Thor Among the Giants: Part III
/When Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, he meant that title metaphorically, not, as it were, mathematically. It’s another way of saying that life in Western civilization had become automated, zombie-like, and it sucks to be us. The eighteenth/nineteenth century poet and artist William Blake however, had a vision of humanity that involved distinct dimensions, four of them in fact, and this vision encompassed a mythic roadmap for how to get from an alienated, one-dimensional world like Marcuse’s, into a four-dimensional world of freedom and fullness. We gotta get out of this place said William Blake, and pretty often he did.
Literary people don’t have all that much to say about Blake the artists, and art people tend to ignore him as a poet; but we will contrive to ignore both and consider him for his system of thought. Central to Blake’s thinking was the four-fold (i.e., four-dimensional) vision, which comprises of Ulro (the one-fold world), Generation (two-fold), Beulah (three-fold) and Eternity, or Eden (four-fold). That four-fold world is the one most often entered by mystics, saints, madcap poets, and people who took mushrooms 45 minutes ago.
Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!
Letter to Thomas Butts
It may seem odd at first that Blake had it in for Isaac Newton, plus some other Enlightenment luminaries of his time like John Locke and Francis Bacon, who after all were the vanguard of the scientific revolution and the birth of liberalism. But for Blake Newton’s sleep is the triumph of reason over vision, it’s the dark side of the Enlightenment, where matter is just whirling lifeless particles, and consciousness is an emergent property of particles that have fortuitously arranged themselves into the shape of a brain. To Blake though, the world is “all alive…where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy,” and this world is animated by the Human Imagination, which is nothing less than the “divine body.” Imagination is the primary reality, and all others are secondary:
In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.
Jerusalem
One-dimensional Ulro is where Newton would take us – a mechanical, lifeless, monovision realm with landscapes of sand and stone and a thought-world composed of rule books and an unyielding moral law, the harsh machineries of the mind. It’s rock bottom for humanity. Blake describes, for instance, how in Ulro artisans and craftsmen are turned into slaves of complex lifeless wheels turning the cogs of other lifeless wheels whose spiritual outcome is:
To perplex youth in their outgoings and to bind to labours
Of day and night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file
And polish brass and iron hour after hour laborious workmanship
Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread
In ignorance to view a small portion and think that All
And call it Demonstration blind to all the simple rules of life
The Four Zoas
Given “a scanty pittance of bread,” the youth, the workers, suffer not only from physical deprivation, but from the spiritual deprivation of the “small portion” of reality assigned to them in this alienated world. Their life has shrunk into a travesty of humanness by the cold and linear world of proof, disproof and Demonstration, which at the time Blake wrote was in the process of creating the “dark, Satanic mills” of an industrializing society. We create machines, and then our machines recreate us, as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where Charlie busily mends the moving cogs of giant machinery as they convey him through the bowels of a massive, dehumanized factory. Or in the darker vision of the automaton-like workers trudging out of the factory in the shift-change scene at the beginning of Metropolis. Such realities can only come as a result of impoverished Imagination:
To the eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way...As a man is So he Sees.
The two-fold world of Generation is a step up from Ulro, but not by all that much. It has at least organic life in it, but it is the life of what Blake calls “the Vegetative World,” a place, or state of mind, ruled by striving, sex and power, where everything has its opposite or contrary, like male/female, subject/object, predator/prey and so on. All the genes here are selfish ones and, “Life lives upon death & by devouring appetite all things subsist on one another.” It is better than Ulro because at least it has the pulse of life in it, but it does not have that divine spark, Imagination. In the Christian myth though, Generation is where the sacred snuck in and incarnated itself and, as they say, the Word was made flesh.
Beulah, the three-fold world, is an odd one. It is a dreamy, soft, paradisical dimension, lit by moonlight and bedecked with flowers where love, especially sensual love, rules – as opposed to the straight up sex of Generation. In Beulah there are people, not just forces, and those people are in relationship with one another, but it is a waystation, a resting spot, between spiritually dead Ulro and the fullness of Eternity. Beulah is where Imagination makes its first appearance in Blake’s schema, and you might be in Beulah when you enjoy a trippy summer’s afternoon with friends, Woodstocking around between trees and bushes.
Eternity is the place where we fully live our humanness, the destination point for those emerging from the nightmare of one-dimensional existence, This is not the eternity of the Christian heaven where, as a reward for failing to do all the selfish things you wanted to do, you get to be singing forever and ever with your saintly chums. Blake’s Eternity is alive and engaged and has nothing to do with endless duration. Instead of the heavenly party you cannot leave, Blake’s Eternity is outside of time, as these couplets make clear:
To see the World in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
You reach Eternity not through good behavior but through improved perception, as his oft-quoted saying points out: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is -- infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” A cavern, we could say, composed of the stones of Ulro. But Eternity is a state of total enchantment with creation; as Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” and it was Henry David Thoreau who gave the corollary that: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” The tripping brain can go into a state of such powerful concentration that we may dutifully enter Eternity not only by being exposed to say, sublime music or spectacular scenery, but by perceiving any portion of creation, such as a weed or a pebble.
In the alienation model, Marcuse saw escape from the one-dimensional world through what he called the Great Refusal, where we choose to no longer indulge ourselves in the soporific consumer joys that chain us to the current economic (and we might say spiritual) system. Blake had an entirely different way to escape from Ulro. It is not so much a jailbreak as a consummation, where the other three states fold into Eternity – the reasoning faculty of Ulro, the bodily powers in Generation, the mortal love of Beulah, completed by the fire of Imagination in Eternity. It’s a four-fold completeness where the states are in balance and harmonized together, not unlike C.G. Jung’s process of individuation, where the four human faculties of thinking, sensation, feeling and intuition harmonize into one unity he calls Self. Jung’s claim was that these four human qualities correspond to the four elements of Mediaeval thought, and in that system the thinking function = air, sensation = earth, feeling = water and intuition = fire. To Jung the bad science of the Middle Ages turned out to be good psychology, or at least significant archetypal psychology that can be useful for us today.
The four dimensions of Blake’s system correspond to Jung and to the four elements like this: Ulro = thinking = air; Generation = sensation = earth; Beulah = feeling = water; and Eternity = intuition = fire. As in these other systems, it is when the four things are harmonized into one whole that they find completeness. We may feel this too sometimes while tripping, when we experience the peace beyond all understanding, and we gain a temporary alignment, a true taste of paradise, where everything is “okay” and we don’t need to change a thing. In Eternity those bad boys Locke, Bacon and Newton finally fall in their rightful place, all friends together and counterbalancing the great and fiery poets Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.
Blake’s personal mythology is complex and sometimes bewildering, but there is simplicity in the fact that his main hero, called Albion, is the person where this harmonizing takes place. Blake was a tad chauvinistic in picking this name, since Albion personifies England and maleness, not something we will all totally identify with. If we forgive him this indiscretion, Albion can stand as a placeholder image for humanity as a whole. Albion, “the Four-fold Man,” is not in very good shape, because he has had a fall from grace rather like Adam and Eve in the Fall from Eden, except that Albion’s Fall has nothing to do with sin, it is a loss of his capacity for visionary experiences. He has divided from his Imagination. Albion’s fall involves a profound and troubled spiritual slumber that has landed him in the dismal reaches of Ulro. Most of Blake’s prophetic works are about Albion’s fitful, reckless, and often quite violent efforts to wake up. It’s a compelling picture, though not a pretty one:
I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep…
I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose.
For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton, black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
Jerusalem
Albion, however, has more than just sleep issues to deal with. In his fall from grace, he fractures into different parts, the main ones being his Emanation, his female side, and his Specter, the reasoning self. It is the Specter who is responsible for the “cogs tyrannic”, the churning, lifeless wheels that powered the dark Satanic mills of a rapidly industrializing merrie England. These wheels have hardly relented in the modern age, as they churn out the super-rationalist mindset of mass production, mass bureaucracy, and mass marketing, with a Midas touch for death of the spirit. This perilous circumstance, this cultural “setting,” is where we have no choice but to take our psychedelics and try to get an expansive taste of Eternity. Meanwhile, we risk taking a ride to Ulro, which we will experience as being trapped inside a fractal, or an endless computer game or some other kind of soulless hell region.
What, it’s worth asking, is the personal experience of Eternity? In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Markel, the older brother of the saintly Father Zossimo lives a life of complete cynicism and dissolution until, when confronted by death at an early age, he suddenly and almost miraculously gets it how vacuous his life has been, and he finds his way into Eternity. This exchange on his sickbed is recalled by Zossimo:
“Mother don’t weep darling,” he would say, “I’ve long to live yet, long to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful”
“Ah dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night, coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces.”
“Don’t cry mother,” he would answer, “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don’t see it; if we did we should have heaven on earth the next day.”
Markel says both that paradise is now, and that heaven on earth would be the next day. Why the delay? I think it’s that the tripping, or the ecstatic, brain can move into Eternity right now at this moment, as the doors of perception go through a thorough cleaning; but heaven on earth can only be experienced with other people, and it will take time for us to recognize each other and develop trust. Hence the tomorrow, and when in Jerusalem Blake said to Albion:
Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine
he was looking towards the collective awakening, not just a private one. We can say that Markel, having found himself in the mutual love divine, is a bit of a spiritual early riser, and he reaches out to his fellow humans in a way they don’t yet understand. Blake’s mission was to let us know that we could all wake up to mutual love, and in Jerusalem he gives us a job description that is not just for him as an artist, but for all of us:
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
The bosom of God is the Human Imagination, and once we realize this, experience it rather, Albion will start to rouse from his sleep. But this heaven is not the perfected heaven of Christianity, any more than being in Eternity stops the passage of time, death and corruption. It is the heaven we see in the little flower, the joy of an Eternity outside of time. Many people over the years have tried to wake up the collective by building Utopian communities which have flourished for a while, but all seem to flounder in the end, not always because there was anything particularly wrong with their ideas, but because there was too much Ulro in the personnel involved, as there inevitably has to be at this point in our evolving. This is perhaps why Marx was wise in saying that he would not try to write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.
Soon after that last exchange Markel was told he was expected to die in the next few days. He then said:
“Why reckon the days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, try to outshine each other, and keep grudges against each other? Let’s go straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss each other, and glorify life.”
“Your son cannot last long,” the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied him to the door. “The disease is affecting his brain.”
The window of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too, “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy, “Yes,” he said, “there was such a glory of God all about me; birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonoured it all and did not notice the beauty and the glory.”
We routinely dishonour our literal and imaginal birds and meadows by not seeing them from the eyes of Eternity, and indeed, the consumption-based society we live in has no regard for the sacred or for birds. Thoreau saw that it has no regard even for its inhabitants:
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistakes, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them…Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything other than a machine… The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another so tenderly.
Walden
For those of us who do not have spontaneous mystical experiences, adherence to a psychedelic regimen is probably our best ticket to Eternity. Some of us were driven to psychedelics for solutions to what at the outset we called mental health conditions, and it would make sense that the ones more burdened by suffering should be a vanguard for change. No everyone has noticed that this dance we are doing is on hot coals.
Psychiatry is coalescing around the idea that the peek into paradise can be a tool to alleviate a gamut of mental conditions, from fear of death, to PTSD, to nicotine addiction and so on. But this is like giving CPR to the canary that just keeled over in your coal mine. It’s a refusal to read the cultural warning signs so you can order everyone back to work. When the world bakes into an Ulro garbage heap of toxic waste what will it matter if we in the West have done enough therapy to become “well-adjusted”? The emotional anguish of the individual cells in the body of Albion signals that all is not at all well, not just for too many suffering individuals, but for the culture, with all humanity. When the scope of the problem is restricted to a model of personal mental health issues, of symptoms and intervention, that restricted view pushes humanity back towards spiritual doziness.
To see things fully we have to shift from a paradigm of mental health disorders, interventions, and relief, and into creating Markel’s heaven on earth. Not that you will find that in the mission statement of most mental health clinics, I’ll admit, but I believe that nevertheless we must get serious about treating one another with kindness, like that tender fruit Thoreau mentioned. We have to take the time to see a tree as a living miracle, not a green thing in the way. “As we are, so we will see,” and if we practice new seeing we will incrementally change who we are.
When we are burdened by “treatment-resistant” depression or anxiety, we are feeling the pain of being confined to the Imagination-free realms of Ulro and Generation. We don’t so much have mental hygiene deficits, as if we forgot to wash our mental hands, we lack vision, and as the Book of Proverbs says in the Bible, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” When I get depressed, or I despair, it’s not just me, it is me as part of a people that is perishing, and my struggle is our struggle. Psychedelics have the capacity to help us in a struggle that is not just for our own “wellness goals,” but part of a spiritual imperative to save the people. It’s just that the arena for the struggle is personal experience.
When Blake says:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise
he is pointing out the offramp to the last exit from Ulro. The mental health industry, when it studies psychedelics and remarks on their efficacious effects at a six-month follow-up, it is trying to bind up “the joy” of our experience with logic and Demonstration. The mystical experience is suddenly in vogue today, and when psychiatrists declare it an effective intervention, they are overlooking its volatile nature and trying to trap it in the butterfly net of rational categorization. The mystical experience, by its very nature however, will work to disintegrate the cannon of psychological classification into the glory of Eternity’s sunrise.
I remember one day, back when dentists were nice enough to give us nitrous oxide, being quite high in a dentist’s chair one day when I realized with a sudden shock that I was being duped. There was no numbing here, this was not a painkiller; it was just that the dance of consciousness had suddenly become so absolutely compelling to my mind that I couldn’t shift my attention back to the pain. I had moved from our usual mode of pain/defense/grab to one of explore/delight/express, and the capacity to focus on pain was just gone. Something similar may happen after a psychedelic journey – the emotional pain is not necessarily gone, but the moments of sheer ecstasy have changed our perspective on it and rendered it more marginal. “Everything has changed and nothing has changed,” we sometimes say after a journey, and in that aftermath, yes we still bring our fragmented selves to a fragmented world, but now we perceive the world and us differently, and the parts of us that were previously troublesome and shameful have now become a worthy object of interest and compassion.
Culturally, we are not in a place right now where we can expect this heaven-on-earth perspective to remain durable. It slips away, and we forget ourselves until the next visit to Eternity. It’s good to do a practice of some sort not only to keep the fairy dust in our hands for as long as possible, but also to do the long, slow work of bringing that new perspective inside us until, eventually, we may become its spontaneous expression. We all have to find what works for us, and it’s worth trying different things until we find what really suits.
A practice I like is walking among trees. If I can find a spot quiet enough and tree-ey enough, where I can walk very slowly, then I creep among the trees, as if tracking something. I do my best to pretend that my local park is mine alone and ready to turn itself into a personal fairyland. It’s not much more than a walking meditation really – except that I am not shutting off my surroundings in order to tune into my body, I am tuning into the props and cues around me, known as trees, so I can absorb some of their magic and remember my own. As a kid I used to do this, much more effectively, when I went birds spotting. It was like slowly creeping through my own secret cathedral as I tried, not so successfully, to be so quiet even the wild birds would not notice me.
Whatever the practice may be, and I hope it will be different for everybody, it requires a shift in identity’s centre of gravity. For me as a child a good deal of my identity naturally drifted towards Eternity/Eden, as did yours, but when we go through the slings and arrows of regular life, we are forced to attend to our ego wounds and ego dangers until we move location to the worried, angry, self-recriminating day-to-day world of pain/defense/grab. And then you wake up one morning and say, “Oh, how strange, I don’t know who I am any more.” Instead of being ugly ducklings that grow into beautiful swans, we have somehow reversed the process, and are in danger of losing the essence of what Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”
I believe our personal practice should not be a severe self-discipline but an act of delicately recapturing that wild and precious life. When I sat in that dentist’s chair something sacred was happening, as Eternity was once again falling in love with the productions of time, through the vehicle of one lucky human being. The thing about psychedelics is that they give us hope; it’s not a hope portrayed in MRI scans, where brain circuits “light up” in one way or another, it is the taste of heaven-on-earth that threw Mandel into an ecstasy, because he saw what was possible. It is within us to realize that.