Blake List — Volume 1998 : Issue 60

Today's Topics:
	 Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
	 Re: Blake and Madness
	 Re: the triad of vision
	 Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
	 Re: Devine voices from the ether
	 ignored, like Blake!
	 The Chimney SweeperR: Devine voices from the ether
	 Re: Devine voices from the ether
	 Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
	-Reply
	       Blake and "NDE"'s
	 Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?-Reply
	 Re: Devine voices from the ether
	 Re: remove
	 Re: Devine voices from the ether
	 Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all
	semi-divine?-Reply -Reply

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 10:56:10 +0100
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
Message-Id: <199809020957.KAA11068@merlot.controls.eurotherm.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>I seem to have wrongly attributed the 3 choices to Tom Devine rather
>than you, Tim, having been in a rush when writing last. Perhaps another
>alternative to the 3 presented is that, like Blake, we are all  able to
>access strata of the divine. This could correspond with  your alternative
>category of direct access to the Almighty.... and Blake's insistence that
>GOd is not a God afar, but within us all when we expand our senses so
>that the divine light at the core of all things becomes larger.  I always
>thought this was the reality behind Jesus's claim that he was/is the Son
>of God.  

This is really part of option 1. Perhaps I should have said, if I didn't,
'divinely inspired'. Like 'voices of the dead' as described in a previous
post, my rejection of this possibility is of course based on personal
conviction, and you can argue it both ways, depending on what you believe.

>I'm well  aware of scientific explanations of near death experiences but
>these do not account for the fullness, variety and individualty of the
>experiences ... nor of those which occur linking this world and the next
>in situations far removed from death-bed scenes.   

Yes they do, Pam: all the elements of the experience have been explained!
The tunnel is a result of the way the optical system (which has a very
limited field of view) works. The feeling of well being is caused by a
release of endorphins. The feeling of floating away from the body is caused
by the deep brain making trying sense of a failing sensory system by
projecting a notional position and filling the gaps with imagined
perceptions. What lies at the end of the tunnel is culturally determined:
those imagining heaven or hell will see loved ones or demons, other cultures
see fantastic animal spirits. And the experiences have been reproduced in
other unrelated instances, for example the blackouts Pilots experience at
high G forces.

>Hypnotic regression
>into past lives often reveals many reincarnations ... that is, evokes many
>deaths as well as  lives, in fulsome detail ... often providing details not
>easily found in history books but verifiable after much research into
>archives.  For example, a psychologist  trying to help 3 ordinary
>housewives in Australia who had never left their continent, regressed
>them into lives in Europe, during which one described  and drew a
>French chateau which she was later flown in to see.  She was  aghast
>at her own accuracy and knew of a dancing floor, in the place, which no
>one else did, but the structure of which was found in the walls.  There
>are many examples  

No there aren't. There are a small number of pieces of anecdotal evidence of
highly questionable validity to support past life regression, which would be
roundly and rightly condemned by Tom Dillingham if someone like Friedlander
attempted to use them as evidence. The overwhelming mass of 'regressions'
provide vague details of 'former lives' (almost all Chateaux have a dance
floor, and anyone who has read Cinderella would imagine one there) which
fail anything but the loosest verification process - many performing the
verification procedures give a great deal of margin for error to the subject
and are prepared to make great leaps of imagination to fit facts to
statements - and are as much influenced by popular fiction as anything else.
Specific detail or name verification almost always fails, except where may
be explained by the actions of pure chance. 

None of this means that there is no such thing as past lives or
reincarnation, of course, and I certainly would not wish you or anyone else
to change your views on spiritual or other matters - indeed I value all
views contrary to my own very highly, because without them my own would
never evolve, with the obvious risk of uninvited mental reptiles and so on.
However if your evidence for a spiritual existence comes from an incomplete
knowledge of the investigations that have taken place into phenomena such as
past life regression, NDEs, and similar, you owe it to yourself to learn
more, however traumatic it sometimes is to let go of the handrails that
simple faith provides.

Tim Linnell

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 11:13:19 -0500
From: "g.l. brackett" 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and Madness
Message-Id: <35ED6E97.669684B4@idt.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; x-mac-type="54455854"; x-mac-creator="4D4F5353"
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unsubscribe.  thanks.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 17:00:48 -0500
From: "Matthew Bodie" 
To: 
Subject: Re: the triad of vision
Message-Id: <21012667150183@ij.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
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. . . I think this account neglects the violence and loss of the poem's
account of the creativity: "pluck'd--not took--a hollow reed" and "stained
the water clear" as well as the fact that the child "vanish'd" as soon
as--or even before--the piper begins writing it down.


The triad included imagination, and thus that would account for the
creativity on the part of the Piper.   I apologize for not having the
wording correct.  I don't have the text in front of me, and I unfortunately
have not committed it to memory.   Second, the corruption on the part of
society (the child labor, etc)  is definitely depicted in the Chimney
Sweep, but I don't think that it's through the angel.    Remember the angel
is part of Tom's vision; and vision is what Blake is calling for in The
Songs of Innocence & Experience, for vision brings redemption to people. 
This happened in Blake's own life when he saw angels in the trees, etc.  
It seemed to bolster his belief in the divine.  In the same way, Tom's
vision keeps him pressing on with life, despite its horrendous nature.   As
the Black Boy does also, Tom takes a negative issue and turns it into a
positive one.   Even though Blake focuses on the young, this does not mean
that these subjects do not have experience, for they are far from naive. 
By having vision, however, which included a new way to view their sad
lives, Blake's subjects are able to find redemption and hopefully bring
others to it, not necessarily by the means that they have come to know it
but in an individual manner, as Blake would find redemption differently
than, say, John Donne.   Again, it's all about perception!    

matthew 

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 16:48:11 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dushyant Arun Viswanathan  
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
Message-Id: 
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

> reincarnation, of course, and I certainly would not wish you or anyone else
> to change your views on spiritual or other matters - indeed I value all
> views contrary to my own very highly, because without them my own would
> never evolve, with the obvious risk of uninvited mental reptiles and so on.
> However if your evidence for a spiritual existence comes from an incomplete
> knowledge of the investigations that have taken place into phenomena such as
> past life regression, NDEs, and similar, you owe it to yourself to learn
> more, however traumatic it sometimes is to let go of the handrails that
> simple faith provides.


ah, the illusion of scientific certainty for the simple minded and who
cannot trust their own intellectual and spiritual endeavors....trying to
quantify the transcendent...to start from the basics, consciousness is not
localized in the brain, and neurophysiologists have no clue about
consciousness and relation to the brain, in the light of surgeon reports
of near death experience and brain-deadness, try working in a neuro lab
and see for yourself...the pre-christ sanskrit works on consciousness and
other metaphsyics are the best source of info on
consciousness...reincarnation is not yet another topic for the spiritually
inclined...the consciousness, cannot
be extinguished...1st law...as we live through the senses and experience
life via the neural makeup, we cannot ascertain the nature of
consciousness, as consciousness is beyond the neural makeup. It is only
those transcendent beings who are beyond the enslavement of the senses,
who can. 
 

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 17:04:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Dushyant Arun Viswanathan  
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Devine voices from the ether
Message-Id: 
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

> However it's difficult to square Clint's assertion with a world of which
> pretty much the entire history has been founded on superstition since the
> first of us raised his eyes to the disc of the sun and ascribed supernatural
> (or in point of fact super-human) qualities to it. This is a world in which
> no-one even blinks to hear that the leader of 'one nation under God' prays
> daily! The human yearning for 'something more than this' is so strong that
> people become deaf to perfectly sound explanations of natural phenomena (and
> even in some cases, for example crop circles, plain admissions of fraud) in
> order to maintain their belief systems intact. There is certainly no lack of
> superstition as we prepare to enter the new millenium (itself a
> superstitious concept), in fact quite the reverse. What is often lacking is
> sufficient critical reasoning to separate the fraud from universal truth. 


first of all, this is the classic western/darwinian misunderstanding of
ancient traditions, in particular the traditions before christ. you people
love to say that the ancient cultures pre-greek were all a bunch of
superstitious pious fools who weren't aware of anything. well, this view
is typical, and its due to a lack of knowledge of what ancient texts,
especially the Vedas (as the way of life in the Vedas later spread all
over the world) are saying. There is so much symbolism, there is so much
understanding of human nature, such deep metaphysics, but often its hidden
in imagery, and so the modern pseudoscholar makes his own narrow
interpretation of it. Because such darwinian outlook is not prominent
amongst humanities people, the latter take much interest in analyzing the
great minds and the works of the great minds of modern times, such as
Michelangelo and Blake and so on...the point is is that ancient texts need
to be reevaluated, because the pseudoscholars, and their distorted view of
the human psyche and of history, have done enough damage.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 02 Sep 1998 18:10:34 -0700
From: David Rollison 
To: Blake@albion.com
Subject: ignored, like Blake!
Message-Id: <35EDEC88.8073E5CB@marin.cc.ca.us>
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I really meant to pose a question with my post which asked whether there
were any gratuitous acts in Blake.

Are there?

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1998 22:53:00 +0200
From: "DAX" 
To: 
Subject: The Chimney SweeperR: Devine voices from the ether
Message-Id: <01bdd6b3$abfe4620$LocalHost@massetti>
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
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Hi All,

I was reading  both the _The Chimney Sweeper_.
More I read the one expressing the innocence and more I feel
the I of the first stanza fading in something referring to human being but
not as
one human being. It seems to me like a force as much as the Angel is.

The first stanza stresses the I (=a second self) and your (l. 4)(referring
to the reader).

In the second stanza there is Tom Dacre and again this I.
But we do not see this I speaking with Tom.

l. 6           ..........,so I said. (there is a full  stop.) It seems like
a god speaking.
This *I* tells to us what he said or  perhaps what he  made Tom to think.
While the Angel "told Tom" (because the forces speaks through sights).

Even in the third stanza he (I) does not appear; nor he neither Tom is in
the sight with the other
sweepers. Anyway this stanza has a link with the fifth. We know that the
sweepers are locked
up in coffins of black. This is a state of unhappiness. They become happy
when they are all white
and have left their bags behind (fourth stanza). But Tom with *I* (Tom awoke
and we rose in the DARK; the *I* does not  sleep and dream) raises in the
dark and gets his bag and he is happy in/with this.

Now, what does the Angel say? It seems a nonsence. Not only Tom acts all the
contrary of his sight, but he
is not in the same sight with the other sweepers. The Angel plays his card
with Tom and looses because:

 So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

It's strange how much different are the Songs of Innocence from the Songs of
Experience, the stanzas are shorter, there are at least two questions marks.
They are harder and the real world, the world of every-day life appears.

In _The Chimney Sweeper_ the questions are direct and the answers show all
the misery of the world.
The parents of the boy are in the church to praise god or maybe because they
do not understand their child.
They do not partake in the happiness of their child.
In The Songs of Experience the meeting of the poet with the reader is
painful.

  What the hammer? what the chain,
  In what furnace was thy brain?
  What the anvil? what dread grasp,
  Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

The cut worm firgives the plough.     But a cut worm remains alive, it has
the secret of the law of contraries.

I do not know whether someone, there, will find something of this message
interesting. I have seen that it is not
so high as many messages I have read in this list, but it is my Blake.

What does it matter to speak about madness in a poet?
We do not even know what deseases are exaclty. We have our body plus
something else that is more than the things you can list and both make our
whole. Where madness begins? When one does not act like other people?
If this is true we must become all mad.


Everything possible to be believ'd is an image of truth.

Listen to the fool's reproach: it is a kingly title.

Ciao

Patrizia

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 07:24:00 +0100
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Devine voices from the ether
Message-Id: <199809030625.HAA08834@merlot.controls.eurotherm.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>first of all, this is the classic western/darwinian misunderstanding of
>ancient traditions, in particular the traditions before christ. you people
>love to say that the ancient cultures pre-greek were all a bunch of
>superstitious pious fools who weren't aware of anything. well, this view
>is typical, 

Bollocks. I said or implied nothing of the sort, and I am heartily sick of
you claiming higher moral or spiritual ground on the basis of the part of
the planet your own particular cells started to divide on. As a matter of
fact, what I actually believe is the constancy of human reaction, which is
to say that I believe that all humans are fundamentally the same whereever
and whenever their origins might be. Which is to say I consider paleolithic
man to be as good an engineer, navigator, scientist, or artist as any modern
man, that I reject utterly the concept of the noble savage (which lies at
the base of the new age concept of ancient wisdom which 'we have forgotten
by virtue of our modern technological lifestyle') to which I presume you allude.

You haven't the faintest idea who I am, how I live, what I think or what I
have read, so please stop pretending you do. 

and its due to a lack of knowledge of what ancient texts,
>especially the Vedas (as the way of life in the Vedas later spread all
>over the world) are saying. There is so much symbolism, there is so much
>understanding of human nature, such deep metaphysics, but often its hidden
>in imagery, and so the modern pseudoscholar makes his own narrow
>interpretation of it.

Well then, it's certainly lucky we have people as enlightened as you to
explain it to us poor fools.

Tim

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 11:44:21 +0200
From: P Van Schaik 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?
	-Reply
Message-Id: 

Tim, Thanks for the fulsome reply, but I am very well read on all these
matters, including  the scientific waivers of whatever evidence has been
adduced.  Nevertheles, there are many practising psychologists who
use past life regression to help people overcome emotional blocks and
phobias and , despite what you adduce, there are some things which
can't be explained away in the terms you use. As I don't want to clutter
the Blake line with what is not strictly central (though it does have a
bearing on Blake's stance), let me adduce a few other examples which
aren't covered by your dismissals.  Many NDE's report over-heairing
what doctors say and seeing  what procedures are used on them from
the ceiling of the room and verify such when they are restored to life ...
this does not correspond with your picture of failing senses., etc., but
rather testifies to heightened awareness of the realities of the physical
world.
Another of the Australian housewives who was regressed remembered
a life as a young boy who had his broken leg set in plaster by a doctor
 near a river, and who drew the pattern of cracks on the floor of the
doctor's cottage in the modern psychoogist's Australian room. Flown to
Europe, she found the cottage, now a chicken coop and, under 300
years of accumulated shite, found the identical pattern on the floor.
Such is not a memory derived from some childhood knowledge of
dancing floors in chateaux.
In my own case with my grandmother, none of the alternatives you gave
me fit except that I really heard her voice from the other side of death. I
didn't tell you the full story, which began the night before while she was
still alive in hospital.  I felt her ask me, mentally,  to have a last drink of
water with her, the night before, and could have ignored this as a
figment of my imagination, and nearly did.  Then decided to give it a go....
just in case what I was `hearing' was `real'.  Then she said: "If you have
anything to thank me for, thank me now" ... a humble and realistic
request, since there were some things I really disliked her for as well as
admired her for.  So, the whole possibility that my subconscious mind
was over-active was one I countenanced, but which didn't fully account
for what happened next when I got too tired to go on thanking her and
qualifying my thanks and  excused myself and said I wanted to go to
bed.  I could feel her repressed tears at having to say goodbye and
endure dying with noone to help her further  .. but, at this point,
dismissed the whole episode as emanating from my own imagination,
until the next morning brought confirmation of its `reality'.  Many cases
I've read have the same ring of individual incontrovertability. Again, I don't
say these  things to alter anyone's beliefs, but to keep the debate open. 
 
All of this could be seen to be relevant to the Angel and Devil"s debate in
MHH  in the sense that the Angel had the worst end of this encounter
since he insisted on defending his orthodoxies and perhaps scientists
today may also be seen to defend their own orthodoxies --or be ready to
see the accreted image of Science take a few knocks as models crumble
before new evidence.  At the moment, what constitutes credible 
evidence is debatable and is, of course, limited by what science has the
tools to explain.
Pam

------------------------------

Date:          Thu, 3 Sep 1998 07:00:05 CST
From: "Ed Friedlander, M.D." 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject:       Blake and "NDE"'s
Message-Id: <2ADEC182C7A@ALUM.UHS.EDU>

Urizen may have gone up the Tree of Mystery, and Orc become a snake,
but dogmatic naturalistic reductionists are surprisingly few, even in
the science-and-scientific-medicine communities.

When I was doing patient care on a regular basis, stories
about paranormal episodes -- typically patients describing
actual hospital events that they wouldn't have known about by
ordinary means -- were the subject of occasional lunchtime
conversation.

One one occasion, a senior internal medicine resident remarked that
yet another patient had made an appointment to tell him about
autoscopic (out of body) experience.  A few grins from a large group
indicated familiarity.  One guy remarked, "The only time that
happened to me, I said to myself, 'You dope, now you've gone and done
it -- you've died.'"  Another guy remarked, "The one time that
happened to me, I went someplace I'd never gone and checked the
colors of houses, then went back after I got back inside and I
remembered them correctly."

Friedman and Kaplan's, the standard textbook of psychiatry, described
this sort of thing as very familiar but "presently unexplained."  A
few years back, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease looked at
differences between people reporting these experiences, and those not
reproting these experiences.  They could find no differences in any
measurable index of psychopathology.

My purpose is not to go far afield of the subject of Blake, or to
take a position on the ontologic status of these reports.  I'm merely
reaffirming, with Blake, that naive reductionism (Ulro) of certain
natural scientists is not the norm among the Sons of Bromion.

* * *

Ed's Pathology Notes
http://worldmall.com/erf/lectures.htm
Obviously, I cannot be your doctor, cannot diagnose or treat over the
internet, and can speak only for myself.  However, I can help you
find information, resources, articles, and experts... all as a free
public service.  Let me know how I can help you and your friends.

              -- Ed Friedlander, M.D. "the Pathology Guy"

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 14:27:36 +0100
From: timli@controls.eurotherm.co.uk (Tim Linnell)
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all semi-divine?-Reply
Message-Id: <199809031328.OAA11923@merlot.controls.eurotherm.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Pam,

Could I perhaps trouble you for a few references to the sources
of your information on past life regression and near death experiences,
particularly the incident involving the young boy with a broken leg? Who
paid for the flight from Australia to Europe, by the way?

I don't want to push this discussion too far past it's sell by date, but I
should say that the sensual projection causing an impression of physical
displacement was covered in my note. According to the theory, as the
conscious brain shuts down,the deep subconscious receives information from
the sensory organs, which it attempts to make sense of by assuming a
physical situation. The theory as a whole does a pretty good job of
explaining a process which might lead to NDEs. Which version you believe is
a essentially matter of personal conviction, and I'm happy to keep an open
mind and wait and find out for myself.

With regard to your grandmother, I am sincerely glad that whatever the source of
the voice it allowed you to say goodbye. The source of this discussion, as
far as I can recall, was  to counter an assertion that there was no longer
any belief in the supernatural, and your refusal to be bound by three
possible explanations for Blake's vision. I have offered many examples of
superstition in daily life, and the way in which people tend to prefer
supernatural answers when there are several possibilities. I also set out
the 'real world' explanations of phenomena that you say have none. I don't
necessarily believe any of them.

Now you ask me to confront my own prejudices (which I am glad to do), and I
so think you owe it to me (and yourself) to confront your own, which are
considerable. In particular, Science is not an accretation of orthodoxies,
but lives in a perpetually changing state of flux - the whole point is that
theories are designed to create models which are compared with experiment
and when they fail they are cast aside. It is pure nonsense to claim
otherwise, or that 'At the moment, what constitutes credible evidence is
debatable and is, of course, limited by what science has the tools to
explain'. Science has all the tools humanity is blessed with, including such
things as imagination, intuition and vision, and your 'of course' is nothing
of the kind. And anyone disputing the objective nature of reality is welcome
to prove the point by walking of a cliff (which might also have the benefit
of resolving the question of NDEs...) 

This has now got so far away from Blake that I will post no more on the
subject, however provoked, although I do want to see those references, Pam,
and will be happy to discuss these matters off list if you want to. I am
quite willing to be argued around.

Tim

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1998 14:47:29 -0500
From: "J. Michael" 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Devine voices from the ether
Message-Id: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

>first of all, this is the classic western/darwinian misunderstanding of
>ancient traditions, in particular the traditions before christ. you people
>love to say that the ancient cultures pre-greek were all a bunch of
>superstitious pious fools who weren't aware of anything.

I'd just like to say that I'm offended by any argument that begins "you
people," whether it comes from the east or the west.

Jennifer Michael

jmichael@sewanee.edu

------------------------------

Date: Sat,  5 Sep 98 14:31:07 -0700
From: Seth T. Ross 
To: blake@albion.com
Cc: adenotte@SKY.LAKEHEADU.CA
Subject: Re: remove
Message-Id: <9809052131.AA00474@albion.com>
Content-Type: text/plain

Alice den Otter writes:
> Sorry, I don't have time to follow the interesting discussions.
> Please remove my name from the list.

Sorry, Alice, but you need to remove yourself.

To leave the Blake List, send an email message to
blake-request@albion.com
with the word "unsubscribe" in the SUBJECT field.
Please use the address blake-request@albion.com
for all administrative queries.

--SR

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 03 Sep 1998 22:54:40 -0800
From: ndeeter 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Devine voices from the ether
Message-Id: <35EF8EB0.1C4C@concentric.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

J. Michael wrote:

> Dushyant Arun Viswanathan wrote:
 
> >first of all, this is the classic western/darwinian misunderstanding of
> >ancient traditions, in particular the traditions before christ. you people
> >love to say that the ancient cultures pre-greek were all a bunch of
> >superstitious pious fools who weren't aware of anything.
> 
> I'd just like to say that I'm offended by any argument that begins "you
> people," whether it comes from the east or the west.

I agree with Ms. Michael. You should be careful about jumping to swift
conclusions about the educational or cultural backgrounds of anyone.
Though I am restricted to English translations of the Vedas, the
Upanisads, the Mahabharata, etc., I esteem them as just as spiritually
significant as the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the teachings of the
Buddha, Greco-Roman mythology, Egyptian mythology, Druidism, Pagan,
Witta, Tarot, and Native American mythology, as well as natural sciences
and psychology. And poetry.

Especially poetry.

Zealotry, no matter what belief it comes from and how it is applied,
often has the effect of distancing people away from the text and the
spirituality, and encouraging stereotyping and closed-mindedness and
hatred between peoples.

Whether or not Blake was consciously and actively influenced by other
texts is moot when you consider that Blake was not at all into
closed-mindedness. He allowed the angels to come to him, whether they
were angels of a christian heaven or ancestors of humanity or archetypes
from the world of the divine or other personalities from his
unconscious.

Nathan Deeter

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 04 Sep 1998 09:26:55 +0200
From: P Van Schaik 
To: blake@albion.com
Subject: Re: Blake and "madness" -Reply -Reply/ Are we all
	semi-divine?-Reply -Reply
Message-Id: 

Tim, The particular reference to three housewives  in Australia, one of
whom identified a chateua she had drawn, and the other, marks on the
floor while having a painful leg-set, is to a videotape shown here  by the
Theosophical  Society.  I don't normally attend this, but had given a
lecture on Blake there, and so heard of the video.  Becuase the patients
of the psychologist were videotaped in the doctor's office, drawing and
regressing and then taped again on approaching the places they'd
described, and finding them from a nearby road, and then during the
uncovering of evidence, this is a well-documented case.  I think the same
people who made the film funded the trips overseas of the 3
housewives, but don't recall this detail.
My point re orthodoxies is that, just like our own images of ourselves, all
models are built up on the data processed by our brains -- even our
images of ourselves become `orthodoxies' if we don't remain open to
change  and I'm glad to hear that there are many scientists who keep an
open mind because few  of the limited explanations you gave, Tim, fit the
examples  I have read about  -- in some of which even dead animals
come to assist the lviing in danger.   My other point is that all models of
reality  can and should crumble when  such time arrives that science can
explain what presently seems miraculous or supernatural  ...I personally
do not believe there is anything super- natural, but that , because we
don't yet know much about the 3 dimensions of time and 7 of space, for
example, which science is now beginning to talk about, nor enough
about  electro-magnetic forces (not even enough to know if cell-phones
are dangerous to the brain), etc  we make false distinctions. Blake would
perhaps equate this with Urizen's false reasoning.  I don't think you quite
understood the drift of my argument, Tim, and there is no veiled attack in
it on anyone intended in it, nor any adherence on my part, so far as I am
aware, to orthodoxy.
Pam  

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End of blake-d Digest V1998 Issue #60
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