featuring Michael Bertiaux on La Prise-des-Yeaux, Carlos Castaneda on seeing & a special guest appearance by William Blake
William Blake asserts that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite", Michael Bertiaux outlines the faculty known as la prise-des-yeaux & Carlos Castaneda's descriptions of seeing are a central theme in his books. There are many stimulating similarities between these concepts which we will leave it to the reader to uncover. Suffice it to say here that they all point to a deep, immediate grasp of an intense, somehow more real reality only glimpsed rarely & fleetingly but which, with initiation, can become continuous. Making use of Grant's dictum as outlined above, one can form an assemblage linking Blake's recommendation concerning the cleansing of the doors of perception, through physiological cleansing procedures (something along the lines of the yama and niyama of Patanjali's yoga sutras, which were intended more as technical recommendations than moral injunctions) to the objective of la prise-des-yeux, or of seeing for what it is the inexhaustible, luminescent wonder of the world.
Grant's work is everything that esotericism is at its best - bold, creative, almost athletically eclectic, & lacking the all-too-common narcotic qualities of much else in the field. Many of his detractors, taking a cue from the notorious Crowley quip (specifically: "you cannot be content with the simplicity of reality or fact; you have to go off into a pipedream", from a correspondence) see Grant as a fantasist. Never mind that this may have been based on a single incident, or that the man, or beast, was sometimes condescending even to his closest associates. Against this misconception there is Grant's own position, first articulated in The Magical Revival & expanded upon throughout the Typhonian trilogies, that the gnosis is, at least in its original, undistorted form, physical. About as down-to-earth as you can get, that.
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| William Blake, Hecate (1795) |
William Blake asserts that "if the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite", Michael Bertiaux outlines the faculty known as la prise-des-yeaux & Carlos Castaneda's descriptions of seeing are a central theme in his books. There are many stimulating similarities between these concepts which we will leave it to the reader to uncover. Suffice it to say here that they all point to a deep, immediate grasp of an intense, somehow more real reality only glimpsed rarely & fleetingly but which, with initiation, can become continuous. Making use of Grant's dictum as outlined above, one can form an assemblage linking Blake's recommendation concerning the cleansing of the doors of perception, through physiological cleansing procedures (something along the lines of the yama and niyama of Patanjali's yoga sutras, which were intended more as technical recommendations than moral injunctions) to the objective of la prise-des-yeux, or of seeing for what it is the inexhaustible, luminescent wonder of the world.
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