Kabir, William Blake, Nietzsche, knowledge, ecstasy, drunkenness, and the doors of perception

excerpted from THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves, by Jack Haas

“The knowledge beyond knowledge is my knowledge.”

Kabir

We begin to live completely in the moment, and in the mystery, without the hindrance of ‘what?’, ‘how?’, or ‘why?’, when we are free of the need to know.

We are infinite just as we are, only we are clogged with the detritus of all we are not.

And so we must “cleanse the doors of perception”, as William Blake suggested, and this requires cleansing the mind, for only in doing so do we re-awaken to life’s novelty and allow Beauty to flow uninhibitedly through us.

            Thus Nietzsche was able to claim: “...the blissful ecstasy that arises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of nature, at this same collapse of the principium individuationis…[is] an insight into the Dionysian, which is brought into closest ken, perhaps, by the analogy of drunkenness. It is either under the influence of the narcotic draught, of which the hymns of all primitive men and peoples tell us, or by the powerful approach of Spring penetrating all nature with joy, that the Dionysian emotions awake, in which the subject vanishes in complete forgetfulness.”

excerpted from:

THE WAY OF WONDER: a return to the mystery of ourselves

by Jack Haas

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Mystical books, visionary art, and fine art photography by Jack Haas