The Forest is a place, where the invisible world is close. It is a place for imagination. The Forest is more than the trees. It is the place for the visionary to see cosmic life.
One of the most extraordinary and influential artists and poets was William Blake. We can grasp the power of imagination through him and other writers of the beginning of romanticism. But there is more to it. Blake opposed the materialistic worldview and kept a much longer tradition alive—a tradition of seeing a deeper truth in the ordinary world.
However, there are a couple of points here, that make Blake particularly interesting:
William Blake – A Visionary in the era of enlightenment
Unlike some romanticists or modern esoterics, he is not out of touch with the ordinary world, he seeks the connection with the other world, the eternity in his words, and our oft bleak and dark everyday world.
Another remarkable thing about Blake is that he is a shamanic figure without the typical initiation as a turning point in his life. He seems to be aware of the other world from the very beginning.
Furthermore, his visions don’t seem mysterious or as hard to understand encounters with the unknown.
His Christian upbringing allowed him to shape his creative works inspired by visionary experiences in a unique cosmology that includes Christianity and elements from antiquity.
He is if we will a natural-born daimonic man, a person at home in both worlds. Unlike many people, Blake embraces the otherworld.
Blake seems, like Wordsworth, never has lost his childlike imagination. However, it is not imagination in the way we see it today, but a way of seeing. There is more than meets the eye:
Blake’s Double-Vision
“Blake distinguished between seeing with the eye and seeing through it. He insisted that his poems are not just figures of speech, but true accounts of the natural world transformed (invariably personified) by the power of the creative imagination”. (Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality, Page 90)
A famous Blake quote refers to the sun in the morning:
Do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a guinea?
Oh no, no, I see an Innumerable Company of The Heavenly Host….
(William Blake)
This is double-vision. Seeing the literal thing but this literal thing is like a symbol representing a larger reality, a deeper meaning. It might be difficult to understand for modern Westerners this idea. Blake was still with one foot in the older traditions of a more magical, spiritual worldview and with the other foot in the scientific worldview of the Enlightenment. He is famous for his criticism of the modern worldview labeled Newton’s Sleep.
Blake’s State Of Mind: Ulro, Generation, Beulah, Eternity
Therefore he developed a model, a system of different levels of vision or states of mind:
Four-fold Vision
Ulro = mostly presenting the single vision, a materialistic worldview, the world as data in modern terms
Generation = a view focused on production and reproduction without higher goals
Beulah = a more empathic worldview with the dark side of moralism
Eden or Eternity = which is also the four-fold vision. A coexistence with the divine, where the otherworld is seen too. The spiritual dimension becomes real and is seen as the normal material world.
Mark Vernon offers an excellent introduction to Blake’s system of the states of mind in The Four-Fold Imagination, What we can learn from William Blake’s visionary imagination.
Of course, this is not a view offered in everyday life, it is the goal of shamans, of meditation of a life-long quest. However, it is available for everyone who opens his eyes, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” Blake says. But we can learn to no longer see the world as the fool sees it.
It is books like Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur that offer a field guide to reconnecting with these deeper dimensions, to understand a four-fold vision.
One thing that we need to keep in mind is, that we don’t know if the higher realms are only the heavenly realm Blake envisions in some of his poetry. There are darker, dangerous realms out there, which Blake recognized too. This is the Forest Dark.
Visionary Experiences in The Forest Dark
Is it only that the daimonic world appears threatening because it is suppressed in our times? That would be the Freudian view, but if we look at the endless reports of visionary encounters a more complex image comes to light.
The Forest Dark. It’s no secret that many encounters with the unknown realms ended in a catastrophe. Fairies and aliens abduct people into their fairy realm. People go missing as the famous Referend Kirk who investigated the secret Commonwealth. People die or lose their wits. This is perhaps the most common danger of otherworldly encounters and visionary experiences They are not always a blessing. The trained mind who learned fourfold vision may be better prepared to handle mind-blowing visionary encounters. However often the Otherworld seems to choose the inexperienced wanderer in the darkest corner of the woods.
Blake and others recognized this special quality of the forest:
“Shelley, Keats, and Blake may have captured the wonders of nature but they were just as quick to recognize its destructive forces and temptations, horrors and alienation. A reaction to the Enlightenment Romantic writers went deep into the woods, as their ancestors had before them, to find, monsters and miracles.”
From: Lost in the Wildwood: Sylvan Dread In Weird Fiction
A forest is a place where certain energies appear to gather, a borderland inviting daimonic creatures and a portal to the higher dimensions. In the outstanding anthology there are more good notes about the specific quality of the forest: “A living embodiment of our dreams and nightmares, the forest has played an ancient and vital role in shaping the human imagination and literature.”
It is in the forest where our ideas of existence are tested, where initiation and metamorphosis happen. A four-fold vision can happen here, perhaps more easily, but it can be unpredictable, as we can’t know which forces reside in the deep forests from the very beginning of time.
