How to Live like William Blake

Plus a few changes going on around here...

IlluminAsia has had a make-over! I hope you’ll find the new name and look a bit more personal, a little more human…

Another change is that one of my weekly posts each month will be a video interview. Kicking that off is psychotherapist and author Mark Vernon, whose new book Awake! argues that we’re missing something from our view of the great visionary artist William Blake.

It’s that word - ‘visionary.’

Mark argues that Blake’s extraordinary art reveals an expanded experience of the world that Blake lived with every day: angels, fairies, realms beyond our own. Blake wasn’t, in other words, making it all up…

Mark says that we shouldn’t be afraid of the ‘supernatural Blake.’ We should embrace him - and even aspire to live a little as he did.

How?

Here’s how:

Some of my big takeaways from our conversation:

• Blake is Mark’s ‘local mystic’, having lived much of his life in south London.

• His mother remembered him first seeing God at the age of four!

• Blake was likely influenced by India in his work - especially the spiritual classic, the Bhagavad Gita.

• Modern people live in a ‘madhouse of abstractions’, according to Carl Jung. Blake was interested in how we might break out of this and experience the world as it really is – by, as he famously put it, ‘cleaning the doors of perception.’

• I always thought that Blake was part of the spiritual 1%: elite visionaries, whose experience of the world wasn’t available to the rest of us. I was wrong! Towards the end of our conversation, Mark talks us through practical ways of using Blake’s art to expand our experience.

You can follow Mark Vernon’s Substack, A Golden String, here.

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