“If the Doors of Perception were cleansed
Every thing would appear to man as it is,
Infinite”

“If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character. the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again. Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only.” – William Blake
Reality “is” interpretation: the manifold of experience, meaningless in itself, is twisted by our understanding into a meaningful image. Looking out the window, the sun hangs in the sky, yet we all see different suns. The primitive may see a metaphorical ball of dung being pushed through the sky by a beetle, the average man sees a functional object that he enjoys on cloudless days and tells him to rise from bed each morning, the scientist sees the fusion of hydrogen into helium via the release of energy caused by that process. The poet has a different experience, when William Blake looked to the sun he saw “A hundred angels singing ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’” This becomes interesting with the realisation that we can choose which world we live in. Since the computational model of the mind gained major acceptance, the possibility of deliberate mental reprogramming of that system has become a way of life for many within the magical community. What I present here is in joint an explanation of modern Blakean mysticism, and also a partial example if not explanation of modern magical practice in the form of mental programming, which I regard Blake as an early practitioner of himself.

The first step in mental reprogramming is a comfortable acceptance of the denial of “objective truth”. While enlightenment optimism hangs like a noose around the necks of the mass populace, since Nietzsche there has been a large enough movement denying truth that it will be left to the reader to research how to shed their skin in this area. Theories such as pragmatism and instrumentalism have taken the denial of the traditional conception of truth to the heart of the scientific community itself. Having joined the Hassim in an acceptance that “Nothing is true, everything is permissible”, we are granted free access to our mental structures. We can form religions around Bugs Bunny as easily as Christ, we can hold faith in whatever we choose to as our choices are no longer confined, nor even linked, to the “true”, “likely” or even “probable”, as all these concepts are dissolved. Occam’s Razor no longer censors the systems we adopt. Of course, we may choose to live in a world of protons, neutrons and electrons, as certainly this serves certain ends, however equally we can choose to live in a world of angels, demons and divinity.
Of course, to see the sun as a hundred angels singing “Holy! Holy! Holy!” is not as simple as a single active choice, due to the resilience of our common perception, mental reprogramming in pursuit of a desired world is a slow, laborious, and above all, dangerous activity. The method of reprogramming assumed here is that through exposure to certain experiences, the brain adapts to new ways of viewing reality. An example of this can be seen in the way someone on returning from a war-zone may take months before they start to perceive reality in a normal manner. Having picked the desired way of perceiving existence, a system of exposure to stimulus has to be created that will mould the brain in the desired direction. I take the most powerful form of art to be ritual. Ritual may include drama, dance, visual images, music, and all other forms of traditional aesthetic experience in combination, and also combined with an intensity, as despite the rational denial of truth, due to the suspension of disbelief during ritual the reality created in the art is experienced “as if” it were the real nature of existence.
The principle of reprogramming asserts that through this exposure, the subject’s reality will have some hang-on from this invented reality. This can be seen in traditional church ritual, as the person involved in Holy Communion for a period sees the love of God everywhere on leaving the church, this fades without constant “topping-up”, however it can be maintained until the brains adaptation, like a spring exposed to a large weight, takes on the permanently distorted shape of the new reality, until the priest or monk through their lifestyle live in a world where God is apparent and obvious everywhere.
Many people live their lives without seeing past the objects of this world, they scurry around and achieve their own mechanical dreams within the mechanical universe, they touch only the finite surfaces of objects, because that infinitely thin, infinitely detailed, yet still finite and limited layer is all our common perception allows us to see. And they think surface thoughts, and they dream surface dreams, and so onward they go skating on a crust of particles, until one day, the tides of their inevitable death and destruction sweep them away, leaving our world very much indifferent to their impact. No more than a poem on a grave. All this, is just one perspective
“One can thus regard every human being from two opposed viewpoints. From the one he is the fleeting individual, burdened with error and sorrow and with a beginning and an end in time; from the other he is the indestructible primal being which is objectified in everything that exists” - Schopenhauer
As a rational creature, I found myself a mechanical animal in a mechanical universe, heading towards the nihil that is death to any mechanical being. My only escape was to abandon that form of truth. I would like to share some preliminary results. If these results appear in any way Christian, I point the reader to this Blake quote

ALL RELIGIONS ARE ONE: PRINCIPLE 7th: As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions & as all similars have one source. The true Man is the source he being the Poetic Genius.

All religions have one source according to Blake, these views are applicable to other religious beliefs and humanist atheism. You may see parallels with Blake’s god here and the collective unconsciousness, though more accurately it is a collective inspiration. The trans-religious entity that interests Blake is the Spirit of Prophecy, which is found in great men of all religions.
A pagan friend of mine gave a speech where he talked of the death of nature, of walking in fields but them not being the same fields that the classical poets he quoted had walked in, that everything had been tainted by the modern world till it was unrecognisable and unrecoverable. I asked him, “If we cannot step in the same river twice, can we worship the same God twice?” The idea and reality of nature today and tomorrow are different entities, what fixed thing is left to worship as time passes? Nothing physical and transitory, that is certain, it must be something eternal and thus, abstract. But he quoted poets, a poet’s words live forever, they paint eternal images. I saw paganism as the actualisation of romantic poetry. In poetry the worship of nature was just in words, now the worship is in action. To be dedicated to a form of poetry is to be dedicated to an aesthetic vision, a paradise, and also bound to that, a fear or hatred of its negation, or hell. The druid and the romantic poet share their heaven and hell, an Odinist has a very different aesthetic, but his Valhalla has a match in the poetic Veda’s, or to a modern Odinist perhaps Wagner. One of my favourite artists David Tibet constructed a religion based around a vision of Noddy as the messiah. How can we better describe worship of a religion than as an expression or manifestation of an original art?
Many will think I am demeaning the depth of religious experience by calling it art, but I hope not to show that religious experience is as shallow as art, rather artistic experience is as deep as religious experience. The first vision of earth from outer space, an image that literally changed the way we saw the world, a fundamentally spiritual experience. Religion is just one area of art, yet it is the most powerful of all forms of art because it takes its aesthetic and encodes it deeper within our psyche than any other form of art. The paintings of Michelangelo are as much a part of modern Christianity as the bible itself. The worship of God is mentally a worship of that very figure from the Sistine Chapel roof. The awe inspired by the art feeds the concept of an all-powerful God, by the concept growing, the art of that figure will produce more awe, and so on. Religion is not more than art; it is art in a feedback loop!
In the actualisation of romantic poetry into a religion, such as paganism, we find that aesthetic vision of harmony is not merely the effective heaven, it also translates into practical guides on how to achieve this paradise, how to live in accordance with it, and thus springs ethics. For the pagan these may be caring for the environment and practical guidelines to living in harmony with nature, the Buddhist aesthetic vision of paradise is of nihil, and so the ethical code demands the abandoning of desires. The glory in the Veda’s is of great battles and conquests, and so Odinist morality is of maintaining honour. All these examples are of how an aesthetic vision is practically translated into people’s lives through religion, the vision has a path leading to it, and that path is an ethical code.
What I am attempting to show is that the structure of our existence reduces to visions of heaven and hell and paths towards those visions. Aristotle said the definition of human was rational animal, I say it is aesthetic animal. Everything we do is guided by art; everything we do can be interpreted and judged as art or routes to art. The very structure of our existence can be built around any system that can be displayed to us aesthetically.
Blake said “All deities reside in the human breast”. The ancient poets animated physical objects with Gods, such as rivers or cities, they saw the spiritual in everything because they allowed themselves to. He thought priests had tried to abstract the Gods from the objects into spirits that exist both independently of the world and ourselves. This was a terrible mistake, God, spirits and angels do not exist apart from us, but exist in us, and further, we do not exist apart from them, and exist in them. The one from which all emanates, and yet all is. The great in the small, echoed identities, or perhaps fractured identities. When we fall from grace we are shattered and divided, to become only a shard of that original whole divinity. To be apart from God is to be divided from part of what you are, God is mirrored in the complete human working in unity with himself. Just as Kabbolists see us as splitting from the androgynous Adam Kadmon to Adam and Eve, so Blake has his eternals split into male parts, spectres and female emanations, these parts may then further split into smaller units.
Salvation is only reached by these shards uniting, and that is achieved by the destruction of all that stops them being one, the death of individuality in favour of unity or divinity. God is something we lay upon the world poetically by virtue of the divine shard of God inside ourselves, that divinity comes from us having sprung from the poetic genius, which is God. Blake says “God only Acts & Is, in existing beings or Men”, he cannot do anything apart from us, he does not exist apart from us, he is us, all of us, united as one being with total acceptance and forgiveness. He is the divine body that we partake in by being humans, and the root to him is self-annihilation.
The child is quickly taught to stop seeing divinity, repressed by a combination of reason, formal religion, and the pressures of society. Few people can escape the early years of childhood without having had their senses smashed down to the gutter of material reality. Blake was almost beaten by his father for seeing angels in a tree when very young. Luckily he escaped at the pleas of his mother, he did not listen to those who told him he was being foolish or mad, and he kept seeing angels throughout his life. He claimed angels dictated some of his texts, yet despite the inspiration of the angels, it was still his words, his poetry. He describes how he had to try to form the ideas dictated him into epic poems, how he played with different structural forms and symbols. The inspiration of angels is not word-by-word dictation; it is a dictation of ideas that a great artist can formulate into art. This is essential to understanding Blake, God talks in inspiration, not words. By creating art, by being inspired by that genius, we are drawn closer to God, we are actualising the shard of God within us.

A poet, a painter, a musician, an architect:
the man or woman who is not one of these is not a Christian.

Since everyone not only anthropomorphises God, they also egomorphise him into themselves, so the poet’s God is invariably poetic himself, just as the Masons see God as a builder. For Blake a true poet is a prophet or a true prophet a poet. How could one divide the two, since the words of the poetic genius will be poetry? To use rational scientific language is not to talk in the language of God, and since God is truth, to talk in such sterile terms no truth can ever be uttered. A line of poetry has more truth about it than any philosophy if that poetry is inspired, and any inspired philosophy, will be poetry. This was taken up by many of the 19th century German Romantic philosophers. Philosophy has become sterile in modern times, and art has become mostly petty. To use Blakean terms, art is no longer bounded by reason and reason no longer inspired by art. This needs to be rectified.
In Blake’s world the great evil is not Satan, it was Newton and the empirical philosophy of Locke. These English empiricists presented a hollow dead universe that he could never accept. Blake thought the universe was whatever it was perceived to be by the subject, reality is interpretation. With time he would “invent his own symbolic systems rather than be damned to use other people’s”, he created his own metaphysical universal order inside his head. Blake thought the world could be flat or round, and when he claims this, he means it quite literally. It is merely a matter of perspective if you choose Newton’s dead sphere of finite size floating through void, or an infinite plane stretching towards eternal horizons. Pick your world, science or magic, and make your own truth.
The poet and the scientist are eternal enemies, and yet both have the same goal, to understand the world. The scientist tries to understand the true world by looking at the lowest most basic level, that of atoms and mathematical laws, while the poet tries to understand by looking at the highest most transcendent level, emotions and what lie beyond even those. The pure information of grey, grey, greyey blue, brown, in a matrix, like a computer screen, would have no meaning to us if our eyes brought us this information directly. We have to interpret and abstract from this flow of mechanical data a world around us. This is the second layer of perception that we normally live in, sterile, but not as sterile as the layer below.
To a scientist, tables do not actually exist; yet to common man, tables are realer than atoms, far realer. They are solid physical objects, while the modern physicist tells us this table is 99% void and far from solid. But this is not the limit of layers we impose on the world, we can see a lot more than that too. A beautiful girl walks into the room, for the boy who loves her the room lights up, for her bitter ex-lover the room darkens to blackness, for another girl it clouds green with envy, perhaps for another it is unnoticed. None of these people is seeing the scientist’s reality, nor are the first three just seeing a girl enter the room. They are seeing another layer above that, seeing through clockwork reality of particles, through practical reality of objects, to something else, a world of emotional events that does not exist on its own, it exists in the synthesis of us and the world.
The scientist sees the mechanical level as truth, the common man sees the practical world as truth, the romantic sees this emotional level as truth. Emotions and feeling are not only more important than tables and chairs, they may be realer than tables and chairs, realer than protons and neutrons. And more than this, if you want to explain the universe, you may explain it in terms of feelings rather than objects or particles in space-time. Perhaps love and hate are not only realer than tables and protons; they cause tables and protons, it is merely a matter of perspective.
But, the third layer is not the final layer, nor is it where poetry ought to stop though frequently it does. There is a forth layer. Blake said that when he saw the sun, he did not see particles, nor an object, nor even emotion, rather he saw 100 angels singing “holy, holy, holy!” But did he really see this in the literal way, not exactly. Not in the scientific, common or even emotional sense of seeing. Rather, to understand this forth layer of perception that is above and beyond the three preceding, we must consider in what manner we see the third layer. The room does not literal light up for the man in love when his darling enters the room, the feeling of the room lighting up is more profound, more deep, and more real than if it literally did light up. Just as we see through the girl to the emotional layer of light, we can see through an emotional layer of light to the forth layer. It is not seeing just through particles, not seeing just through objects, divinity lies behind the emotions. This is fourfold perception.

Now I now a fourfold vision see
And a fourfold vision is given to me
‘Tis fourfold in 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

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