Thinking takes courage if it is our aim to think ideals into real deeds.
Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality. http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/AncientMyths/19180108p01.html [1]
The exercise of thinking the way someone else thinks is a very worthwhile up-building practice that enables us to visit other mansions in the house of ideas. Tom’s work with Human and Cosmic Thought is a great way to discover whose shoulders we may be rubbing up against in the dark. When a flashlight clicks on, we are lit up for a moment where time stops as we see ourselves anew. But who switched on the light and where are they now we are blinking and rubbing our eyes? Does it matter who threw the thought we caught?
Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. -- William Hazlitt
So we have received from some primeval benefactor this wonderful gadget called thinking. Now what does it do if we leave it to do its own thing? What can we do with it once we have got the hang of how it operates?
We can create a new world in our heads and think it into active deeds that build us all a New Jerusalem. We may think that our contribution is small, and we can think that it is needed. But no matter how sub-atomic or unnoticed we experience our thinking to be it is a collaboration with other thinkers. Some folk, such as Carl, have a clear recognition of the faces of the thinkers of yesteryear who rooted the thoughts that flower in our enlightenment. There are also others who have no faces, who will write no books, who breathe spirit-life and purpose into thinking not our own. Are these Inhabitants of the Realm of Ideals our friends? Are they the wise teachers of the New Jerusalem? Maybe they are tricksters, spiritual property developers raising buildings that they have no intention of using themselves. Are they the architects of the New Babel?
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
-- William Blake
Blake was an interesting craftsman artist working tirelessly at the forefront of the technology of his day. He was not known for his sociability yet he created a monumental legacy of an imaginative cosmos through enlightened imaginative thinking.
In Century 21 our tasks are to bring to birth the new within the mansions of the past and to build new mansions that will devour the redundant ones.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
-- William Blake (Songs of Experience, 1794)
“To understand "The Tyger" fully, you need to know Blake's symbols. One of the central themes in his major works is that of the Creator as a blacksmith. This is both God the Creator (personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his alter-ego.) Blake identified God's creative process with the work of an artist. And it is art that brings creation to its fulfilment -- by showing the world as it is, by sharpening perception, by giving form to ideas.
“Blake's story of creation differs from the Genesis account. The familiar world was created only after a cosmic catastrophe. When the life of the spirit was reduced to a sea of atoms, the Creator set a limit below which it could not deteriorate farther, and began creating the world of nature. The longer books that Blake wrote describe Los's creation of animals and people within the world of nature. One particularly powerful passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.
[…] “Blake's Jesus liberates people, though by providing visions rather than focusing on political activism.”
-- Friedlander ER (1999) Enjoying "The Tyger" by William Blake. Retrieved from http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm [2]
So let us weave the body of the Tyger, atom by atom, and may it turn round and devour us. Who wants to join the spirited celebrations in the belly of the Tyger?