William Blake

William Blake
(An approach to his Philosophy of Life.)

 

BY J. O. MACKENZIE*

 

The time has long since passed when by designating Blake ‘a mystic’ an excuse was made for considering his prophetic books as other than the outpourings of a disordered mind.

His lyrical poems have always been the delight of everyone with even a spark of human feeling or tender love but to grant to Blake the status of one of the world’s great minds is a position accorded to him as yet by only a very few. There are many today, however, who have realized the faithfulness with which he has depicted his own psychological experiences in his symbolic writings, and not only his own but the whole path of man’s slow travail through the mazes of embodied existence and of the steps yet to be taken. His description of these stages vary only in detail from the records left by other travelers and seers on the same path.

It is not our intention to touch on the interpretation of these symbolic writings nor do we think much good can be achieved by any strict rationalizing of the brain-mind in that endeavour. Our purpose is merely to show that Blake was no madcap. He had high discriminative faculties and if he purposefully wrote in a veiled language, he but followed his predecessors in the prophetic art. He wrote to Dr. Trusler: -

What is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men....The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction because it rouses the faculties to act.

Only when we can appreciate that are we in a proper mental attitude to perceive the inner sense of what he has written. If we are willing to learn and follow Blake’s own instructions, we shall draw upon our imaginative mind instead of using merely our analytic mind, and hitherto unsuspected meanings will flash upon us and we shall wonder why we did not see them before. Once we have made a discovery of this kind with Blake we have gained a key for understanding more, and perhaps we shall also perceive that another turn of the key will open up another level of understanding. In the writings of Blake lies an ‘immense world of delight’ once we are no longer bound by our ‘senses five’.

But Blake himself might object to the term ‘philosopher’ as applied to himself. That merely arises from the connotations of the term as generally used in his day. Argumentative philosophers were rampant. They were all, in his eyes, rationalistic philosophers who reduced everything to the level of physical existence so that thought itself became but another ‘organic perception’ since it was made entirely dependent on the data gathered by the five senses and the functioning of the brain.

Against such a philosophy of life Blake set himself with all the ardour of his being, though at the same time he said, “Let the philosopher always be the servant and scholar of Inspiration and all will be well.” It is in his role of a philosopher of the things of the spirit that we approach Blake.

Now any philosophy of life must provide us with not only some definition of its meaning and purpose–what man is, whence he comes, whither he goes–but also some understanding of the cosmical ground in which he plays out his drama and the interrelationship of all the parts and their position in the great scheme. If we can show that Blake possessed a comprehension of the universally recognized fundamental principles of such a scheme we will have accomplished our aim and we can then see for ourselves if their application to what may appear, at first sight, incomprehensible in his writings will not remove much of their obscurities.

First, then, what was man in Blake’s eyes? Above all else a spiritual entity with roots and definite being in Eternity, one whose body was but a portion of himself which he had externalized and into which he had descended. It was the redemption of his outer consciousness from the bondage to corporeal existence which was Blake’s one and only theme. That man should once more live a conscious life in spirit and be delivered from the thraldom of his five senses and the tyranny of his lower reasoning mind was the object of his writing. Only a deep sense of his mission and duty drove him to write when there was scarce one to read. As he wrote to Hayley in 1805:

O, what wonders are the Children of Men! Would to God that they would consider it, –that they would consider their Spiritual Life, regardless of that faint Shadow called Natural Life, and that they would promote each other’s spiritual labours, each according to its rank, and that they would know that receiving a Prophet as a Prophet is a Duty which if omitted is more severely avenged than every sin and wickedness beside. I know that those who are dead from the Earth, and who mocked and despised the Meekness of True Art (and such, I find, have been the situation of our beautiful, affectionate Ballads) I know that such mockers are most severely punished in Eternity; I know it, for I see it and dare not help. The mocker of Art is the mocker of Jesus. Let us go on, dear sir, following his Cross: let us take it up daily. Persisting in Spiritual Labours and the use of that Talent which it is Death to bury and of that Spirit to which we are called.

In his first tractate** Blake set out to prove the existence of the inner spiritual entity in man. He demonstrated the fallacy of the rationalistic thinker, the ‘natural religionist’ as follows: -

None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions.

Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions; none can desire what he has not perceived.

The desires and perception of man, untaught by anything but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense.

Then he developed the opposite viewpoint: -

Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception; he perceives more than sense (tho’ever so acute) can discover.

If any could desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot.

The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is infinite; and himself Infinite.

His conclusion to the first part is: -

If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic Character, the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.

and he draws the further application to the second art: -

He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only, sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as He is.

In his Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the soul, Oothoon, plucked the flowers of incarnate life calls out: -

They told me that the night and day were all that I could see,
They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up,
And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle,
And sunk my heart into the Abyss, a red, round globe, hot burning,
Till all from life I was obliterated and erased.

How was she to regain her lost innocence or rather regain her spiritual vision as there can be no going to the former condition? The ‘fall’ having brought individual consciousness to birth is necessary for that purpose; but the child-state has to be regained experience purified of its dross, in order that the soul can self-consciously pursue its journey with spiritual eyes open.

Blake’s answer was–by Imagination. But what Blake meant by Imagination would require a volume to set forth. A more familiar word today is Intuition but to be precise it is the faculty of Buddhi, discriminative insight which rests nevertheless on the experience of the mind (Manas), as a basis. Four-fold seeing was another term used by Blake, thus indicating three lower levels of seeing.

The first of these was single vision, or corporeal seeing, i.e., the mere functioning of the five senses and the co-ordination of their reports to the brain mind:

I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it and not with it.

This lower form of seeing will be burnt up, he says, when men cease to behold it.

I assert for myself that do not behold the outward creation and that to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is, as the dirt upon my feet, no part of Me. “What,” it will be questioned, “When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea? O no, no, I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.”

or more tersely,

This Life’s dim windows of the Soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole
And leads you to believe a Lie
When you see with, not thro’ the Eye***

Two-fold vision is natural to everyone as his intellectual powers awaken and analytical faculties develop. Here is the world of name and form, the abstractions by which we distinguish the phenomena of the objective world. This world of Nama-rupa, has been so merged in that of sense-perception that we have identified the two and often do not see that it is ourselves, who Adam-like have made the classifications and that our names and forms are very partial representations of the identities or individual existences behind the veil of matter.

Intermixed with these two is a third factor making Blake’s three-fold seeing. One might call it moral perception, a sense of values by which the attributes are reclassified in terms of an inner scale. Heart perception has been added to head learning. Love is present but the scale differs greatly according to the individual’s level of consciousness. All the degrees of human love and affection, the most sensitive and artistic natures as well as the grossly sensualistic find their own levels as the focus of consciousness rises or falls. It is not soft Beulah’s night for all.

In these three worlds we all live and move and have our perceptions, but in all ages there have been those who have broken through them into the world of spiritual verities, who have transcended the worlds of changing images and have entered into the world of eternal types, Plato’s world of Ideas. This Blake calls four-fold vision. And it is from the point of view of this fourth world that he writes; hence the ‘inconsistencies’ which so perplex the reader who tries to ‘understand’ Blake and who does not bring his own spiritual vision, his own human imagination or ‘spiritual sensation’ to throw light on these perplexities. Imaginative sight develops through true heart or feeling perception and, when fully developed, becomes four-fold vision. Reasoning is easy but imaginative understanding is difficult and most people will not make the necessary effort to develop the higher type of seeing. Blake was determined that he would not descend to the lower levels because he wanted everyone to make the effort which would be repaid a thousand fold and he preferred to be considered even by his friends as a mad man than gain the empty praise of the multitude by writing as they read.

Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold is my supreme delight
and  three fold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold always, may God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep!¹

Blake was no ignoramus. He was well read in the classics and knew both Greek and Hebrew. He had studied all the great writers from Dante and Chaucer onwards. He wrote of Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme and esteemed their writings as of the highest value. Voltaire he read in the original, Neither the Scandinavian Mythology nor that of the North American Indians had escaped him. His drawing of Charles Wilkins translating the Bhagavad Gita² shows that he had picked up the first faint strains of Indian thought whose mighty message has been rolling Westward ever since, in ever increasing measure. He was, of course, well versed in all branches or painting and his criticism of the then fashionable school represented by Sir Joshua Reynolds remains as trenchant today as when it was written. What he would have to say about present day art in the West would not pass the censor. “Without minute neatness of execution the Sublime cannot exist. Grandeur of ideas is founded on precision of ideas” was his conviction.

Further Blake was a reasonable man however much he declaimed against mere reason. He was also a very hardworking one. As an engraver he had to attend to the ‘minute particulars’. In his eyes every mortal thing on earth reflected its eternal counterpart in the world of true being. The engravings which accompanied his text were as much a part of his message as the written word, if not more. But, again, the illustrations need the eye or imagination to view them and not the eye of sense. Blake lived a quiet contented life and a life of strictest probity in all matters. There was nothing un-clean in his eyes that was a product of mother nature to him every living thing was holy. That some were offended by his drawings reflected the impure state of their minds rather that of his. He drew in conformity with his spiritual vision to merely reflect physical nature in painting was to betray. Art, which was the very foundation of civilization in his eyes. That many of the forms he drew obey no laws of physical gravitation only shows that he knew the soul had a polarity different from that of the body and lived in a different gravitational field, it obeyed its own attractions. Every tree, every flower introduced by Blake into his drawings represented different emotions and conditions and states of human consciousness. His plates in fact, are a key to his text when once one has grasped something of his use of correspondences. There is once more a variety in these, much to the disgust of those students who want to unravel Blake on the jig-saw puzzle plan. But nothing will fit that way, yet he used his symbols with a precision only an engraver who has to consider the placing of every minute line and dot in his plate could accomplish.

Blake continually spoke of the Universal Man. This in its highest form is the logos of the Greek thinkers, the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalists, the Om of the Vedas, and the Atman of the Vedantists etc. Following the biblical and kabbalistic formula this Man was fourfold, and is the same as the Pythagorean Tetractis. This is the Eternal Man from whose emanations are derived the worlds of manifestation, and the human being is himself the microcosm of all this. His lower nature is also fourfold, forming the cross on which his higher spiritual nature is continually crucified until the Christ who is the true man rises from the grave of the merely personal life.

As already indicated the whole burden of Blake’s message had to do with the subject of man’s redemption. Blake had thus to trace in all its details, through vision after vision, the story of the development of the lower worlds and the way in which ‘the fall’ so-called took place. Reading the Bible with his spiritual eye he grasped intuitively what there was hidden behind the words. He saw the planetary worlds or globes and the whole process of the emanative life as it unfolds plane by plane and man with it, principle by principle. The early races before the division of the sexes are described, then the fall into the sexual, and the appearance of ‘Urizen,’ man glorying in his separative, ahankaric life. We might add this point that those who think Blake advocated any kind of sex license are making a grave mistake. Blake was all for the removal of the priestly veils and social taboos that had made of sex an unholy instead of a sacred function to be used only for its legitimate purpose. Blake saw into the world where there is neither marriage nor the giving in marriage though he considered human love as the natural avenue to divine love.

In Blake’s sight what was man’s relation to God? He said, “God only acts and is in existing beings or men.” For him there was no outside personal god. In the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell” he further states “that all deities reside in the human breast”. He repeats in Jerusalem what he first enunciated in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

Go, tell them that the worship of God is honouring His gifts
In other men and loving the greatest men best, each according
To his Genius which is the Holy Ghost in Man; there is no other
God than that God who is the intellectual fountain of Humanity.

On the God within man, his constant refrain is:

I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and a friend.
Within your bosoms I reside and you reside in Me:
Lo! We are One forgiving all Evil: Not seeking recompense
Ye are my members, O ye sleepers of Beulah, land of shades.

This is also from his “Jerusalem,” his last work. In “The Everlasting Goespel” he writes: -

If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me;
Thou also dwell’st in Eternity.
Thou art a Man, God is no more,
Thy own Humanity learn to adore,
For that is my Spirit of Life
Awake, awake to Spiritual Strife.

Of the unchanging Reality behind the manifested universe, he wrote: -

Many suppose that before the Creation All was solitude and chaos. This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the mind as it takes away all sublimity from the Bible and limits all existence to creation and chaos, to the time and space fixed by the corporeal vegetative eye, and leaves the man who entertains such an idea the habitation of unbelieving demons. Eternity exists, and all things in Eternity, independent of creation which was an act of Mercy.

On the problem of good and evil Blake saw no two opposing principles.

“The combats of Good and Evil is eating of the tree of knowledge” he says, and “The combats of truth and error is eating of the tree of Life, these are not only universal but particular. Each is personified. There is not error but it has a man for its agent, that is, it is a man. There is not truth but it has also a man. Good and evil are qualities in every man whether a good or evil man.”

Of the great cyclic ebb and flow, of the coming and going and returning again of worlds as well as men, he closes “Jerusalem” with these words: -

All human forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth and Stone; all
Human Forms identified, living, going forth and returning wearied
Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days and Hours: reposing,
And then Awaking into his Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

“Brahma’s day extendeth for a thousand revolutions of the Yugas and his night extendeth for a thousand more,” says the Bhagavad Gita and it was to such days that Blake referred, and to Nirvanic rest.

Of the law of Cause and Effect he said in “Milton”: -

And every natural effect has a Spiritual Cause, and not
A natural; for a natural cause only seems: it is a Delusion.

Here, again, is occult truth and a correct understanding of Karma. “Each thing is its own cause and its own effect,” he also wrote.

Blake was constantly calling to people to awake to the great battle of life and fight it out “with intellectual spears and long winged arrows of thought.” His lines in “Milton” are familiar to all: -

Bring me my Bow of butning gold;
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of Fire.

I will not cease from Mental fight
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.

One need scarcely add that Jerusalem, the sacred place of peace, is the principle of love and forgiveness and compassion absolute in man, that principle of pragna which when fully awakened makes of a man a God, his course has been run, and self-conscious immortality secured.

“This theme calls me in sleep night after night, and every morn awakes me at sun-rise,” he says in the opening lines of  “Jerusalem” Chapter I: -

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:
Fibres of love from man to man thro’ Albion’s pleasant land.

and in the concluding Chapter 4 summons once again: -

Awake, Awake, Jerusalem! O lovely Emanation of Albion,
Awake and overspread all nations as in ancient time;
For lo! the Night of Death is past and the Eternal Day
Appears upon our Hills. Awake, Jerusalem, and come away!

All the gifts of the spirit are mental gifts, he says, in his address to the Christians in Jerusalem in Chapter 4, and adds that our treasures in heaven are mental studies, the joys of heaven are in their exercise and improvement, the pains of hell are but ignorance, bodily lust and idleness. To labour in the knowledge is what he means by building Jerusalem and he calls upon every Christian to engage himself openly and publicly before all the world in some mental pursuit for the achievement of that end. Art and science was the real life of man to Blake. It was the art of living itself and science was to him the knowledge of the things of the soul, mortality but the things relating, to the body which dies, immortality but the things relating to the spirit which lives eternally.

As Blake was not an initiate in the secret schools of the ancient mysteries his vision like that of other independent and isolated mystics was naturally restricted in many ways. Had he been an initiate, however, he would probably have been much more reticent. He recognized the one true source of all religious teachings and saw behind the veils of the Greek fables as he did behind the dead letter of the Bible. His particular reference to ‘Apuleius’ Golden Ass and to Ovid’s Metamorphosis in which certain mystery teachings are given, shows that he knew to what they alluded.

Blake’s visions have their value in that they stimulate us to use our own imaginative powers and make us more susceptible to the world of spiritual reality. Although he spoke in his letters about conversing with spirits, this had nothing to do with spiritualistic practices but are purely interior communications taking their form from the ground of his own mental furniture. He sometimes said passages in his writings were dictated to him, but this must never be taken in any sense of a special revelation. He was always continually polishing what he wrote and perfecting it. Every one must begin to think for himself on all the great problems and to use his own judgment, and each must learn to express his own individuality in his own way in his own life. But, note it is the individuality that has to be expressed and not the personality. The former is a real being, the latter only a ‘spectre’ which has to be absorbed when redeemed, according to Blake. The one has ‘spiritual identity’, the other is only a ‘state.’ Nevertheless every man on earth is the expression of his eternal counterpart in heaven and Blake’s value to us is precisely in the utter dedication of himself and all his powers without the shadow of turning, to bringing that grand message to humanity,

Which if man ceases to behold, he ceases to exist. (Jerusalem)

* James O. Makenzie was born in Glasgow, Scotland. Charted Accountant by profession, he has been an associate of the United Lodge of Theosophists science 1921. He is now in India to serve the cause of United Lodge of Theosophists in this country. He is a student of Literature, conversant with Eastern thought.
** “There is no Natural Religion” 1788
*** The Everlasting Gospel.
¹ Letters to Thomas Butto, 1802
² A Descriptive Catalogue No. 10.