A New Heaven and a New Earth

“it is only that, acting upon his naïve conviction that what he wrote was dictated by an unseen voice and that his paintings were no more than reproductions of what the inner eye had already perceived, Blake threw a brilliant light into a realm that for most men is sheathed in darkness of disbelief.”

June Singer, The Unholy Bible

This is an interesting passage in light of what I now know about manic-depressive illness. Did Dr. Singer see that William Blake was manic in his “visions”? And if he was then his voices were real. Through his mania he heard things that those of us who are “normal” would never hear and saw things that we would never see.

It is both curious and exhilarating to me that those periods of mania are desirable in their less hypo forms by the people who experience them. Perhaps the hypo-manic stages are undesirable and frightening because they tip over into that realm that exists in each of us where the darkness, the evil, the uncontrollable, the Devil resides.

Tyger, tiger burning bright…

I wonder if the “new heaven and the new earth” is that place at which we arrive that is the final culmination of human life whereby unconscious and conscious come together and integrate to create a whole new human existence. A new heaven (unconscious) and a new Earth (conscious).

Caught Beyond Two Worlds

It is being caught, trapped or perhaps imprisoned in between the two worlds. The reality is not religious or secular, the reality is somewhere in between but not really in between but rather beyond. It is beyond the divide between what we have come to know as 'religious' and 'secular'. It is beyond, where there is knowledge that religious and secular do not exist but in the minds of human beings.

So one demands that God be here, that He is necessary and the other excludes God completely and yet they both point to the same thing.

I have a nagging feeling these days that this delineation that we place on 'this' life and the 'next' life, religious vs. secular, here on earth vs. heaven are misguided. Which is to say that I am not at all convinced anymore that we actually completely leave one and cross through some doorway at death that puts us in that completely different place we call heaven. And while there is something within that tells me that the differences may very well be profound (one can only hope) I am not so sure that there is some specific dividing line between the two places. I do not think it valid that we completely leave all of this behind and I feel that it is a much more gradual and gentle exit and entry from one to the other that maybe allows us to retain what has come before. And I think we will be given the opportunity to see all of this, this life we live here on earth here and now with much different eyes. With a newness and a clarity that we never knew existed and yet somehow we will still be able to see what we now know, what is now familiar.