William Blake

William Blake spoke to angels. He said that when his brother died he saw his soul leave his body, soaring upwards "clapping his hands with joy".

Yes, a bit of a nutter.

Here is an excerpt from one of his letters:-

And I know that This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule & Deformity & by these I shall not regulate my proportions, & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees.

(Blake's capitals and spelling and punctuation)

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Tariki

I think on another thread I quoted the first few lines of Blake's "The Everlasting Gospel":-

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine;
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is the Friend of all Mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.

I have never really fully understood Blake's implied rejection of the "friend of all Mankind", although I have seen the value of the indirect parable, which tends to creep upon us unawares, bypassing the logical mind that seeks to plot its own course.

But I have been re-reading Thomas Merton's "A Study of Chuang Tzu and found this:-

It is precisely this unconditional character of wu wei (effortlessness) that differentiates Chuang Tzu from other great philosophers who constructed systems by which their activity was necessarily conditioned. The abstract theory of “universal love” preached by Mo Ti was shrewdly seen by Chuang Tzu to be false precisely because of the inhumanity of its consequences. In theory, Mo Ti held that all men should be loved with an equal love, that the individual should find his own greatest good in loving the common good of all, that universal love was rewarded by the tranquillity, peace, and good order of all, and the happiness of the individual. But this “universal love” will be found upon examination (like most other Utopian projects) to make such severe demands upon human nature that it cannot be realized, and indeed, even if it could be realized it would in fact cramp and distort man, eventually ruining both him and his society. Not because love is not good and natural to man, but because a system constructed on a theoretical and abstract principle of love ignores certain fundamental and mysterious realities, of which we cannot be fully conscious, and the price we pay for this inattention is that our “love” in fact becomes hate.

So, the "mysterious realities" of which we are never fully conscious.

Anyway, simply to share.