Blake & Boehme: imagination, Experience & the Limitations of Experience
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.65
As Boehme understood,
The Spirit that is in us, which one Man inherits from the other, that was breathed out of Eternity into Adam, that same Spirit has seen it all, and in the Light of God it sees it still; and there is nothing that is afar off, or Unsearchable.66
Again, this ‘Spirit’ is naturally inherent within us. And knowing this, Boehme asks, ‘Where will you seek God? In the Deep above the Stars? You will not be able to find him there. Seek him in your Heart.’ This ‘Birth must be done within you: The Heart, or the Son of God must arise in the birth in your Life; and then the Saviour Christ is your faithful Shepherd, and you are in Him, and He in you’.67 The ‘Saviour Christ’ declares at the beginning of Blake’s Jerusalem, ‘I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend;/Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me’.68
Looking outwards and inwards, the imagination explores the relation ship between the individual and the divine. Boehme states, ‘You must elevate your sense or mind in the Spirit if you intend to understand and apprehend it ’.69 Both visionaries sought to awaken the mind from its usual, often habitual modes of understanding and perception, to a real and living awareness of the limited terms in which life can too often be lived. One such limitation is the assumption that we simply see things as they are, that our eye faithfully and fully sees what is there in the world, when in fact reality as we understand it is filtered through us. Again, both Boehme and Blake believed that life is not given and fixed. Man is not merely a tabula rasa on which reality writes itself. As Blake stated; ‘As a man is So he Sees’.70 In Boehme’s words, ‘as the spirit is, so is the essence’: the essence here being that which is produced by the perceiving, and thus determining, ‘Spirit’.71 The responsibility lies with the individual. When cut off too much from our imagination and the profound possibilities within us, the world that is seen and experienced shrinks, as Blake saw: ‘If Perceptive Organs vary: Objects of Perception