Blake, born in 1757, to a family of many siblings of whom some died in a family home built over a graveyard. A poor family, he loved quite poor as an adult though by other's accounts did not seem at all bothered by it, instead citing many riches in the next world. His paintings, writing, and works didn't sell well. He died in a pauper's grave... Later enshrined with head stone. He was said to be a madman, genius, or religious zealot, maybe all of them. The book author cited visionary experiences as Ineffable - too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words. Noetic - relating to mental activity or the intellect and dispensing of knowledge, "the noetic quality of a mystical experience refers to the sense of revelation" Transient and robbing one of agency while being completely awake. CH 2 two fold Section of Blake's poem: What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles or tears For double the vision my Eyes do see And a double vision is always with me With my inward Eye 'tis an old Man grey With my outward a Thistle across my way Blake shows his awareness of two worlds, that he sees differently but is still able to relate to this world- perhaps avoiding insanity thereby. Blake's own mythic characters: Los - the embodied creative fire Beulah - a respite between worlds, an embrace from the universe; probably from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, where it's the name of the earthly land of paradise bordering heaven. Blake poem section: Now I a fourfold vision see And a fourfold vision is given to me Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And three fold in soft Beulahs night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep Single vision- what our eyes see Newton's sleep- a purely scientific view of the world Twofold - seeing the inner and outer world, where the inner is what we see Three fold- the immediate and pleasant step beyond dichotomy but not yet to ask that is Four fold- all that is, eternity and oneness and unity CH 3 People can take different views of individuals like Blake. One could take them as completely delusional, or one could believe that they entered a state in which, kind of like being in the flow or in the zone for musicians or athletes, they lose their sense of self. So the only thing that is is everything. Or one could believe that they actually transcend into a larger reality, unseen or inexperienced by most. It's a cynic's choice. Neurologically, the default mode Network is responsible for down selecting and putting together information to allow us to make predictions. Usually those predictions are based on a story and therefore biased by whatever identity we feel we are. And young children the default mode Network takes some time to develop, and therefore most people do not have any memories until they are between the ages of three or four, whereby they have a default mode Network. "In child development terms, imaginary childhood friends are believed to be a positive phenomenon that can lead to improved social, linguistic and creative skills. There is evidence from surveys in UK nurseries, however, that imaginary childhood friends have become rarer in recent years. Children now have far less opportunity to be bored, and with less time in their busy schedules for unstructured play and daydreaming they are less likely to invent characters so rich and interesting that they pass as real. Blame for this is sometimes placed on the use of tablets by pre-school children. It is possible that the use of screens is helping children learn about the world and causing their default mode networks to strengthen earlier, while at the same time reducing their need for imagination." A study by the imperial college London using fmri scans showed that subjects under the influence of psilocybin had less blood flow in certain parts of the brain, including those portions for the default mode Network. The sense of loss of self and so on... The author speculates that since Blake was not sent to school as a child, was untrained and did not learn lists of facts or other ways to look at the world, that perhaps his default mode Network developed differently and thus the visions and four fold way of looking at/sensing experience... And further, developing this default network and thus identity of self is akin to the biblical fall from Eden, where in we no longer have talking snakes and oneness. Blake was to be The apprentice of a very successful engraver, and a gentleman in the London society. But after Blake met the man and was walking home with his father, he told his father that the man had an unease about him and a face that would live to be hanged. 12 years later the man was accused of forgery and indeed was hanged.. but Blake made few prophecies and didn't endulge in the practice. CH 4 without contraries no progress Blake wrote songs of innocence for children and songs of experience for adults. In it he talks of children forced into chimney cleaning until adulthood, if they lived that long... And his song started God would care for them that are good. In the experience songs, he chastised the parents that sold their kids into this cruel life while they go to church to feel good. He also acknowledged that these kids are on their own. He wrote of the lamb and tiger, the innocence and the prowler. He didn't advocate that one is good and the other bad, just that both are. "Arguments, division and tribalism are, of course, a source of hurt and confusion. It is unsurprising that most people choose a side and want to see that side triumph. They long to enjoy the outbreak of peace that would - supposedly - arrive after their chosen enemies had been wiped away. But from Blake's perspective, this would result in a static, unchanging world devoid of joy or surprise. Without the energy of clashing perspectives, the universe would ground to a halt and die. Blake did not think, however, that we were always trapped in a state of perpetual conflict. It was possible to find respite from these squabbles. This was the state he called Beulah, the 'threefold vision' ... 'There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True'. A contrariety is defined as opposition or inconsistency between two things. This place, he explains, is 'a pleasant lovely Shadow / Where no dispute can come'. The inability for dispute to exist in the state of Beulah is not because one contrary position has been wiped away, but because in the state of Grace that typifies Beulah there is no antagonism felt towards either extreme. They both exist, are recognised, and are simply accepted." (( maybe this was inspiration for Vonnegut and his chrono-synclastic infundibulum?)) The author draws parallels to quantum mechanics, where things are vastly different than the perceived and rationalized world in which we live. Where two particles can communicate faster than the speed of light or exist in a superposition or the various other things, and Blake's writings you get a sense that he had already seen the quantum world and even lived in it... Segment of Blake poem: "Inwards, into a deep world within A void immense, wild dark & deep, Where nothing was: Natures wide womb And self balanc'd stretch'd o'er the void ... The vast waves, & arose on the waters A wide world of solid obstruction... They began to weave curtains of darkness They erected large pillars around the Void With golden hooks fastend in the pillars With infinite labour the Eternals A woof wove, and called it Science" Urizen is the Blake personification of reason and with reason comes form, the collapsing of the wave function into the observable. You get the dead or alive cat without the possibility of the Schrodinger state. With Urizen comes certainty.. "One command, one joy, one desire, One curse, one weight, one measure, One King, one God, one Law." The Ancient of Days, one of Blake's most famous images, shows Urizen in this act of creation. See image Despite Blake's attacks on Newton and his single Focus that brings all possibilities down to one, he portrays Newton in his art with golden curls and idealized physique like a Greek hero. This is another beautiful example of Blake's use of contrary positions and his appreciation for the dynamic they create. PG 64+ is fascinating... "Blake's Urizen resembles an entity from Gnostic thought called the Demiurge. According to the Gnostics, the Demiurge is the creator of the material universe and, because he is the creator, he assumes that he is God. In this, however, the Demiurge is mistaken. There is something much greater and more fundamental behind this figure, which in The Ancient of Days is depicted as the golden orb that Urizen leans out of. Because the Demiurge is focused on the physical universe he is creating, he has his back to this greater power and is unable to see it. For those of us who are inside the physical world of creation, the Demiurge can block this pure light, making this creator a negative and harmful figure." ((It seems worth noting that Blake was never formally educated, which makes one wonder about the parallel between the Gnostic and the Blake mythological views of Urizen and Demiurge.")) The idea of the Demiurge first appears in Plato's dialogue Timaeus. "Blake describes Urizen as being, like the Gnostic Demiurge, the 'Creator of men, mistaken Demon of heaven'. He equates him with the 'jealous god' of the Old Testament. Because this figure is only the creator of the material world, the status of 'god' that the Bible grants him is a delusion of grandeur. His association with matter rather than soul in part explains Blake's claim about his true status: 'Urizen is Satan', he wrote in his epic poem Milton. The idea that Blake equated both the God of the Old Testament and Satan himself with the same character sounds at first like the worst of heresies, if not straight up blasphemy. Once we understand more fully the nature of Urizen, however, it may not seem quite so strange." Blake describes creating our mental models and formulating space in Milton. Via 'Sons of Los', Blake is referring to the work of the imagination: The Sky is an immortal Tent built by the Sons of Los And every Space that a Man views around his dwelling-place: Standing on his own roof, or in his garden on a mount Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his Universe; Because you are constructing that 'Universe' yourself in your mind, you are effectively its creator. This explains the strange quote of Blake's that all spaces larger than a globule of blood exist as creations in our mind. This is parked by Urizen. Urizen's delusion was caused by his limited awareness: being blind to what was beyond himself, he couldn't imagine anything greater than he. Urizen is a personification of the default mode network, the construction of the world in which we live, the story of our self or ego, and our rational beliefs, biases, expectations and narrative. Urizen and our mental world building are not evil or cruel but pragmatic and flawed, so we are unaware of things beyond our limitations. Like our minds, Urizen has no knowledge of what he doesn't know and deep down this terrifies him, because it threatens his very sense of identity. Blake saw Judeo-Christian beliefs and their God as creations of the mind and thus the benevolent cruel, steadfast whimsy God to be a clear indicator of the human creator rather than other way around, and he found both scorn and sympathy for the traps of the old testament or obey these laws and worldview .. noting the difficulty of flawed perspective to live up to divine behavior: To God If you have formed a Circle to go into Go into it yourself & see how you would do CH 5 the tigers of wrath "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' Blake saw things as the expression of mental energies. His primary interest was in the root causes of these different parts of our minds and deeper understandings. The novels of Jane Austen and its many TV and media replications of high society in England leave out the Gordon massacres, the peterloo massacre, and many other social upheavals, riots, colonialism, etc. This would include fighting between the Catholics and the Protestants and class warfare and it's various ways. This, along with much of the information about the lower class of people being written by people who in their own words are better, give a skewed picture of the age. This is one reason why the work of Blake can appear at odds with its times. Eighteenth-century printing was a complex job which involved many specialist tradesmen. One person wrote the book, another was responsible for editing it, and a third typeset the text. An artist designed illustrations for an engraver to produce, and a printer put each page through the press, once for text and a second time for the images. On occasions, these would be hand-coloured by another specialist, and finally a bookseller would sell the finished book. Thanks to Blake's new technique, he had the ability to do all these tasks himself. He was a one-person publishing industry, writing, designing, printing, and coloring illustrated works all on his own and of his own devising... Blake and the revolutionary and wildly varying religious and societal views coexist without clear lines of influence. "Because the exercising of his creative abilities was so important to Blake, it is not surprising that a personified form of it has such a prominent role in his personal mythology. In his work, the character who represents the expression of the imagination in this world is known as Los. Typically portrayed as a blacksmith, Los is said to be endlessly labouring with his hammer at the furnace, constructing a city of art known as Golgonooza. This sense of creat- ive effort as hard physical labour without end, forged by sweat, fire and determination, stands in contrast to images of refined aristocratic poets being visited by the graceful muses. It is, how- ever, an apt description of Blake spending his entire life working with metal and acids. The creation of art, as Los represents it, is not a pleasing pastime" "Blake's politics were encapsulated by Los. They existed in what he created. He may have had great empathy with the poor, but he did not spend his days working to better their situation. Instead, he believed that the imagination was the tool needed to improve society, and that the labours of Los would do more to liberate people than canvassing or protesting. To do this would take integrity, self-belief, and effort. ... It is here that we find the strongest expression of Blake's politics. True politics are not ideologies to discuss, but an attitude to your relationship with the world which is enacted in your daily life. ... Your politics are not what you tell yourself you believe. They are not the set of ideas that you identify with, or look to for personal validation of your goodness as a human being. Your politics are expressed in the choices that you make, the way you treat other people, and the actions you perform. It is here that hypocrisy and vanity fall away, as the reality of your politics is revealed in the countless decisions that you make every day. Who you work for, whether you volunteer for charity work, if you become a landlord, whether you eat meat, the extent to which you pursue money etc- those are your politics. " Blake segment: Trembling I sit day and night, my friends are astonish'd at me. Yet they forgive my wanderings, I rest not from my great task! To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes. Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination ... Tho in the Brain of Man we live, & in his circling Nerves. Tho' this bright world of all our joy is in the Human Brain. Where Urizen & all his Hosts hang their immortal lamps CH. 6 converse not with devils Emanuel Swedenborg: born to wealthy family, a successful and highly creative scientist and engineer that conceptualize submarines, machine guns, helicopters etc as though he were the swedish Leonardo da vinci. Later in life he took a hard right becoming a mystic, sighting visions, recounting having visited heaven, hell, and alien worlds... "An incident which served to further publicise Swedenborg's abilities occurred at a dinner in Gothenburg, on the western coast of Sweden, on 19 July 1759. At six o'clock he suddenly stood up and left the party. He returned looking pale and shaken, claiming that a fire had broken out near his house in Stockholm, hundreds of miles away on Sweden's east coast. The fire had started in the Södermalm district, and it was moving towards his home. During the next couple of hours he remained anxious, and reported that the fire was destroying the home of a friend and near neighbour. At eight o'clock, however, his mood lifted. He announced that the fire had been extinguished just three houses away from his own. News of this incident quickly spread, and Swedenborg summoned to see the Governor the following morning to describe what he 'saw' of this fire. Two days later, a messenger arrived from Stockholm, carrying a message from the Board of Trade. It contained a description of a fire in Stockholm that matched Swedenborg's vision, down to details such as it being extinguished at eight o'clock." The author in this chapter lays out swedenborgs mythological or spiritual views as a framing for that of Blake's. "For Swedenborg, heaven and hell were different and things. A soul after death would know one but could never know the other. Blake, in contrast, joined the two in holy wedlock because, as he scribbled in the margins of one of Swedenborg's books, 'Heaven & Hell are born together.' His love of contraries and the dynamic tensions between them were found to be sorely lacking in Swedenborg. As he saw it, the concept of heaven without hell, or hell without heaven, was meaningless. separate Blake found absurd the idea that a human soul could know one but not the other, because heaven and hell were both internal states. An individual would no doubt favour one over time, but both were always available. A kind, compassionate individual always had the opportunity to dive gleefully into the selfish world of isolated individualism, just as a cruel-hearted narcissist could awaken to the peace and light of selfless unity." Swedenborg could only agree with heaven. Hellish thought was invisible to him. Blake grasped both, rejected neither and, by marrying heaven and hell, truly understood good and evil. 'Proverbs of Hell' which lists the sayings he heard when he was walking among the 'fires of hell, delighted with enjoyments of Genius; which to angels look like torment and insanity'. The hellish proverbs include some of his most quoted lines: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The cut worm forgives the plow. A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. Prisons are built with bricks of Law, Brothels with bricks of religion. What is now proved was once, only imagin'd. One thought. fills immensity. The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction Expect poison from the standing water. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. If others had not been foolish. we should be so. The most sublime act is to set another before you. The bird a nest, the spider a web, mankind friendship. The soul of sweet delight. can never be defil'd. 'I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning. Segment from "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": Without Contraries is no progression. Energy is Eternal Delight Segment from "the marriage of heaven and hell": Without Contraries is no progression. Energy is Eternal Delight Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained Opposition is true Friendship. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men. For every thing that lives is Holy Man has no body distinct from his Soul for that called Body is a portion of Soul. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell repeatedly highlights the importance Blake places on contraries. For example, at one point he divides humanity into two types of people: the Prolific, who pro- duce and create, and the Devourers, who consume. Other writers might praise the Prolific and condemn the Devourers, but Blake understands that both types are needed to keep the world turning: 'These two classes of men are always upon earth, & they should be enemies; whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence.' Not one to miss a sharp kick at religion, he adds, 'Religion is an endeavour to reconcile the two.' Blake never forgot the dynamic struggle between the two is what matters, for this is the power that turns the engines of the universe. This is what keeps creation alive, vibrant and constantly dancing. This is why anyone who 'tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence'. CH 7 once I imagined Philosophers and intellectuals are proud of their rationality and believe that the external world works logically. Artists, on the contrary, value their imagination, and perceive the world to be a place where it is of primary importance. Sartre is used as an example of one that wrote of how imagination is poverty and an antiworld while after talking mescaline saw and talked to imaginary crabs for two years. American philosopher Edward Casey: comes in three forms: imaging (visuals of an elephant, audio of an elephant, taste of coffee, etc), imagining that (an elephant is tearing down a tree), imagining how (I, as a person now in the story world act and survive if I was in the tree). "deep involvement in a task that does not require much assistance from the default mode network can lead to a loss of the sense of self. This, in turn, seems to be a key to visionary experience. A similar process can be found in the practice of transcendental meditation, in which the mental repetition of a mantra works to quiet the chattering mind. This mantra is a collection of syllables which are meaningless in English and which practitioners keep secret, in order not to connect the word with any real-world experiences. As a result, there is nothing for the mind to snag on.." "... That Blake's mythology was his alone and had no associations to his wider culture may, perhaps, have kept social and autobiographical parts of his brain quiet and allowed him to reach deeper states of mind." Referring to Leary's 8 circuits of cognition as framing: "... meta-programming level. Leary believed that this was a state of consciousness in which the mind became aware of how it works and could consciously rewrite itself. On the sixth circuit, the 'mind forg'd manacles' (Blake) that dictate how you react to the world are revealed, and religions, prejudices, beliefs and social structures appear arbitrary and changeable. Here the self understands that it is just a story, rather than something real or fixed, and that it is able to rewrite itself if it so wishes. Blake's declaration that 'I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans' is evidence of this.." "The 'meta-programming' made possible by this state of awareness helps explain why modern therapists have gained promising results from psychedelic drug therapy for the treatment of issues such as alcoholism and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also why psychedelic drug use can be dangerous, and why the 1960s and 1970s produced so many 'brain-fried acid casualties', to use a common description. Rewriting your assumptions about the world is not something to be done casually or even accidentally. There were many who came down from recreational drug experimentation with new beliefs that were wild, paranoid and entirely at odds with the rest of society." CH 9 their forms eternal exist (Referring to particle wave duality) " In a similar way, consciousness is more fundamental than matter when the world is explored spiritually, and matter is more fundamental than mind when the world is examined scientifically." The author covers idealism vs materialism, whether one came first and how it matters to whom. "The opposite philosophy of materialism is called idealism, which is the belief that only the immaterial exists and that matter is an illusion." And on to dualism, that good created the machine of the universe and then it runs as it will. "Neurologically, it is not well understood, although we know it is lifelong, stable, involuntary and has a genetic component. Around 4 per cent of the population experiences some form of synaesthesia, and the condition can sometimes be experienced by non-synaesthetes through the use of psychedelic drugs. It is possible that Blake experienced a similar condition to synaesthesia, because he wrote of 'seeing' words in the air around him. Some synaesthetes, incidentally, not only report seeing the words people say to them in conversations, but also that words in different accents appear in different fonts." "In the mind of Blake, this (spacetime) was the same as the relationship between God and man. Neither could exist without the other, for they were both aspects of a larger unperceived reality..." CH 10 appeared as one man Blake, ever the optimist, mentions his depression until he moved to Sussex... Where he regained his spirit and vivid visions. Blake and swedenborg concluded that the cosmos was, to borrow a much later word, a hologram. With a hologram, the entire image is encoded at every point of the picture. If you were to cut in half a regular photograph and discard the left half, what would remain would be the right-hand part of the image, and nothing more. If you were to cut a hologram in half and discard one part, however, you would be left with a smaller version of the same image. Continue cutting and you would get smaller and smaller holograms, all of which would contain the entire image. There are many modern physicists who take the idea of a holographic universe seriously, although they arrived at this conclusion for very different reasons" "The idea that the universe is a giant person may be hard to reconcile with a twenty-first-century worldview. Think of the enormity of the cosmos, of the stars and immense black holes and the vast distances between them. Think also of the intricacy of life on this planet, of the ecosystems in rivers and forests and the slow creativity of evolution. Think of the totality of creation, of the scorching temperatures inside supernovas and the dark emptiness of the voids between. How can such a vast cosmos be inside some form of giant person? The idea seems absurd. Yet the cosmos you were just then experiencing was not physical reality. It was nothing more than your imagination, the one you have created inside your mind. In this example, you were the Universal Man inside which that immense cosmos existed. It is this universe, which fools you into thinking it is a physical world when it is nothing more than mind, that Swedenborg and Blake are describing. Recall these lines from Jerusalem: ... in your own Bosom you bear your Heaven And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within In your Imagination [...] Once again, we see how the division between the interior and exterior worlds are blurred in Blake's philosophy, and how the universe we perceive is a product of both ourselves and the cosmos. It would not exist otherwise. There are precedents for ideas like this in the Christian faith.. gospel of Luke: 'Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you'. ... Blake was clear that God can only exist where the human mind is present; to mention again what he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: 'God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men', or more simply, 'men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. From this perspective, the universe is indeed inside a great cosmic figure, and that person is you." To Blake, God and man are indivisible and, in some ways, dependent on each other. CH 11 green & pleasant land General discussion of Blake and his landlord in Sussex, as well as to Blake's challenges in finance. The chapter moved to lines famous in England: "And did those feet in ancient time, Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!" Scholars debate whether that refers to Jesus, Joseph, or... "Theologically, Jesus was neither a god nor a man, but a combina- tion of both; a perfect illustration of Blake's belief that humanity and divinity were codependent. From Blake's perspective, Jesus' dual qualities were not unusual... Blake believed that the divine part of Jesus came from the imagination. Blake wrote in Milton about 'the Human Imagination / Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever', for example. 'Christianity is Art [...] Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists,' he wrote a couple of decades later. 'The Eternal Body of Man in the Imagination, that is God himself, The Divine Body: Jesus we are his Members.' If Jesus' divinity came from the imagination, as Blake believed, then it was theoretically accessible to others. It was, perhaps, theoretically accessible to all." Some golden from Blake: To H Thy Friendship oft has made my heart to ake, Do be my Enemy for Friendships sake. To H You think Fuseli is not a Great Painter Im Glad This is one of the best compliments he ever had. Ha. CH 12 when I speak I offend A review of developing recognition of mental illness through a view of Bethlem, the mental hospital, that became bedlam, which shows it was really just a place to put people. Blake in later years recognized his differences and society may have been less accepting of him.. "O why was I born with a different face Why was I not born like the rest of my race When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend Then I'm silent & passive & lose every Friend" And to a peer: "Hes a Blockhead who wants a proof of what he Can't Perceive And he's a Fool who tries to make such a Blockhead believe" Blake's Milton is shown in the light of Blake vs Haley, but perhaps more so a narrative on Blake vs the world. Seen as mad, his visions must either be denied or a grander spiritual battle must be taken on Blake's social and financial challenges. CH 13 My wrath did grow The Ancient Britons is Blake's largest work, which has also gone missing. "As Blake saw it, the collapse of this (united, cohesive spiritual physical) uncorrupted religion was marked by the arrival of the druids. Druidism was experiencing a romanticised revival or reinvention in Blake's time, but he viewed it with disdain. ... In Blake's eyes, the arrival of the druids was the external consequence of the rise of Urizen in human consciousness. This rise, in his mythology, corresponds with the biblical Fall. It was the moment when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge and our reason cast us out of paradise. Urizen was the rational power who abstracted and divided the exterior world until it became a mental model we could confuse with reality. As the druids watched the movement of the stars and performed rituals at stone monuments aligned with the heavens, they too abstracted the greater reality into a system that they could master, and inside which the stories of their lives could be located and comprehended. Our Fall began when we started to identify with the mental house of cards that Urizen had constructed, and could no longer see that it was incomplete and approximate. Urizen is, ultimately, deeply insecure. In order to maintain his delusion that he is a creator god, he has to deny, mock or belittle any evidence of a greater world beyond his awareness. Not only must he believe in his model, but he needs other people to believe in it too. Urizen believes he is being rational, but all too often he is just rationalising." "With Urizen dominant and the human mind unbalanced, society was moulded in his image, with all his prejudices and delusions. Many people in Blake's time struggled to understand how the rational enlightenment ideals that fuelled the French Revolution resulted in the bloodshed and horror of the Reign of Terror, but Blake understood. Urizen was not the whole of our minds. There was something divine beyond reason, he knew. Any model in which this was missing was profoundly flawed and ultimately doomed." History becomes legend when the fantastical enters, and becomes scripture when authority enters. "Myth has elements of all these categories. It is understood not to be true - to say something is a myth is to deny it - and yet it has greater power and authority than fiction. Myth is often concerned with the gods and the origin of the world, or, alternatively, with the end of the world, such as the Norse myth of Ragnarök. It talks not so much about this world, but about the behaviour of the fundamental forces that go on to create it.. (or end it) British myth is subtly different. It is less concerned with the birth or the end of the world, and more focused on how similarly charged mythic forces act out in individuals." Blake's system is personal.. "such as the patriarchal engineer Urizen or the fiery revolutionary Orc, to be different aspects of Blake's own psyche. His myth has all the trappings of gods and apocalypses, but it too is fundamentally a story about the struggles of a mind.. and an exploration of the workings of the mind... the clashes and drama that occurs between them (Blake's characters) can be seen as Blake trying to understand his own mental landscape. When the angels and demons who appear .. to come from within, all mythical and theological sagas are revealed to be the clashing energies of the mind." CH 14 hidden from the corporeal understanding Britian was once a land of giants, defeated by Brutus of Troy, from which the island gets it's name. Albion was the original name and perhaps the name of the main giant. For Blake, Albion was the universal man in one take... "another interpretation of Albion, alongside the giant, country, people, cosmos and Blake - is that Albion is you, the reader. You are the creator of the universe inside your head, and by reading Blake's work you are seeing it through his expansive eyes. Indeed, when you suspend your sense of self, how could Albion not be you?" Albion had the cohesive united imagination view but falls into the materialistic reasoning trap.. in another physics bender and merger "Blake's narrative appears to come from a place outside the usual constraints of time and place. The fall of Albion, for example, is simultaneously happening right now, about to happen, and already ended. ... Blake is not telling the story from the three-dimensional perspective of the human world. He is telling it as it appears in his 'fourfold vision'. He is describing events as they appear from outside normal time and space, in Eternity. It is the way the story is told, and not the simple plot, that gives the its challenging reputation." "The sleep and subsequent reawakening of Albion may seem an extremely simple plot for such lengthy poems, but Blake's focus is not on this plot. As always, it was the psychological analysis of events that fascinated him, and it is in this arena that we find Blake's great insights and true genius. .. To explore the interior of Albion, Blake divided the giant's mind into four separate sections, each of which he personified as an independent male character. As we saw earlier, he called these four aspects of the mind the four zoas. The word zoa is a Greek plural word which Blake used as an English singular. It refers to the four spiritual beasts described by the biblical prophet Ezekiel." Ezekiel: Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. ... And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings. And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot: and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass..." And so on.. (seems like if Ezekiel can see these things, why not William Blake?) "For Blake, of course, these zoas were not external spiritual beasts but aspects of our own minds. One of them we know well- our old friend Urizen, who represents our cold, rational, reasoning power. He is joined by Tharmas, who represents sensations and the physical body, and Luvah, who is our emotions. These three are joined by Urthona, a zoa who represents creativity and the imagination. Urthona differs slightly from the others in that when he is active in the human world he changes and becomes Los. This is probably because while intellect, emotions or bodies can exist as abstract ideas in the Eternal realm, creativity and imagination need to be active in the physical world of time and space in order to truly manifest. Los, Blake explains, is 'the Vehicular Form of Strong Urthona'. However, Los has a spectre, his dark thoughts that criticise and doubt, the voice that declares that friends are false and that creative work is empty. Los's spectre is depicted as a dark, bat-winged dragon that emerges from his back as he works away at his creative labours. "The birth of a spectre leads to conflict and struggle, but it is important not to attempt to destroy your spectre, because this would destroy part of you. The goal, instead, is to re-assimilate it. Los achieves this by putting his spectre to work and using it in his creative projects. .. Blake's spectre is a similar idea to the Jungian concept of the shadow, the name Jung used for the hidden, usually negative and unknowable aspects of our psyche. Blake's spectre, like Jung's shadow, is our blind spot. It knows things that are kept from our conscious minds. As Los's spectre tells Los: O! thou seest not what I see! What is done in the Furnaces." "The conflict that makes up Blake's Albion myth, then, comes from the clashes between these central components. The giant Albion, who represents man, Britain, Blake, you and the cosmos, contains four zoas. Both Albion and the zoas produce emanations and spectres. Out of the first man comes the entire cast of this melodrama. This was the structure that Blake used to reframe the internal energies of his own mind into the epic battles of a new spiritual pantheon." In his later years, rather than seek public opinion, and sales, Blake doubled down and went to write his most dense pieces. Characters are many and scholars often find his work not to be understandable.. but Blake wrote in his words "for future generations". Returning to Blake world view.... Blake's insights.. "The giant Albion could perceive the divine light of the imagination, which Blake also calls 'Poetic Genius', because the different parts of his mind were still in balance. It flowed through him in a pure and uncorrupted form, just as it would enter the world again at a later date in the form of Jesus Christ, who referred to himself as 'the light of the world'. Because the nature of Albion's and Jesus' light was identical, Blake saw Albion as a Christian, even though that religion would not arrive for countless centuries after Albion's fall. The myth of Albion, Jerusalem and their spectres at the beginning of humanity also has strong echoes with the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In this scenario, Albion is Adam, Jerusalem is Eve, and the spectre of Jerusalem - and indeed the spectre of anyone cut off from the divine light - is Satan. But while the biblical narrative presents Adam, Eve and the serpent as separate beings, Blake saw them as aspects of the same psyche. This is a profound change and one potentially far healthier. It avoids the patriarchal power divide between men and women that has dominated Church teachings for centuries. It also avoids the dualistic split between Satan and man, in which Satan is seen as a separate 'other' to be fought, instead of a dark part of ourselves we need to illuminate. The Fall occurs in both myths, but only Blake sees a reunification between male, female and Satan as the solution. It was Blake, after all, who called for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake, therefore, associated Albion with both Adam, who represents mankind not yet cast out of Eden, and Jesus, who as we have noted was interchangeable with divine imagination. With our more modern understanding of prehistory, we might instead see Albion as a personification of the time after recognisably human consciousness appeared.. and we moved from the world of animal consciousness into the worlds of gods, cave art and the tribal telling of stories around the camp fire. This was when imagination first arrived in the material world and the moment when the cosmos first gained the ability to intentionally shape itself. It is because this illumination arrived in a human form that many occult traditions speak of the spiritual universe as being the Universal Man. This period did not last, however. A shift in human consciousness occurred in which the egocentric rational mind gained superiority over other ways of perceiving. Blake repeatedly dates this change to 6,000 years ago, which is roughly the time when the first Sumerian and Mesopotamian temple cities appeared, along with the wheel, calendar and complex writing and number.. An echo of this shift in human consciousness at this time is recorded in the origin myths and scriptures of the world, which tell of the arrival of bearded, patriarchal, controlling 'sky gods' such as Zeus, Jupiter, Odin and Jehovah. These sky gods typically viewed themselves as creators, even though their acts of creation were limited to imposing order on chaos by abstracting and dividing. In the Book of Genesis, for example, Jehovah creates the world by defining the contraries of light and dark, day and night, land and sea, good and evil, and so on. These sky gods brought law, judgement, reasoning and language. They were often said to have fought and overpowered immense giants or Titans, which were linked with the earth and judged to be brutal, irrational, disobedient, and animalistic. In the old British myths, however, there remain hints of the time before the reign of Urizen. The concept of sky gods and the idea that the spiritual realm is in some way above us first appeared in the writings of Plato and was taken up and propagated by the Roman Church. The old myths of the British Isles, however, still recall a time before this suspect idea arrived on this island, when the spiritual realm was not above or distant, but within and present. They tell of a timeless otherworld known as Tír na nÓg by the Irish and Annwfn or Annwn by Welsh. Remnants of this 'land of the ever-young' still linger in the later English concept of Avalon. To Blake, these myths told of a time before the Fall when the mind was in balance, and the rational Urizen still worked in harmony with creative Urthona, emotional Luvah and the physical sensations of Tharmas." (PG. 274) CH 15 in love with productions of time To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour "So what, exactly, was Blake talking about when he used the word 'Eternity'? One common definition of eternity is that it refers to an infinite period of time. Understood in this way, eternity is simply time without end. This definition does not fit well with modern cosmology, however. This claims that time did not exist before the creation of the universe in the Big Bang, and that time may also end at some far-off future moment if the universe does indeed cease to exist, as some models predict. Eternity cannot refer to infinite time..." Instead, eternity can be defined as all of time. Understood in this way, eternity is the period that contains everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen... Einstein and relativity, gravity and speed vs time and observer, etc.. on to the block universe... "The block universe solves the prob- lems of defining 'now' by making the concept irrelevant. In a block universe, the passing of time is little more than an illusion. Every event exists always, regardless of whether it happened hundreds of years ago or hundreds of years in the future. Every first kiss and every last word is like an exhibit preserved in a museum that only beings with a godlike perspective can explore." The chapter moved on to cover expanding block universe, where the future can comfortingly remain yet to come, and on to Rovelli and the absence of time in fundamental physics... Wherein time is little more than a construct of movement between objects, if anything at all. Circling to Blake, "Blake always allowed room for two seemingly contradictory positions to be revealed as different aspects of a larger truth." "From this perspective, to perceive the timeless present moment is to escape from the limiting horror of the block universe. It is here in the right hemisphere's model of time that we may find ... (Enlightened) conscious experience of pure bliss and joy. All we need to do to achieve this liberation, Blake tells us, is to balance the zoas so that Urizen no longer dominates. Human consciousness can experience liberty while the trapped, static eternal angels and demons of the block universe can only look on, amazed. Perhaps this is why, as Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'Eternity is in love with the productions of time.' How the angels must envy us." CH 16 work of the devil "Even by the early eighteenth century, people generally didn't travel to scenic locations such as the Alps. Mountain ranges were viewed as obstacles to travel between cities, rather than destinations in their own right. Before we could recognise that nature was beautiful, we had to first think of ourselves as separate to it. The word 'nature' came to mean everything in this world that is not us, and not built by us. We could only admire and appreciate it after we saw it as the other. This is still the way that nature is typically understood today. A key factor in this new concept of the natural world was the binomial system, which was created in the late 1750s by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. ..His system of binomial nomenclature was a categorisation structure that reduced a plant or animal down to two Latin or Latinised words, which in turn defined the genus and the species, such as Canis lupus for a wolf or Homo sapiens for a human... It (nature) is labelled, categorised and understood, and as a result we now think of it as something comprehensible to man. By naming and defining, nature was mastered. This was a highly Urizenic left-brain endeavour. (Think of the tao: that which can be named is not the tao) Once we had become separated from the natural environment, we finally saw it, as if for the first time, as something that had beauty and value. The idea that we might now walk up a mountain to see the view no longer seemed crazy. This was the new perspective which the Romantic movement arose to express." (Perhaps late in the book) this chapter makes the distinction between imagination, in the Blake sense, and that of fantasy. To take a horn and horse and come up with a unicorn, that is fantasy. Imagination has a vivid quality, something encountered, a living process that you're part of and in which your would can be (better) understood. The regional material world only goes as far as the circle from Urizen's compass. It then is not informed in full or has the ability to see the light of the spiritual sun, and being a closed system will fall to entropy. Imagination generates insight that keeps the system open, and thus dodges the fall. That chapter, through Coleridge and Wordsworth, reflect how Blake's engagement of imagination and nature, but a nature not separate from the self as above, led to Romanticism reaching out to include Blake. CH 17 weak, and old man feeble and tottering Blake finds respect and admiration in a young group of artists. He also finds work, including the ironic request of watercolors for Job. Blake illustrated Dante's Divine Comedy. 72 drawings for hell, 20 for purgatory, and 10 for heaven. Virgil being the guide for Dante through hell and purgatory served to influence Blake in Milton. Blake also took on Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Both are journeys that reflect the imagination and material, both that end with grand visions of God and arrival. Blake's last commissioned work was a vision he'd had years before.. and it was an explanatory of power and blindness of reason and materialism, the illusion of self and creation, the mystery of what is beyond our sight. The Ancient of Days. Fittingly, his last sketch was of his wife, to whom he sang praise. CH 18 as a man is, so he sees There are many ironic examples of Blake's work in popular culture or around Great Britain. For example at Eaton college they sing the lyrics that Blake intended to comment on the uninspired insipid world of higher education.. "They sing about doing this in the name of the inspired mythical giant Albion, whether they know this or not. .. there is the 12-foot-tall metal statue of Newton, created by the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi in 1995, which is based on Blake's painting. Blake showed the great scientist as an avatar of Urizen, focused on a pair of compasses marking a circle on paper and oblivious to the immense wild world beyond his limited logic. ... It was placed on a high plinth in the courtyard outside that great establishment dedicated to book learning, the British Library. That the image is intended to mock the limitations of this form of knowledge is as clear an illustration of Urizen's blinkered nature as you can get. It is also another example of the establishment not just failing to understand Blake, but getting him so wrong that it is hard not to suspect a trickster .. (such can) easily happen once, but when it seems to happen every time, it does make you wonder." Perhaps the best we can do is find our own version of Blake, and take pleasure in knowing how incomplete it will appear to others. The author explores exactly what kind of religious view did Blake hold?... "Blake said himself up as a contrary... The goal isn't to choose one side and declare it to be the one correct truth. Instead, we must accept that both contraries are necessary, and that any philosophy that includes one at the expense of the other is incomplete. It is the tension between the two poles, and the dynamic conversation which they start, that matters. Having learnt this, we should no longer feel that we must choose between Blake and the deist Enlightenment philosophy of a dead, meaningless material world. We do not need to plant our flags on one hill and believe whole- heartedly in everything that dogma stands for. Instead, we can learn from the dissonance and questions generated by those .. contrasting worldviews. Blake's central argument, then, that imagination is divine, can't be ruled out or dismissed ... His position is not argued in the language of his opponent, with logical proofs and measurements of matter. Instead, he presents his body of work and awaits our reaction. That work is an illustration of the experience of imagination at a far deeper and more overwhelming level ... Like early explorers returning from their ocean voyages with exotic plants and strange beasts, or Apollo astronauts returning to earth with a case full of moon rocks, he has travelled to inner places that we knew nothing about and returned with exhibits to convince the sceptical. When we see his images or hear his words, what exactly attracts us to them? They are strange and powerful, and we can't claim to fully understand them. Yet they resonate with us, as if they wake up something inside.." "The mind is the one thing that emits imagination into our closed, limited, finite universe. It is we and we alone who are the source of meaning, purpose, love... If our eyes had evolved to see the light of the imagination rather than sunlight, then we would see ourselves as part of the constellations of the heavens, down here on earth rather than up in the night sky. We are the source of what we perceive. We are that which we crave... Our inner Urizens fight against this idea, of course, because it is a threat to their self-image. They usually begin by denying that any such experience is real... We are too busy (Urizen tells us) and have too many responsibilities, and we probably couldn't do it if we tried. Of all Urizen's lies, this is possibly his most malicious. As those who have experience of paradise will confirm, this couldn't be more wrong. The state is there for everyone, and the only harm involved comes from a refusal to enter. Blake did not view Urizen as an enemy to be defeated, however. He could at times be sympathetic or even pitying towards him. He knew he did not mean to cause the harm he did, and that he only did so out of ignorance rather than intention. Blake did not want to see Urizen vanquished. Instead, he wanted the four zoas to return to balance. Urizen does much that is good and valuable and if he could only understand his limited nature, he would no longer deny or drown out the heavenly parts of our minds represented by Tharmas, Urthona and Luvah." "Blake himself focused on Urthona. the creative zoa, who was active in the form of Los. With his particular artistic talents, strengthening Urthona was an ideal way for Blake to counterbalance the rational world through the burning fire of real creativity. This is a far more potent weapon than we might first realise. True imagination, Blake knew, has no limits. It is an active process fundamental to the workings of the universe, and to dismiss it is to voluntarily live a poorer life." Luvah, the emotional zoa. It was Luvah that Blake evoked when he stressed the importance of forgiveness, empathy, and compassion as a route to heaven. As he wrote, 'Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell / There God is dwelling too.' Such emotions dissolve the Urizenic hard ego, revealing ourselves to be connected rather than isolated, and revealing the category of 'others' to be nothing more than Urizen's invention. Opening our heart, then, is another route to rebalancing our minds. As Blake explained, 'Mutual forgiveness of each Vice / Such are the Gates of Paradise.' Then there is Tharmas, the zoa of physical sensation. Blake's embrace of his sexual nature was his method of strengthening Tharmas... It is not just sex that strengthens Tharmas, as dancers and athletes in many fields will confirm. The experience of a 'flow state'" I give you the end of a golden string Only wind it into a ball It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall. To follow that string we need to strengthen our emotional, physical and creative aspects - the 'right hemisphere' part of our minds. At the same time, our rational side needs to step down and understand and accept the limitations of its mental models. When these two things are achieved, our mind will finally be in balance and we, like the giant Albion, can awaken into a perfect timeless moment. We will step outside of the everyday modern world of noise, anxiety and fear, and experience the world as a Blakean paradise.
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