Regardless, however, of particular circumstances, we should examine the phenomenon of epiphany in regard to the doors it opens when it comes to individual consciousness. Some regard life as being essentially tragic, mainly due to the feeling of “thrownness” that permeates the life of a newborn. The newborn doesn’t choose the starting level of difficulty in his life. He doesn’t choose his parents, his country or much less his cultural conditionings. He is just thrown towards a world where he will encounter all these and more and adaptation is key to survival. His life is, to a great extent, homogenous and predictive. But then, with the coming of age, and if he happens to be among the “chosen” ones, comes the epiphany, a sudden realization of something that wasn’t taught to him directly by his peers or even socially expected for him to learn. To elucidate what triggers such a phenomenon would be a titanic task. Whether it is an internal genetic disposition or something that is stimulated by a specific set of outer circumstances would, nonetheless, give plenty of room for debate. Defenders of a more deterministic approach claim that there is a genetic predisposition, while others think it can be externally activated in various ways, for instance, actively searching for such experience through the use of entheogenic substances.

What we can be certain of, however, is that the individual will not be the same person after foregoing such a process. An inner transformation occurs, and a new world of possibilities is bestowed upon him. Whether it was a sought-after experience or an involuntary happening, he will not be the same after it. But how likely is an epiphany to occur given our current circumstances? Is there a place for the uncommon in a world where post-industrial standardization is the norm? “Ask, and shall it be given you; seek and ye shall find,” Matthew 7:7. Taking this biblical verse as a reference, it wouldn’t be too risky to say that he who encounters epiphany may have been looking for it in a subconscious or conscious level, whereas the specific conditions in which it is given would come off as secondary. If this statement is true, then the conditions necessary for having an epiphany vary more from individual to individual than from era to era. It is, however, still important to examine the place epiphany holds in our current state of affairs. Let us first examine the Zeitgeist (also known as the spirit of the time) offered by modernity in a broad sense. Modernity offers romance in a short-term, quick satisfaction model. Sex is no longer a sacrament, and wars are no longer seen as holy (at least in modern, secularized societies). If all the elements we find in the 3D world are ephemeral manifestations of an emanation from nothing, then only nothingness and its infinite emptiness are the only sources of depth. It is especially common for the modern artist to look forward to a creatio ex nihilo, a creation from nothing, with a relative sense of disregard for what came before him. The weight of history becomes, with the upcoming of modernity, lighter and lighter, and so does the importance of tradition. Will this current state of affairs offer the individual enough freedom to make epiphany a more common incident, or does the lack of objective inherent meaning and solid life guidance models annihilate the capacity for escaping the mundane dread of existence? I, optimistically, believe it’s the former.

The existential void in modernity leads to a crisis, which leads the individual towards a search for meaning. Every search leads to a finding, and it wouldn’t be strange to assume that many of these findings may be of the special type, of the type that seems to burst violently into the individual´s conscience, in other words, epiphanies. What happens after that is similar to the opening of the Pandora box: a limitless amount of possibilities seemingly appears out of nowhere. Whatever thought pattern he was aligned to prior to the epiphanic experience dissolves and is born anew as a fresh set of ideas, theories, and attitudes toward life.

As mentioned before, whether the environment is receptive towards that is, in most occasions, a matter of luck. An epiphany could be considered similar to flipping a coin, but instead of heads or tails, we have social praise or condemnation. In our current state of affairs and with the advance of civil rights, the stakes are, however, not that high. It is not uncommon nowadays for someone to receive such a burst of inspiration, to have an enlightened vision and then turn it into art, philosophy, a manifesto, or scientific discovery and, in a matter of minutes, upload it to the collective consciousness depot known as the internet so it can be accessed by billions of people worldwide. Anyone confident enough regarding his vision can become a guru or a coach and, eventually, gain thousands or even millions of followers worldwide.

This could lead to the notion that religious fervor is far from extinguished and, if anything, has become disseminated and separated into small groups. The speed of life is increasing, terabytes of information travel at full throttle, and the individual is constantly stimulated, but among this sea of information, he finds very little to call his own. It is under these conditions that he needs to differentiate himself from the rest of the flock. He is looking for something, and many alternatives are given to him, but none to his satisfaction. This is definitely an ideal breeding ground for epiphanic experiences. Creatio ex nihilo occurs: seemingly out of nowhere, a new operative system is born inside him. If he doesn’t find a good way to channel such energy, his mental health could face danger. A big new input of rare information just lying stuck in his head would harm him from the inside. To let it out or not is, in part, a matter of courage, though this also depends on the nature of the epiphany he just had and also if the sharing of such information could create much distress among his peers. Some restrain themselves from expressing what they have seen due to fear of social rejection. A number of reasons could lead to this spiral of self-doubt. Maybe the realization is not that original after all, maybe he just accessed a particularly uncommon place of human consciousness that has been visited before. If this happens to be true, his excitement wouldn’t be justified. One could go as far as to say that maybe his epiphany is not even such but merely a personal delusion fueled by repressed trauma or wishful thinking.

It is due to this level of uncertainty that epiphany can be the cause of much distress. No one wants to make a fool of himself or break the weave of consensus reality without thinking about the consequences. Plus, one cannot be certain about the benefits of such temerity until the newly received input has been shared with the world. Can there be, therefore, a strong case for epiphany? Absolutely. To deny one´s epiphany is not only to deny an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-challenge but also to deny the spontaneous course of progress itself. Spontaneous is the keyword here since, after all, epiphany is probably the most spontaneous of happenings, contrary to the predictable mundanity proper of mechanical reasoning. Through escaping the realm of the predictable, the individual becomes untraceable and, therefore, free from external conditionings. He is forced, in the midst of this violent input of data, to find new life meanings for himself (or at least regarding a specific branch of life, science, and spirituality being the most common). It wouldn’t be too accurate to state that the experience of epiphany has forced him to be free since free will is given as an innate condition, but more that it made him conscious of his inherent freedom for giving things meaning.

It is in these circumstances that chaos becomes more evident; the chances of crisis are high, and so it is not uncommon for such a potentially tormented genius to undergo a dark night of the soul. William Blake said that in order for a tree to reach the sky, its branches need to be rooted in the hellish underworld. But what is this “hell” he talked about? Chaos, uncertainty, lack of sense of direction, unsafety. The relatively safe haven of consensual reality, of assumed thought patterns, of rigid mental structures, starts to fall apart. The individual has to rebuild his path towards lucidity from scratch. This entire process is similar to a return to home, comparable to Odysseus’ return trip to Ithaca. In this metaphor, home would be the state of lucidity, of balance, of clarity of thought. The epiphanic experience has demolished all signs of stability and replaced it all with a deep existential crisis in which the individual questions both his understanding of reality as well as his place in it. He knows that, in order to survive this, his new re-making of the world has to be even more solid than the world he left behind. This, needless to say, is no easy task, yet it is totally worth it. First, it is a matter of survival: not being able to correctly process this life-marking experience could lead to a shattering of his identity and a loss of position among his peers.

In other words, it is not like he has much chance. Second, the possibility of obtaining some form of glory is enticing, to say the least. If the epiphanic experience can be transmuted into a useful and comprehensible idea, concept, or art form for his peers, then the reward would be high. These two reasons are another way of describing the social appraisal versus social condemnation model expressed above. What is important to note, however, is that due to the spontaneous and unpredictable nature of the epiphanic experiences, the individual doesn’t have much chance regarding the fact that he has to face this high stakes, high reward model. The tools an individual can use to face this challenge are more generous nowadays than some centuries ago. This is due to the fact that access, not only to information but to worldwide communication, is becoming more fluid each year that passes by. A person can now share this unexpected streak of information, this spontaneous epiphanic vision, with other people worldwide. On the other hand, with the right use of search mechanisms, he can build new life-changing, consciousness-transforming connections. This leads to the notion that, even if his new vision is contrary to his particular cultural weather, there is still an escape route for the individual to share this intimate experience and get feedback in return. Social isolation can, therefore, be avoided if the right tools are used.

What we can make of all this is that epiphany understood as a consciousness-transforming process, takes a great deal of courage to face, as well as a rigorous testing of the individual´s mental stability. It is important for those who undergo such a process to look for the right tools and the right people to make their path both less lonely and less dangerous. If the individual keeps his eyes on the prize, this is, the possibility of sharing and structuralizing brand new informational and experiential input in a comprehensible manner, then chances are he will be up for a quite productive, transcendent, and satisfactory lifetime.

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Children, of course, cannot be objects of satire in the usual sense (the neo-classical sense of Pope, Swift, and Dryden say) because they are not worthy targets. The strategy of Blakean satire, though, is not so much to ridicule the ridiculous or to castigate vice as to diagnose forms of ‘bad faith’, to show the evasions and self-deceits by which false forms of consciousness are constructed and maintained. One of these is ‘childhood’, as certain of Blake’s contemporaries understood it. Blake grants there is strength in innocence, in its guilelessness, its implicit faith in the world’s beneficence, and its immediate conviction of divine presence. Each song, however, is a demonstration of the limits of this strength when unredeemed by an adult consciousness (or, to use a more Blakean term, ‘organized innocence’). Innocence is easily deceived because innocence trusts too much in itself and too readily deceives itself. This may be one reason why we are so eager as adults to keep children ‘innocent.’ Thus, each song of innocence presents a flaw (whether the speaker is a child or adult- an adult can be innocent too) that the speaker of the poem either masks from him or herself or compensates for by some substitute gratification. Thus, the speaker of ‘Little Boy Lost’ projects a ‘father in heaven’ to compensate for the (unredeemed) loss of his earthly father (as if ‘supernatural’ good were some substitute for a more primary lost earthly good). The speaker in ‘The Shepherd’ fails to notice that it is the shepherd who is supposed to be leading the sheep and not vice versa. The Shepherd is only raising the sheep to shear and eat them. The sacrificial lamb of ‘The Lamb’ (a figure who recurs many times in Blake’s songs) is oblivious to being in the divine image (as he is of everything else) even though his (unstated) crucifixion will be all too real. In each case, the speaker papers over some crack or flaw in the vision of innocence that he or she cannot face so that innocence becomes an evasion.

That this has crippling consequences is nowhere more evident than in the case of the speaker in ‘The Little Black Boy.’ The mother of the poem certainly offers a powerful vision of the inclusiveness of divine love, one with a Blakean twist: the experience of embodiment, which causes so much mischief in the poem (as people have black and white bodies), also has the positive side of filtering or limiting the divine love till the soul has grown sufficiently to be receptive of it.^[2] A mere ‘child’ cannot bear the vision of God, which in Blake’s mystical doctrine includes the vision of negativity and darkness. Yet the black boy cannot realize the full implications of this vision because innocence is passive: he can only imagine a heaven in which souls are as black and white as bodies and in which he will win the white boy’s love by serving him as an umbrella. In other words, his mind is colonized, and he is incapable of questioning his worldly status, which he thinks will be retained in the afterlife. At the same time, as he is given a vision of universal love, he is inoculated from revolt. Ironically, the black boy cannot receive the beams of love in their aspect of the fires of rebellion because he cannot free himself from the “mind-forged manacles” imposed on him by his condition. In this respect, he is like any of us who limit the divine vision to what our narrow categories can encompass. Things are similar with the hapless chimney sweep. His liberation occurs in dreams, the warm after-glow of which serves to get him through his day. His rationalization of the shearing of the sacrificial Tom Dacre is the most desperate imaginable: his precious white hair would only be sullied by the dirt of this world. The conclusion of the poem is that the sweepers go back to work, which is, in fact, all they can do. They do their duty in the vain hope that they will be kept thereby from harm.

All of these points become clear in the subsequent Songs of Experience, which present the exact same world viewed through a different lens. Blake tells us that the eye-altering alters all, and what we see in Blake’s sequel is the world of innocence disenchanted. It is a world of economic oppression, sexual puritanism, cruelty, jealous fear, and selfishness. We must remember, however, that it, too, is satire. If innocence lacks the clear-eyed vision of experience, it has to be admitted that experience cannot see past the same dull round. It has no imaginative freedom from the empirically given: the disenchanted world it sees is the only world it recognizes. At this point, we must evoke innocence in a positive sense and reread the poems discussed above in a different light. The duty sarcastically invoked in our first interpretation of the Chimney Sweep is now our duty to our spiritual liberation. The passivity of the black boy is now an active Christ-like condescension (for it is the incarnate Christ who mediates God to our limited vision as the black boy shades the white). The lamb is now a powerful image of God’s humility in the incarnation. The Shepherd becomes the good shepherd of the Gospels, seeking his lost sheep. Innocence admits the necessity of imaginative transcendence so that even the chimney sweeper’s dreams become a prelude to liberation. As the vision of innocence is cracked and flawed when seen from the standpoint of experience, so the vision of experience is cramped and despairing when seen from the point of view of innocence. Each state is a satire on the other. Each cries out to be read in a special double sense when the two books are taken as a whole.^[3] Blake’s model here may be Milton’s pairing of L’Allegro and Il Peneroso or, more remotely, the dyadic structure of Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar. His demand for a ‘double reading’ of his opposed collections, however, seems far more systematically worked out than in either of his predecessors.

The reader who has attained the capacity to read in this doubled way has attained the standpoint of an adult, which is neither naiveté nor cynicism. Doubled or perhaps dialectical vision has the imaginative strength of innocence and the hard honesty of experience. It can encompass both poles of the deity, the light and dark, in a single/double vision. This higher vision is sometimes associated with childhood in the Gospels, but it is childhood purged of passivity and ignorance. It is innocence as an active achieved virtue to return to our Aristotelian beginning. Thus, Blake is not a proponent of any sentimentalized vision of childhood: his is a vision that honors not the child but what the child can become, and in this sense, his view is quite traditional. The limitations of the innocent contain the seeds of their own overcoming: the admittedly false consciousness of the Black Boy has within it the possibility of becoming a Christ-like vision. However, Blake’s qualified praise of childhood is that this is not true of experience. Innocence signifies something higher than itself, whereas experience signifies only the things that are: to become more than a child, I must become a child again in the sense of reclaiming the imagination of childhood from its alienated forms (one of which is the sentimental contemporary construction of ‘the child’!).^[4] This is Blake’s gloss on Matthew 18,3: “Verily I say onto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.”                 

References

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics trans. R. McKeon (Random House, New York, 1941)

KJV Bible (BEAMS, Gulfport, 1078)

Damon, S. Foster.  William Blake: his Philosophy and Symbols (Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, 2010)

Blake, William The Complete Poems ed. Alicia Ostriker (Penguin Books, London, 1973)

Ostriker, Alicia Vision and Verse in William Blake (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 1965)

[1]When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (1Corinthians 13,11) As Alicia Ostriker puts it: Whoever wished to babble over the natural sweetness and happiness of childhood would be reminded (by Blake) that childhood was by no means always sweet and that happiness was against nature.” (47)

[2] Powerful but still limited to the displaced discourse of ‘religion’. The mother is still speaking of a projected realm outside of or alongside this world which thereby retains its monstrous injustice intact. This fact is indicated by her sitting beneath a tree: never a positive symbol in Blake.

[3] In this essay I have read the Songs of Innocence in their negative sense and used the Songs of Experience to recuperate what was positive in them. I could have pursued the opposite course and read the first set of poems ‘innocently’ and used the second set to diagnose their limitations. There is doubtless no Archimedean point from which to read the entire set rather than in the back and forth fashion we have employed here. There is however the trajectory of Blake’s canon taken as a whole for which both innocence and experience take their place in a total spiritual anagogy. This is well laid out by Foster Damon (William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols, 12-13).

[4] As Alicia Ostriker notes we are reminded by the Songs of Innocence that: “…human perfection never arises from material well-being, but only and always from spiritual strength. The rationalist, materialist outlook was no less sentimental, because no less limited, than blind adoration of the child or savage.” (48).  It is the imaginative power contained (in nucleo) in innocence that frees us from the solipsistic self-enclosure of sense experience and reflection (finite ego) as understood by Locke. We should note in this respect the satiric thrust of Blake’s use of that very Lockean word ‘experience’.

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