Oh what a smile, a threefold smile
filled me that like a flame I burnd.
I bent to kiss the lovely maid
and found a threefold kiss returned

Here we see through even the most romantic poetic sexual love only threefold existence is achieved. Blake goes further down the road to traditional Christian hell by claiming that obsessive relationships, such as marriage, are the opposite of unity. In obsessive romantic love you are loving a self, and so not embracing infinity, and in trying to persuade someone to be faithful to you, you are putting value on yourself as an individual above others. When you consider that we are all parts of one shattered greater being, the idea of being dedicated to one other part and deny the whole is actually a very shallow action.

He who binds to himself a joy,
does the winged life destroy,
but he who kisses the joy as it flies,
lives in eternities sunrise

A true mystical hedonist. We were not born into this world to simply reject it, what god made pleasurable was made that way so that we could enjoy it.

The whole of creation will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy whereas is now appears finite and corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of the sensual enjoyment.

Blake is the anti-Buddah. In the marriage of heaven and hell we find that true paradise is not the calm reason of heaven, but the energetic fires of hell. Energy is eternal delight. In later writings Blake describes the highest fourfold level of reality as a war zone. A battlefield were inspired souls draw fourfold bows of ideas, poetry and genius. Heaven is an intellectual and artistic battlefield. In God, all contradictions exist in harmony, but not harmony in a peaceful sense, a harmony of war. To Blake the idea of paradise being the surrendering of all desires, laying on a cloud and plucking a harp was unthinkable, that was hell. Eternal war however, is a tiring state.
The reason for the existence of the third layer of perception, the peaceful paradise that is Beluah beneath the true paradise, is that souls in eternal war need a rest, and so they travel down from this high artistic paradise to the peaceful meadows, where they regain strength until they can rise up again to battle. Blake’s mythology is of how one of the eternals, Albion, who is all mankind, travels down to Beluah to rest, and the zoa’s that make up his personality battle for domination, causing a further fall from Beluah to the lowest level of Newtonian reality, Ulro. Los, the zoa of inspiration, manages to raise humanity to Generation, from where salvation is possible. It is here that we find ourselves, and we have the choice of following scientists down to Ulro, where we may be enslaved by Urizen, the Old Testament God of moral law, or we can through sexual love and brotherhood we may rise to the peace of Belauh.
Only through artistic creation can we hope to reach up to the war-zone of ideas that is the true paradise. The unity of mankind does not mean us all hugging and making up. We are still at war even when we no longer have selves. By being this sea of contradictions, God is at war with himself, but in such a way that is harmonious, and the way it ought to be. God should not lie back and rest, genius does not rest, genius is active even when infinite, indeed, is infinitely active.
We take far more input from our senses than we actually interpret, need or would desire. The brain is not just a productive organ but is a negative instrument that acts as a filter on information that is not necessary for survival. Once we see the brain as a filter-on rather than a producer-of the things we perceive, we find that when Blake talks of self-annihilation, we are conversely talking about a productive process. Self-annihilation brings us closer to being like God because it destroys all the individualistic aspects of us in favour of eternity, but it does not destroy those individual aspects with a wrecking ball, it destroys them by building. Self-annihilation is not about becoming nothing, it is about becoming everything. Between two people with different opinions, the contradictions do not exist in harmony, and so in order to make themselves like God, both must unite. While it is impossible for all contradictions to exist in us in harmony, in the attempt we draw ourselves closer to completion as infinite components of God.
Just as Blake did not deny the world when it came to sexual experience, similarly in his visionary experience he did not believe in the denial of the world. His visions were constant, they were not all had in darkness or with the eyes closed, he had visions within reality. The angels did not just come at night, they lay beyond the sun.

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

Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception similarly describes how transfixed he was by the world when on mescaline as opposed to when he shut his eyes and saw mere blobby patches. If the objects of this world did not matter, then there would be no point us having come to this world. If there is any purpose to life then it must be linked to this world, not sitting around with our eyes closed contemplating the divine, we could do that in heaven.

Without Contraries is no progression.
Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy,
Love and Hate,
are necessary to Human existence.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell we are presented with a theological system in which God and the Devil represent opposite sides of human nature, both essential, though Blake sides with the devils. He does this because he is a poet, and true poets are of the devils party, the devil being part of God too. Scientists who try to impose order on the world are on the old Gods side, and the two are at constant war, and must be forever. They are the devourer and the prolific, those who create by divine inspiration and those who impose order on creation, and “whoever tries to reconcile them seeks to destroy existence”. To Blake, reason had almost won the battle, he saw the world around him being covered in dark mills as the industrial revolution took of took of, the climate of his times was for rational progress rather than artistic flair. He saw Newton reducing the whole universe to a set of mathematical laws.
And so, the marriage is symbolised by an angel of reason being persuaded to reach out into the flames of hell, having been convinced by the devils arguments, and transforming into the prophet Elijah, an artist. The next line is “this angel which has now become a devil” implying that and angel has become a demon by embracing hell. So the marriage is not an equal joining of opposites, rather it is a conversion to art instead of science, but this is needed to reset the balance of the times. The angel is convinced to enter the flames of hell by a demons claims that Jesus Christ was all virtue and yet broke all 10 commandments, Blake shows a legion of demons who are still Christian but have a vastly different interpretation of the bible as opposed to the literalistic interpretation of the angels. The key moral law to Blake is that there is no moral law, the 10 commandments are the words of a false God, the true God is the voice of honest indignation in our own heads, and this is the only voice we should listen to when given a moral option. We should talk from the heart and soul, rather than the dogma of priests.
Blake is intent on forgiveness as the primary virtue; he has the opinion that you ought to blame sin not the sinner. The self, the sinner, is an illusion. Spirits in descending to the temporal world pass through various states on a scale between the predatory selfhood of Ulro and complete humanity that is Eden. So the spirits and the states are unchanging and everlasting, nothing can be done about them. Satan is a state, an unchanging way of life that spirits may move through.

To distinguish the eternal human from those states of worlds in which the spirits travels, this is the only means to forgiveness of enemies.

These states exist only outside of eternity, they are the manner in which we exist within this world, and to transcend this world be must become stateless. To be stateless is to be everything. The state of Satan is not a state of sin, it is a state of absence of mercy, and so to be outside of that state is to be both contradictions, to be infinite.
People mock the Turner prise because the artists trying to explain their art, to verbalise their art, fail. It is the very fact that you cannot reduce art to an explanation that justifies the existence of art. If the artist were able to adequately explain his art it is only then that there would be nothing substantial behind the art. If it can be formalised then there is no need for the art in the first place. Blake is one of the greatest appreciators of this truth behind art as we see him become progressively more obscure. In the early works All Religions and One and There is no Natural Religion, Blake attempted to explain his beliefs in philosophical language, as he grows older he abandons all attempt at such science and becomes both increasingly obscure, yet certainly he believes he is expressing far more truth in his later years. He appreciates that the real metaphysical truths cannot be formalised into neat sentences to be judged as true or false, that the real truth behind this universe is as vague as its inhabitants. Among my favourite Blake quotes is:

I have always found that angels have the vanity to think of themselves as the only wise, this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

Wisdom does not only have one source, reason. This is what the modern world has come to believe, it is that lie that the angels were spreading. The highest wisdom does not come from reason, it comes from prophecy and inspiration, things that the pursuit of reason closes you off from, and the language of reason cannot express.
So what role does magic play within this system? It is magic that gives objects religious beauty, we enchant objects both subconsciously as one form of magic, and actively in ritual as another. Painting or creating music is a magical ritual since it creates something that transcends reality, it takes mere objects and creates emotional layers, and through those we can glimpse into the face of divinity. By performing ritual we enchant God, a space, the objects involved, and above all, ourselves. We give value to what would otherwise be a mechanical dead and useless universe. Magic took place when Los, the pure poet and embodiment of inspiration, managed to raise humanity from Ulro to Generation, that is, to turn clockwork reality into a word of objects and concepts, from which we can reach emotion and divinity. Crucially to this vision of magic though, creation is always the highest form of magic. In creation we both express divinity and emulate divinity.
How do you reduce Shakespeare to that level, and yet does that mean Shakespeare is not true? Science has no role in the world of art, and so no role in the world of religion. We should oppose science at its core, attack “it” rather than try to justify our beliefs in “their” terms. We should not be seduced by Newton and Locke’s void into surrendering the true beauty of this world. We hold ultimate respect for physical reality that it is in no way worthy of, and through that we not only destroy divinity and art, it also leads to capitalist and scientific visions of the world as opposed to romantic and religious views. We say, “this poem is about a maiden getting lost in the woods”, and yet by doing that we are not really talking about the poem at all, we are talking about the façade that the poem hides behind, the façade of a rational plot.
The true poem is untouched by any criticism that reduces it to anything other than poetry because nothing about it can be handled in non-poetic language. From childhood we are forced at school not to write, enjoy or really understand poetry within the poetic context, rather we are taught to strip out the plot from behind the words, and at best comment on how some of the word play accentuates a few of the ideas.
Huxley gives an account of how thin the line between visionary and insane is in Heaven and Hell. He shows how the types of visions experienced by Blake are almost identical with the experiences of a schizophrenic. Huxley claimed that through controlled use of drugs mankind can reach these outer levels of perception in a safe way, if one is not lucky enough to be gifted like Blake or cursed like the schizophrenic. Huxley never abandons his love of reality fully, he thinks that it is very important for a practical persons life that you have normal periods and extra-sensory periods. I believe that if you are looking for the divine in life, then having a tab of LSD every few weeks is not enough. If you really believe that this world beyond the world is realer and more important than our world, then you must be willing to plunge headfirst into it.
Millions of people throughout history have been willing to die for their religion, why is it then shocking that they should be willing to surrender their sanity for it. When Blake talks of self-annihilation, he never imagines it going quite this far, and yet the surrender to self-annihilation has its highest expression in the surrender to madness. To bring on schizophrenia is to kill your selfish human personality in favour of an uncontrolled seemingly externally inspired unity. A sane mystic is like a man who swims every weekend in the nearby river claiming to be a fish, he may gain great knowledge of the fish world and fishy ways, and indeed be able to tell them to us, but he is never going to really become one. To become a fish you have to surrender everything that makes you human, cast yourself into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and never walks on dry land again. You have a 99% chance of killing yourself within a few hours as the human body is not made to be a fish, nor is it made to be a mystic, but that is the only way to truly be one.
Far too many people in this world are willing to die for their beliefs while they are not willing to live a hard path for them. As Huxley said, “life is an illusion, but an illusion which we must take seriously”. In the words of Simon Moon “What the world calls sanity has led us to the present planetary crises, and insanity is the only viable alternative.” In the words of Albion Moonlight: “The saner we are the more danger of madness there is… I much doubt that there is a single sane human being on this planet now… gentlemen – we protect ourselves by going mad.”
Do you want to live in this world of TV and pop culture, do you want to live in a world of particles spinning in determined patterns, do you want to live on a hollow sphere, or do you want to live in a visionary landscape where our actions matter. There are angels everywhere if you allow there to be. Every crack in the pavement, every smudge of dirt. Every bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five. Those doorways need to be opened wide. Whatever demons may sweep in, at the very least, it will be a hell of a show. Love is the law.