William Blake vs the World

When Robinson asked him about the divinity of Jesus, Blake replied that, ‘He is the only God. And so am I and so are you.’ [...] ‘I live in a hole here, but God has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere, [...] ‘I possess my visions and peace,’ he argued. ‘They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.’

‘I thought I should have gone first,’ he said, then remarked that, ‘I cannot consider death as anything but a removing from one room to another.’

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.

Most accounts of Blake’s life and work explain his visions away as a form of ‘eidetic imagery’ – a vivid mental image which a person can see either in their mind’s eye or externally, as if the mental image was part of the observer’s environment.

The author Philip Pullman, who is a prominent critic of religion, has had similar experiences. ‘The sense that the whole universe is alive – not just inanimate, but alive and conscious of meaning – is one that I’ve felt on two or three occasions, and they made such a deep impression on me that I shall never forget them [...] I just saw connections between things – similarities, parallels. It was like rhyme, but instead of sounds rhyming it was meanings that rhymed, and there were endless series of them, and they went on forever in every direction. The whole universe was connected by lines and chains and fields of meaning, and I was part of it. [...] I’m believing more and more firmly in this thing called panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is actually everywhere.

Most of us would experience a similar phenomenon if we were kept in isolation for long enough, away from other people. It is normal for people to start talking to themselves when they are alone for any length of time, and if isolation continues they may start projecting their inner monologues out into the world and argue with people who are not present.

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

This ‘supreme delight’ was not something he created himself, but something he said was ‘given to me’.

This is perhaps why the countryside, in Blake’s work, has all the qualities of a prelapsarian paradise.

his loss of a sense of self, it should be noted, is different to the psychological experience known as dissociation, a state in which the mind becomes detached and disconnected, often as a way of avoiding dealing with trauma. Unlike the loss of a sense of self, it is a fundamentally passive experience.

Is ‘the self’ like a little person who watches this information, as if on a TV screen, with eyes of their own? If that was the case, would that little person also have another person inside their head, in order to watch what was going on in front of their eyes? That person would then need an even smaller person inside them, and so on to absurdity.

The adult mind is, in a sense, in a rut. Once it knows what is likely to happen in the world, it does not usually bother itself imagining scenarios that do not fall into this pattern. A child who has yet to develop a fully formed default mode network may spend time imagining what their life would be like if they had a pet dinosaur they could ride to school and impress their friends with. An adult, in contrast, will think about what they need from the shops and what to watch on Netflix that evening. On one level, this is a much more practical and energy-efficient use of the brain, but it may not be the way to a richer, more fulfilling life.

In a 2014 paper called ‘The Entropic Brain’, a team of researchers led by Robin Carhart-Harris from Imperial College London looked at the consequences of what they called ‘entropy’. In this context, the word ‘entropy’ referred to how chaotic or ordered the activity in the brain was, with chaotic, unexpected brain activity being classed as high entropy and calm, predictable brain patterns being classed as low entropy. [...] Addiction, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, depression and rigid or fundamentalist thinking are all the result of a brain that is too efficient, and which has too little entropy. Where these problems arise, a sprinkling of chaos is needed.

Note that Blake is not trying to remain neutral. His position is not a proto-postmodern belief that all perspectives are equally valid. He is quite prepared to call out one side as good, and the other evil. Instead, his position is that both sides of the clash are necessary, because there is no such thing as light without dark or hot without cold. For Blake, the conflict between these divides is the fuel that moves the universe. [...] Blake introduces the state of Beulah in both of his major works, Milton and Jerusalem, with the line: ‘There is a place where Contrarieties are equally True’.

Urizen is the personification of reason. He is the intellect that creates law, he is controlling and associated with language, and it is he who constructs the human-scale world of rationality and logic in which contrary positions cannot both be physically true. Urizen is the conscious observer that forces Schrödinger’s cat to become either alive or dead.

Because Urizen’s sense of himself as a creator god is built on the denial that there is anything outside of him, he finds this idea extremely threatening and he uses all the logic at his disposal to ridicule it. [...] What he likes above all other things is the idea that he is right, because this takes far less mental effort than understanding error. [...] 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. He will attempt to belittle, mock, or otherwise deny evidence that there is more than he knows, and that he is not the powerful creator he thinks he is. Deeply insecure, Urizen is the aspect of our minds that needs not just to be right, but to be thought of as right. You will recognise him immediately if you use social media.

Swedenborg was too comfortable in his own reality tunnel to question how limited it was