Birthday of English Poet William Blake

28^th November is the birthday of the English poet and painter William Blake. Born in 1757, Blake lived during the Romantic Era when individualism, emotions and love for nature were elevated in art, music and literature. As a successor to the Enlightenment Era, Romanticism affirmed ‘harmonious coexistence with nature’ as opposed to ‘controlling nature’, a propensity fuelled by the Industrial Revolution. Blake’s quote sums it up well – You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. Other famous Romantic Era writers include Byron, Coleridge, Dumas, Emerson, Hugo, Keats, Shelley, Thoreau and Wordsworth.

Although unrecognised during his lifetime, today Blake is considered a seminal figure in poetry and art. The philosophical and mystical undercurrents that make his work unique can be tasted from these famous lines – 

To see the world in a grain of sand,
and to see heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hands,
and eternity in an hour.

Osho has spoken on William Blake in His discourses. Osho says William Blake is one of the greatest poets the West has produced. He has many beautiful insights. Blake has said ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ Just a few steps more and he would have been an enlightened person. He could have been a RISHI, a seer. Just a few steps, maybe only one step, a little jump… he had come very close to the boundary of realization.

I am wondering from where to begin! Niten, meditation is the only contribution the East has made to humanity. The West has made many contributions, thousands of scientific inventions, immense progress in medicine, unbelievable discoveries in all the dimensions in life. But still, a single contribution of the East is far more valuable than all the contributions of the West. The West has become rich; it has all the technology to be rich. The East has become poor, immensely poor, because it has not looked for anything else except for one thing, and that is one’s own inner being. Its richness is something which cannot be seen, but it has known the highest peaks of bliss, the greatest depths of silence. It has known the eternity of life; it has known the most beautiful flowering of love, compassion, joy. Its whole genius has been devoted to a single search — you can call it ecstasy.

Meditation is only a technique to reach to the ecstatic state, to the state of divine intoxication. It is a simple technique, but the mind makes it very complex. Mind has to make it very complex and difficult, because both cannot exist together. Meditation is the death of the mind. Naturally, mind resists every effort for meditation. And if you go on without listening to the mind… It is clever and cunning enough to give you false directions and call them meditation…

Meditation starts by being separate from the mind, by being a witness. That is the only way of separating yourself from anything. If you are looking at the light, naturally one thing is certain, you are not the light, you are the one who is looking at it. If you are watching the flowers, one thing is certain, you are not the flower, you are the watcher.

Watching is the key of meditation: Watch your mind. Don’t do anything – no repetition of mantra, no repetition of the name of God – just watch whatever the mind is doing. Don’t disturb it, don’t prevent it, don’t repress it; don’t do anything at all on your part. You just be a watcher, and the miracle of watching is Meditation. As you watch, slowly, slowly mind becomes empty of thoughts; but you are not falling asleep, you are becoming more alert, more aware. As the mind becomes completely empty, your whole energy becomes a flame of awakening.

This flame is the result of meditation. So you can say meditation is another name of watching, witnessing, observing — without any judgment, without any evaluation. Just by watching, you immediately get out of the mind. The watcher is never part of the mind and as the watcher becomes more and more rooted and strong, the distance between the watcher and the mind goes on becoming longer and longer. Soon the mind is so far away that you can hardly feel that it exists… just an echo in faraway valleys. And ultimately, even those echoes disappear. This disappearance of the mind is without your effort, without your using any force against the mind — just letting it die its own death.

Once mind is absolutely silent, absolutely gone, you cannot find it anywhere. You become for the first time aware of yourself because the same energy that was involved in the mind, finding no mind, turns upon itself. Remember: energy is a constant movement. We  say things are objects, and perhaps you have never thought why we call things objects. They are objects because they hinder your energy, your consciousness. They object; they are obstacles. But when there is no object, all thoughts, emotions, moods, everything, has disappeared. You are in utter silence, in nothingness – rather in no-thingness; the whole energy starts turning upon itself. This returning energy to the source brings immense delight.

Just the other day, I quoted William Blake, “energy is delight.” That man, although he is not a mystic, must have found some glimpse of meditation. When meditation comes back to its own source, it explodes in immense delight. This delight in its ultimate state is enlightenment.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse series: The Invitation Chapter #21

Chapter title: To know oneself and to be oneself

31 August 1987 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium

References:

Osho has spoken on eminent poets and philosophers like Aristotle, Byron, Bukharin, Camus, Coleridge, Dale Carnegie, Descartes, Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Gorky, H.G. Wells, Hegel, Huxley, Kahlil Gibran, Kalidas, Keats, Mark Twain, Milton, Nietzsche, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Rumi, Shakespeare, Tagore, Tolstoy, Voltaire, William Blake, Wordsworth, and many more in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. The Book of Wisdom
2. The Sword and The Lotus
3. Returning to the Source
4. Light on the Path
5. The Secret
6. The Hidden Splendour
7. The New Dawn
8. Beyond Enlightenment
9. From Bondage to Freedom
10. The Golden Future
11. Take It Easy, Vol 1
12. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 4, 5
13. Theologia Mystica