William Blake vs. the World by John Higgs

Author:John Higgs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

And the voice faded mild

I remaind as a Child

All I ever had known

Before me bright Shone

That the experience had turned Blake into ‘a Child’ suggests a return to the innocent state of consciousness he experienced wandering the countryside as a youth. Of course, such an elated and ecstatic vision coming so soon after the ‘Melancholy’ he experienced in London would now be thought of as bipolar or manic-depressive symptoms. Such a condition may have been a factor in his awareness of contraries.

The strange idea at the heart of this vision, that every particle of the universe is a little man, and that collectively they make up a universal man, is one that can be found in Swedenborg. In the years before his visions, as we’ve noted, Swedenborg was what we now think of as a proto-scientist. He attempted to understand what the universe was made of, on both micro and macro levels. Through his studies, he concluded that the cosmos was, to borrow a much later word, a hologram.

With a hologram, the entire image is encoded at every point of the picture. If you were to cut in half a regular photograph and discard the left half, what would remain would be the right-hand part of the image, and nothing more. If you were to cut a hologram in half and discard one part, however, you would be left with a smaller version of the same image. Continue cutting and you would get smaller and smaller holograms, all of which would contain the entire image. There are many modern physicists who take the idea of a holographic universe seriously, although they arrived at this conclusion for very different reasons to Swedenborg.

Swedenborg believed that everything in the universe worked like a hologram. The sun, for example, would be made up of countless tiny versions of the sun, each of which could be further subdivided into endless smaller suns. Likewise, the sun could be thought of as being a constituent part of some larger, vaster sun.

Swedenborg lived at a time when chemistry was in its infancy. The idea that the universe was built from tiny building blocks, called atoms, had been around since the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, but it would take until 1905 before Albert Einstein proved that atoms existed. We now know that a lump of a natural element such as gold can be endlessly divided, down to an atomic level, into smaller and smaller pieces of gold, as Swedenborg believed. But most things are created from a mix of different elements, rather than being a unique substance. The sun is not made of smaller and smaller elements of sun, for example, but out of a combination of helium and hydrogen atoms, with a few other elements. In his attempts to explain the materiality of the universe, Swedenborg has been shown to be wrong, but, given what was then known about the nature of things, his theory was certainly interesting.

When his attention moved to spiritual matters, Swedenborg again applied the logic of his holographic, fractal-like cosmos to the higher realms.

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