"For all Men are in Eternity . . .
In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven and Earth & all you behold;

tho' it appears Without, it is Within,
in your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow."

Such is Blake's summons to Jerusalem, essentially a post-Einsteinian vision, a realm of consciousness in which man has passed into another dimension of being.

Jerusalem - the biblical City of Peace - is the very notion of liberty, or liberation from the confusion of restrictive sense-desire bound by Ulro, the sleep of matter.

To wake thoroughly from Ulro is to expand and unite the senses and consciousness into the realm of Jerusalem, liberty.

In another sense Jerusalem is the female emanation of Albion, the "Gallen Man"; she is psyche, Goethe's Woman-Soul that "leadeth upward and On."

She is the force that Albion, dominated by the false pride of reason, has turned his back upon.

In this sense Jerusalem represents the repressed elements, psychic and terrestrial, upon which the brute male force of our present civilization raises itself in the great phallic symbols of skyscrapers and rocket ships.

Indeed, in Blake's epic poem "Jerusalem," Jerusalem's city is laid to ruins by Albion, and her children are taken into captivity, where they soon become ensnared by the materialism of Vala and are pressed into war - certainly a clear statement of humanity's present psychological condition, in which the anima, psyche, is ruthlessly suppressed by the animus, techne, to the point where women believe that freedom means becoming like their terroristic male repressors.

In the course of the epic- which traces the fall of man into the sleep of Ulro, and his passage through eternal death and his awakening to eternal life in the divine vision of unity - there is a phase following the triumph of reason in which the female will comes into dominance.

Uniting in the form of Vala, the women proclaim contempt for all men.

"This is a Woman's world...
The Man who respects Woman shall be despised by the Woman."

It is only following this retributive turn of events that Los, the creative imagination, is finally able to proclaim the truth, leading the human race into the liberating unity of the eternal dimension.

To arrive at this end, "such is the Cry from all the Earth." Blake's vision is beyond 2001, far beyond the dreams of the technocrats.

It is a vision of the true space age, in which even astronomical space has become totally enfolded in the mind of man. For us it represents an almost inconceivable dimension of :

All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth and Stone:
All Human Forms identified, living, going forth & returning wearied

Into the Planetary lives of Years, Months, Days & Hours; reposing,
Then awaking into the Bosom in the Life of Immortality.

Our civilization as it is now propelled will reach this end only by a cathartic transformation achieved through the path of art.

Those who hold steadfast to art as the fiery connecting rod leading to and from the source of life will themselves form the path to this end...

Blake declares that every man who is not an artist is a traitor to his own nature... then by Blake's definition a Christian is a totally integrated and spiritually renewed human being:

A Poet, a Painter, a Musician, an Architect:
The Man or Woman who is not one of these is not a Christian."

For Blake, the discipline of art is a psychological, even religious, process of detachment that is akin to Yoga, or the Yogic techniques that lead toward an inner freedom from the demands of the world:

You Must leave Fathers & Mothers & Houses & Lands if they stand in the way of Art

Prayer is the Study of Art.
Praise is the Practice of Art.
Fasting &c., all relate to Art

The outward ceremony is antichrist.

The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination,
that is, God Himself
The Divine Body Jesus: We are his Members

It manifests itself in the Works of Art
(In Eternity All is Vision).

And of course, Blake is uncompromising: the practice of true art can only be suppressed and destroyed by its association with money (which Mumfred has characterized as man's most powerful hallucinogen):

Where any view of Money exists,
Art cannot be carried on, but War only . .

Christianity is Art & not Money.
Money is its Curse.

Given his definition of art, Blake can proclaim:

Jesus & his Apostles & Disciples were all Artists.
Their Works... were destroyed by the Antichrist Science"

All that negates life, inhibits the basic energy of the organism, and furthers incessant war and the corruption of the spirit is science in this use of the word.

The scientist is the unwitting destroyer, who, abdicating moral judgment in realms other than his own limited sphere of research, has turned the world over to the nonimaginiative Antichrist: the politicians, the intellectual parasites, the greed-driven insatiable ghosts, consuming and consumed by the deadening fever of matter.

In contrast to the social vision grouped around physical science... with its materialistic pollution, mental illness, and endless political embroilments with their ever-increasing emphasis on security and secrecy, Blake proclaims quite simply the unequivocal role of the spirituality rooted artist and the corresponding social vision:

The Whole Business of Man Is The Arts & All Things Common.
No Secrecy in Art

To achieve this vision, civilization as we know it must be turned upside down and inside out.

Art as Blake conceived it is a race of heroes...
not a race of ego-striving men.

Chapter 8. Transformative Vision. page 1..2..3..4..5

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