Ray peats paper about William Blake

cs3000

I noticed ray mentioned william blake a bunch of times, ray wrote a paper about him https://wiki.chadnet.org/files/ray-peat-masters-thesis.pdf I'm reading through it atm ,
to me its not the smoothest read (first parts commenting on what others wrote about him) but it starts picking up from chapter III page 69

^(ironically me rn with the measuring stick on this text, & less jacked)
his artwork is very observant alive and curious in style. a lot of the paintings are like a graphic novel style before this form even existed as that, in the 1700s , , they are dripping with imagination and often have some bizarre feature

^ a false actualized human / god missing a dimension to his being, measuring void , blind to the light behind him (eyes rolled inwards aka overly focused on words / fragmentations)
. they stand out a lot as their own thing from that industrial time period. the color use too is cool a mix of light and dark
so far him and yung stand out to me in the similar way they are of the world but also saturated with imagination / myth / aliveness of the mystical , its integrated with living interconnected instead of only the internal . especially william blake further titled towards the visual / imagination/mystical
he talks like he felt life in all objects. they both talk highly of "visions" / creative imagination. he held creative imagination as the closest way to get to the magic of life.

When he said that the world is alive, he meant that it is a defect of perception that makes Newton’s world seem passive, empty, and dead. A few years ago, a movement that called itself “deep ecology” tried to absolutize the ideas of ecology; Blake’s view of the interactive unity of life was as well thought out as any that preceded Vernadsky’s cosmology.
Rather than elevating any of the ideas of Christianity to an absolute doctrine, Blake used them as parts of an organic whole. The principle of forgiveness was presented as the appropriate response to a world which is always new. The desire for vengeance comes from a delusive commitment to the world of memory. Virginity is constantly renewed in the world of imaginative life. While Blake said that you can’t forgive someone until they stop hurting you, the desire to be forgiven indicates that there is an opportunity to resolve the problem.
Holistic medicine and holistic psychology came into existence as attempts to overcome the dogmatic compartmentalization of reality that is endemic.
Whenever rigidity is a problem, looking for ways to create new patterns that by-pass the petrified pattern can lead to a solution.
Parkinson’s disease and other physical problems have been approached using techniques of intensified or varied stimulation. Increased stimulation--even electromagnetic stimulation-- appears to open alternative patterns. Music, dance, and swimming have been used successfully to improve fluidity in various neurological diseases. Kurt Goldstein (The Organism) worked with brain injuries, and found that the brain has a variety of ways to restore a new balance. Raising the amount of energy that’s available can allow natural processes to create a better synthesis. Political and social problems that are culturally determined may follow rules similar to those of organic brain disease.
Optimal assumptions, when assumptions are necessary, are those that don’t commit you to undesirable conclusions.
Self-fulfilling prophecies and self-limiting assumptions are often built into supposedly practical activities.
Blake found that contrasts made meanings clear, and made language vivid. Heaven and Hell, Clod and Pebble, Lamb and Tyger, Angel and Devil, Greek and Jew, Innocence and Experience, presented contrasts that encouraged the reader to think about the range of possibilities Blake had in mind. He was always consciously trying to energize the reader’s mind to get out of dogmatic ruts, to look at things freshly, so he often used the polarities in ways that would surprise the reader
the assumption that regeneration is impossible in the heart or brain, are self-limiting assumptions that have been immensely destructive in biology and medicine. There was no reason to make those assumptions, except for the rationalist culture. Physics, biology, and cosmology are manacled by many unnecessary assumptions. The limits of adaptation, the extent of life’s potential, can’t be discovered unless you look for them, but the sciences have built many artificial limitations into their systems.
Avoiding unnecessarily limiting assumptions, looking for patterns rather than randomness, looking for larger patterns rather than minimal forms, avoiding reliance on verbal and symbolic formulations, expecting the future to be different—these are abstract ways of formulating the idea that the world should be seen with sympathetic involvement, rather than with analytical coldness.
Everywhere in Blake’s work, it is clear that he never underestimated the possibilities of the future, and never imposed false limits onto anything, but he didn’t tolerate vagueness or empty abstraction. Sharp definition was essential, and unique particulars were the basis for beauty and knowledge.

Blake was clearly aware that the reason for making limiting assumptions was to maintain control, and to profit from another’s suffering. Seeing that the sadistic assumptions that were put in place to regulate human life rested on a dichotomizing of soul from body, Blake’s correction was to replace them with a unity of consciousness and substance, a living world rather than a dead world.

An imaginative study of his work has the potential to rouse one’s abilities and to open an unlimited world of possibilities. “I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”
We can sometimes finish another person’s sentence, the way we anticipate the notes in a melody; we predict the intended meaning. If the symbols carried the meaning in a passive rationalistic way, the person receiving the symbols would receive nothing new. Intellect is a process of imaginative synthesis, or it is nothing.
. I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.
[…]
You certainly mistake, when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world. To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so.”

Youtube Video

NoeticJuice

@cs3000 I wanted to bring more attention to your post. And, as I do so, I might as well add something that, at least in my mind, relates to your post:

"From research areas like these, an extraordinary hypothesis has emerged that is finding connections in many different fields and disciplines. The fact that it appears to fit into such a wide range of subject areas, and indeed links and clarifies them, adds credence to the basic theory.
Let us assume that sometime in the past the neocortex was effectively a single consciousness system, that is, there was no marked structural and functional differences between the two hemispheres. It was just one whole brain. At some point in time, however, something went wrong and damage was sustained to this highly sensitive system. This resulted in progressive change in the most delicate structural components of the brain, and this, in turn, changed the very nature of man's experience; it altered his consciousness.
. . . The damage is primarily restricted to the dominant half of the brain. This has created a distorted experience . . ."

"The cultural decline of Greek oracles mirrored a similar change in the fortune of the muses. Jaynes believes that poetry is founded in the rhythmic speech of the bicameral mind. As the bicameral mind broke down, those who retained 'the gift' either became prophets or poets (or both), relating the words of the gods to their community. As left-hemisphere dominance increased, the poets, in order to access their muses, had to learn to do it, and as this became more difficult, they resorted to conjuring up states of ecstatic possession. By the end of the first millennium BC, access had been mostly lost, and poetry became a creative art. Poets sculpted their own words in laborious imitation of previous divine utterances.
Unlike the oracles, poets did not disappear; their craft changed from one in which messages were received and directly passed on to something that is part a nostalgic search for the absolute. Some poets have, however, even in these latter days, accessed states recalling those more than two thousand years earlier. The most celebrated of these was William Blake, who was visited by extraordinary visions and auditory hallucinations that could persist for days at a time."

Return to the Brain of Eden (2019), pp. 34, 160
by Tony Wright and Graham Gynn

"But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally 'pedestrian, or walking, logos,' as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left-hemisphere language (the referential language of prose).
Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere, where one would expect a means of communication with others, promoting social cohesion, to arise."

The Master and His Emissary (2019), p. 105
by Iain McGilchrist

"For the apophatic writer, the logical rule of non-contradiction functions for object entities. When the subject of discourse is a non-object and no-thing, it is not irrational that such a logic be suspended. Of course, apophasis is not the only discourse that cannot directly name its subject. Poetry, drama—almost any form of art—risks being trivialized when its meaning is defined and paraphrased discursively. Anyone who has attempted to explain discursively the humor of a joke knows how the humor disappears when removed from its performance."

"For Plotinus, discursive reason reflects alienated consciousness. It must 'run after' the object of its contemplation through activity. It is caught in dualisms of subject-object, cause-effect, origin-goal. The overcoming of these dualisms occurs in nous. Plotinian nous is commonly translated as 'intellect' but such a translation gives a cold or 'intellectualist' connotation to a term that for Plotinus signified both impersonal truth and the most personal and intimate mode of contemplation."

Mystical Languages of Unsaying (1994), pp. 4, 22
by Michael A. Sells

"Learning to draw may uncover potentialities that are unknown to you right now. The German artist Albrecht Dürer said, 'From this, the treasure secretly gathered in your heart will become evident through your creative work.'"

"Research on brain-hemisphere aspects of visual perception indicates that drawing a complex realistic image of a perceived form is mainly a function of the right hemisphere of the brain. . . . Learning to draw well may depend on whether you can find a way to access the 'minor' or subdominant R-mode."

"It appears that the right hemisphere perceives — processes visual information — in a mode suitable for drawing, and the left-brain mode of functioning (L-mode) may be inappropriate for the task."

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (the definitive 4th edition), pp. XIX, 31
by Betty Edwards

"The contextual versus abstract distinction is illustrated by the different use of symbols by each hemisphere. In one sense of the word, a symbol such as the rose is the focus or centre of an endless network of connotations which ramify through our physical and mental, personal and cultural, experience in life, literature and art: the strength of the symbol is in direct proportion to the power it has to convey an array of implicit meanings, which need to remain implicit to be powerful. In this it is like a joke that has several layers of meaning — explaining them destroys its power. The other sort of symbol could be exemplified by the red traffic light: its power lies in its use, and its use depends on a 1:1 mapping of the command 'stop' onto the color red, which precludes ambiguity and has to be explicit. This sort of symbolic function is in the realm of the left hemisphere, while the first type belongs to the realm of the right."

"The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known — and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantages of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really 'break out' to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own representations only. Where the thing itself is 'present' to the right hemisphere, it is only 're-presented' by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing."

The Master and His Emissary (2019), pp. 51, 174-175
by Iain McGilchrist

All of this is connected, even if not directly, and I recommend reading the books I quoted. It's useful not just for theory, but also for gaining perspective and improving one's own mind.

I haven't read Mystical Languages of Unsaying or Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain completely yet — I'm in the process of doing so — but, based on what I've already read, I can tell that they are good books.

It's also good to remember that the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain explored in some of the texts above are generalizations. The functions, if we may call them that, of the hemispheres may not be as clearly lateralized in each individual as they are described in the books.

Also related:

Expressive therapies (Wikipedia)
Becoming unpredictable

NoeticJuice

Youtube Video

Not just for those who want to learn to write poetry. It explains the basic principles of lyric poetry, so it can also be helpful for those who just want to read poetry.