In Part 1 of this essay (‘Weird Universe: Are We Meant To Be Here?”), I discussed the strange ideas of William Blake (1757-1827), England’s famous poet-painter and mystic. He had managed to combine his own wacky version of Christianity with an uninhibited tantric sexual mysticism that most of his contemporaries found ridiculous, if not repugnant, and which the subsequent age of Queen Victoria would regard with revulsion and horror.
An excursion into the visionary worlds of Blake, Swedenborg, and Leonardo da Vinci. None of these great thinkers would have had any problems believing in a postmortem existence, given that they regarded death as a “continuation of life”.
“The universe is not only stranger than we imagine,
it is stranger than we can imagine.” — Sir Arthur Eddington [1]
Strange. Weird. Uncanny. Three sensational synonyms to lure us into the bizarre mind worlds of William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Leonardo da Vinci. Perhaps they will help us to appreciate Hamlet’s observation to his friend Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy [2]. Read More