Blake and Castaneda Belly-up to the Infinity Bar

“The task of sorcerers is to face infinity.”  Don Juan, The Active Side of Infinity

Today, it’s El Día de las Letras Gallegas here in Galicia.  (17th May, 2024.) A holiday honouring the language and literature of Galicia.  Sounds good, except that you have to have been dead for at least 10 years to be honoured. While still living you must do something more useful.

We’ve had very little internet access over the past two weeks, just a couple of hours a day if we catch it, due to the solar flares and heavy rain.  It’s been unseasonably cold and we haven’t been able to get out much.  Our dining chairs are draped in wet clothes and my three pairs of wellies are wet on the inside from the long grass. Stepping into cold wet wellies in the morning is not one of my favourite experiences.  Our world ends in pearl-grey skies just across the river and I feel cocooned.

There is a fork in the road ahead and I’ll see it when the rain clears.

As a child, I was criticised for having an over-active imagination and spent most of my adult life trying to squeeze it into something useful.  I now see that Nature needs our imagination just as much as people do, maybe even more. That revelation marks my personal pivot point on the invisible path.

With the solar flares and nothing to do, I’m stretched between my physical presence and somewhere else, that isn’t a place at all.  When I close my eyes, I’m looking in the doorway of the Infinity Bar and there are two men, alone at the bar, an empty stool between them. I know they are William Blake and Carlos Castaneda, sharing tales with tequila and I am eavesdropping.  They talk of dragons and folly, playing the game, but the emptiness around them is full of shadows. I don’t step into the bar.

I was never that fond of William Blake, from what I learned in school.  Too religious, he seemed and I was too young.  Yet, here he is, showing up repeatedly and insistently, his Eternity merging with Castaneda’s Infinity.

Does a poet never die?  Life between the worlds.  I looked up Blake’s Fourfold Vision and found a reference to the ‘still living poet’ in Mark Vernon’s excellent essay, The Four-fold Imagination that I quote from liberally below.

“Many of Blake’s contemporaries regarded him as eccentric or mad. But a different mood prevails today. Busts are as evident as booms. Civilisation itself can feel as if it teeters on the brink. Blake’s critique of ‘dark Satanic Mills’ now appears prophetic; his advocacy of the need for ‘Mental Fight’ to liberate the imagination sounds like a calling. When, on a damp Sunday in 2018, a substantial slab of handsomely engraved Portland stone was unveiled to mark his burial place at Bunhill Fields in London, hundreds gathered, having heard about the occasion by word of mouth. They were addressed by Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, who described Blake as one of the greatest living English poets. And he meant ‘living’. Blake never really dies, the rock star insisted.

This sense of his immortality arises with a recognition of the conviction upon which Blake bet his life: the human imagination is not only capable of entertaining fantasy. When coupled to creative skill and penetrating thought, it reveals the truths of existence and life. It converts everyday incidents into rich perceptions that might amount to a revolution in experience.”

Blake describes four states of mind that are differentiated according to attitudes towards the imagination, which then determines the living reality within each state.  From the perspective of what Blake calls Eden or Eternity, we can see the other states that people are operating in, but they cannot yet reach into Eternity.  And it doesn’t matter anymore.

Ulro is the state of single vision, with neither imagination nor subjective experience.  Blake sometimes referred to this state as Satan.

“In Ulro, that which can’t be expressed quantitatively does not exist…. Wisdom is sought in logic and numbers, and debate is met with the cry to gather more evidence.”

Fact-checkers are Ulro’s spawn.

“The imagination is absorbed by this data capture. It works like an obsessive tourist pointing and clicking, pointing and clicking with a camera, while experiencing little or nothing new.”

Ulro is a limited and managed perspective, that keeps out all painful and the messy stuff of life. Blake observed that the emptiness and confusion of a life described by statistics and devoid of experience could prompt a shift to the next state, that he called Generation.

“Generation is ruled by a spirit of reproduction. Its twofold vision grasps more of the nature of life and allows for a degree of subjective experience. It understands biological cycles and productive seasons and, in the modern world, has fostered great advances in manufacturing and farming.”

Blake had not heard of Heraclitus and Jung was not yet born, but he nonetheless real-eyesed the tendency of each state to become its opposite over time.  So the endless growth and reproduction of Generation, leads to replication, mindless consumption, less value and ultimately scarcity.  This is the cancerous growth of the predator mind that Castaneda described, which easily slips back into the anaesthetized Ulro state of percentages, statistics and mortality rates.

“As things run out of control, life is felt to be complexifying at exponential rates and panics set in. It’s not really. It always was complex. Rather, people have lost their bearings for lack of imagination. But, as before, the crisis becomes an opportunity to perceive more. Threefold vision can break through.”

Blake called the next state Beulah, which is the landscape of dreams and of existence in a state of wonder, talking with animals and singing to the Sun.

“Beulah introduces an awareness of and desire for felt relationships. Sensitivity and care, sympathy and happiness and, above all, love and affection come to the fore, offering the narrower states of mind windows on to new dimensions of life: Beulah can warm Ulro’s chilly reason and orientate Generation’s directionless reproduction. Rich seams of meaning and value, aspiration and recreation are uncovered, to the extent that people in Beulah intuitively know what it means when life is said to have interiority and soul.”

This is a blissful state, feminine, but unstable. Back at the Infinity Bar, Blake and Castaneda don’t have much to say about the feminine element, nor their women. Beulah was abandoned, left to deal with her own wounds, because the ‘old masculine,’ coerced into serving the predatory state could not relate.  History.  It’s not their fault.  The split in the feminine has now been healed and the masculine principle has broken free and is looking for a new purpose.  That’s what it looks like from here.

Blake’s left-brained ‘spectre’ of the reasoning mind, hovers in the shadows, hungering for ‘selfhood.’  Selfhood to Blake is a toxic blend of righteousness and ego-based identity. However, we can now see it as just a mask for the super-sensitive Beulah, that also functions as a Guardian to the Garden of Eden, which is the infinite landscape of the imagination, spilling out from eternity and through us into the world-at-large.

This is a good point to take in this presentation from our friends and subtle energy researchers Meg Lund and Jerry Gin, made to the Foundation of Mind-Body Research on the 9th May.  The presentation details many of the subtle energy changes I’ve previously referenced, that they have observed in the human biofield over the past 18 months. Evidence of our upgrade. These changes, that they call activations, are still ongoing and many of them are observed through looking at Nature and works of art.

From the perspective of the fourfold vision, this is demonstrating the process through which the artist brings Eternity into the ordinary world through the action of their imagination made visual.  Different aspects of our physiology and psyche are activated just by looking at artwork, which are then ‘transmitted’ through mind-field resonance to everyone else we are connected with.

Eden/Eternity does not negate the values of the other states of being. Neither does it bring instant change to the material world – we are in a hailstorm as I write this, because Nature cannot function in a balanced way without our imaginative engagement!  In Eden/Eternity we retain the differentiations of Ulro, the productivity of Generation, and the bliss of Beulah, in balance with a flourishing imagination, that allows magic and wonder as part of our everyday experience

“Eternity likewise casts a different light on contemporary concerns about ecological devastation. It shows that the material world alone is too small for us. Our capacity for transcendence means that we are creatures of infinity. We can notice ‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’ and ‘Eternity in an hour’, though the perception should also be a warning; as Blake stressed: ‘More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul, less than All cannot satisfy Man.’

His vision for ecology is, therefore, not one of managed exploitation (Ulro), managed consumption (Generation), or even managed cooperation (Beulah), but instead one aimed at radically extending awareness of the ecologies of which we’re a part. It means embracing not just the environments and organisms studied by the natural sciences but the divine intelligences appreciated by the visionaries, plus a panoply of gods, spirits and daemons that our ancestors took as read.”

El Día de las Letras Gallegas is a doorway in time, where stories from Eternity play out on invisible threads, to land who knows where.  William and Carlos are loosening up, digging deep, contemplating another round, maybe I’ll join them.

With new information, nothing is as it was before!

Next post:  Merlin Heart-fire, unconditional Earth magic.