The flow of the past

Yesterday’s celebration of William Blake’s birthday brings about a very good time to reflect on his great contributions to our understanding of evolution.

Throughout his extraordinary creative achievements, William Blake has illustrated how the past is both the root of the present as well as how we need to get detached from it and move forward. The goal of positive evolution and transformation is always front and centre in his work. He has described how our right side of action and our left side of emotion and desire are both needed but they can both get out of balance. Thus we end up in lethargy, depression and inability to act when we keep sliding towards the left, or in an angry, mechanical and materialistic wasteland when we keep moving towards the right.

In the middle he depicted a world of action motivated by the ultimate qualities of pure love, compassion and peace, which he deemed the essence of both the Divine as well as humanity. The action is both internal, to keep purifying ourselves for ongoing spiritual evolution, as well towards others - helping them in their evolution as well. For this, awakening is needed to get to the state where we act from that higher angle.

He also dedicated a full volume - one of his very first - to praising innocence as the base of everything that is good and pure. And connected it with the left side of emotions - just as it is. He also criticized conditionings of all sorts and made strong statements about institutions and their leaders that nowadays appear much more accurate that anyone was prepared to accept at that time.

In a nutshell, Blake was a very enlightened presence with a great (and often rather prophetic} vision of superb artistic expression. Read or contemplated with the eyes of the Self, after Realization, he will always be a source of joy as well as spiritual reflection, both most needed at this time.