I suspect it was no accident that I, having now seen over forty one years of this subjective human experience and existence, was pondering seriously about the possibility of going deliberately mad, on the same day I also became once more heavily exposed to the philosophies of one William Blake and his more recent countryman Alan Moore.
These two remarkable literary and visual visionaires and artists have always been there in the back of my head since my teens, but they now (especially William Blake being the first of the two mastering this magical art) became extremely important in this my moment of coming to terms with the fact that the only sane way through this life is to go insane. The Swiss psychoanalyst and master of the hidden Carl Jung would perhaps call this conjunction of the spheres synchronicity.
The thing is that I have for the longest time considered myself to be a nihilist. Meaning I cannot find any real fundamental purpose or meaning in this nature and universe we inhabit, except for the apparent workings of the natural phenomenon we like to call evolution. I do not see Mother Earth (or the God of Einstein and Spinoza if you will) having any real plan for us (or themselves for that matter) per se, besides just existing and working towards the goal of surviving and reproducing, adapting and evolving, with the logic of water trying to find its way out of a maze. Life seems like an unbelievably random chance, something that just simply happens against so many odds, emerging from the chaos of the incredibly vast ocean of uninhabited and hostile worlds, or clusters of energy. And that is it, no bigger plans there.
To me ideas like consciousness or soul aren't real things to be grasped any more than the luminiferous aether of the past, and just like concepts such as élan vital became obsolete once our understanding of biology progressed, I suspect the whole concept of consciousness will go away the more we learn about the function of the brain. To me, and believe me I have meditated and tripped a lot during this lifetime, consciousness seems similar to the concept of awareness, the feeling of experiencing the surrounding objective (and at the same time the inner subjective) world through these human senses and nervous system. The ghost in the machine is just that, a story, fiction, a feeling. But this does not by any means downplay the amazing nature of our minds and experience, on the contrary. Reality is something to be alchemically and magically altered and manipulated.
Back to the term I used about the myself, nihilism. While the Russian radicals fine-tuning of this idea already present in Buddhism indeed condemned everything into meaninglessness, the existentialist or active nihilists such as Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche found real value in this absurdity, leaving the individuals in charge of their destiny. If nothing makes any sense, if morals do not exist outside the human experience, if our lifes amount to less than ants in space, it is our divine duty to create meaning where there is none to be found.
Which brings us to William Blake. Living in the so-called age of enlightenment, he witnessed the rise of rationalism, the cult of Newton, and the bleak industrialisation of his beloved Albion. The scientific worldview was of course in certain areas extremely welcomed but in some areas extremely narrow in its view, and this made Blake understand that experiencing the world through mere subjective tunnelvision devoid of all colour and light was the worst thing man should bring upon himself. Blake called this Single Vision. He also used the terms Twofold, Threefold and Fourfold Visions to describe the opening flower of experience.
If there are any universal morals (so to speak) present in the life of men, surely empathy must be one, and the fact that Blake was extremely oppososed to social injustices of his time like child labour, the conditions of the forced factory workers (which would be critisized as the horrors of capitalism as well), racism, slavery, unjust authority, monarchy, and so on. Being the sort of Christian he was, he must have taken the words Jesus supposedly spoke "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" strongly to heart. Blake was clearly battling the archons of our minds and societies at large. The modern man is still completely dominated by demons of indoctrination, oppressive and psychologically subjugate environments, trauma and neurosis. Collective hallucinations, mass psychogenic illness, the ships of fools.
The world is sick, yet if a medicine is to be found, it must be art. And in the words of this other man of Albion, already mentioned Alan Moore, who is of course heavily inspired by Blake and has also called his native England (or Northampton at least) Jerusalem, "Magic is art". And just as Blake was coined a madman by his peers (something he probably did not protest against), it comes as no surprise that also this current visionary writer, occultist, magician and master of realities decided to go insane and declare himself to be a magician when he turned forty.
In the times of Blake, the Romantic movement was a backlash to the increasing rational views of the era. What he called the poetic genius was far more valuable than the calculations of science, the first being full of infinite possibilities while the other limited to the philosophies of the human ape. Again, without downplaying the function and value of science, and not going the "science can't prove everything" route which leads to bullshit basically, I do find art to be at least as important to the wellbeing and evolution of genuinely happy societies as the cures for diseases and discoveries by telescopes.
Now someone really into the certain (perhaps misunderstood) Zen way of viewing the world, in which experience is stripped out of all subjective meaning and categorisation, might be tempted to consider the fantasizing of people like Blake as very un-Buddhistic, living in their own heads in that dreamlike way instead of experiencing the true reality as it is, wards and all. But that's the thing, when you view reality without personal limits, going completely bonkers and freeing all the power of your conscious and subconscious, it becomes limitless and full of colour, full of possibilities. "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."
Carl Jung and Blake have been compared to each other a lot, and while the two most certainly are not completely compatible and differ in many of their views about the human psyche, they both would most likely agree that the tip of this iceberg we call waking consciousness is dominated by the huge mass of archaic planes under the waves, made of strange symbols and mythological beings. And Blake did indeed create a mythology of his own, which he liked to project unto his experiencing of the surrounding world, something scholars researching his art are still unraveling today. (Mind you, scholars are not completely sure of the meaning and symbolism of many of his paintings which have been used by people to symbolize numerous worldviews, usually most likely in vain.) Carl Jung called the usually artistic process of merging the conscisous with the unconscious Active Imagination.
To recap this causerie of nihilism, science, and art and imagination: If God represents mental order, authority, forced universal laws, or life devoid of passions, joys and sorrows, pleasure and pain, then I'd rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Just like Milton (according to Blake) I am "of the Devil's party", but knowing it. But if God represents infinite possibilities, the absolute and becoming, childlike experience, invoking and evoking and delighting in the dance of the inner and the outer, accepting everything and everywhere with joy and vigor, then I shall gladly go insane and profess this religion of Active Imagination.
P.S. Now would be a great time to actually finish reading all that James Joyce stuff.
(All artwork included with this article is done by the author)
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