Training the Mind
Posted: 23 Sep 2018 13:09
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What is all this, "Dying won't solve the problem, as much as I wish it would," is that your own sentiment or borrowed, I do hope the latter as the cause needs an attuned mind such as yours more than ever, may I therefore commend you to the words and work of English poet, painter, printmaker and according to many, including myself, visionary William Blake. And no, there is no easier way, we must continue to do good despite what ails us physically or what negative energies afflict us mentally, remembering that the best medicine is laughter, no matter what is going on in the world.
There is a third aspect humour, which even Blake did not take into account. Thus, I would like to interject in my own thread and Blake's for that matter and say what we really have is a: dourly dominating Heaven; raucous, fun and somewhat bawdy Hell and the uninhibited Laughter Chamber. You can add the suffix pot if you wish, but I think of it more as a hall.
As an example, I was dropped off in an electric blue hatchback car by a friend to deliver some supporting documents at a local government office. It was raining heavily, so having delivered the paperwork, I stood outside the office the front door, head bent forward in the misguided belief that it would prevent my glasses getting wet. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the front of an electric blue vehicle poking out from behind a large white delivery van. I almost wrote a white delivery van full of lager! Freudian slippage, more vaseline. Thinking that this was my friend waiting to pick me up again, head still bent and rain now running in my eyes, I scuttled round the white van, possibly full of lager, opened the blue car's door, noticed a carrier bag with contents on the front passenger seat, while I thought this odd no brain alarms were penetrating the rain so I tossed this item on to the back seat with a thud. Then proceeded as a rotund lager person to reverse-sit on the passenger seat of a complete stranger's car, who shouted at me to stop, at which point I apologised profusely gibbering, "Wron' car, friends'er exactly same colour bright blue,' which was followed by us both falling about laughing. Well what would you say to an elephant trying to get into the front seat of your car, like the misuse of the word lager, the mind plays tricks.
"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
Poem The Marriage of Heaven and Hell 1793
Hugely influential, the poem's vision of a dynamic relationship between a stable "Heaven" and an energised "Hell" has fascinated theologians, aestheticians and psychologists
Blake's conception of Hell does not start out as a place of punishment, but as a source of unrepressed, moderately sensual, spontaneous, and emotional energy, opposed to the absolutist, controlling perception of Heaven.
Blake explains that,
"Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion,
Reason and Energy, Love and Hate are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing
from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell."