the other party into you."