When the “old” version of the awakened eye website was being transferred to this site, many shorter pages were edited out. It seemed they would be better shared as posts. This is the first – a collection of quotes from William Blake, along with some examples of his artwork.
[Blake] held that the way to truth and higher consciousness was through the contemplation of art. He proposed that by immersing oneself in art, a person could experience it not just as an aesthetic but more akin to the meditative exercise a mystic performs in preparation for achieving a higher state of spiritual enlightenment.
– Leonard Shlain in Art & Physics
[For Blake] every act of the imagination, every union of existence and perception, is a time-space complex … in which time and space as we know them disappear.
– Northrop Frye in Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
The eye altering, alters all.
– William Blake
To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
As a man is, so he sees.
As the eye is formed, such are its powers.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.
First thought is best in art.
He who binds to himself a joy
does the winged life destroy;
but he who kisses the joy as it flies
lives in eternity’s sunrise.
Every man who is not an artist
is a traitor to his own nature…
Find more images and in-depth information here: siteslab at UNC
UPDATE – See Eric Nicholson’s fine article about William Blake’s vision of The Book of Job at The Culturium – highly recommended.
Drawings of William Blake (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
the awakened eye 