Cleansing Our Inner Vision

Photo by Arman Hovhannisyan on Unsplash

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to us as it is: Infinite.

For we have closed ourselves up, till we see all things thro’ narrow chinks of our cavern.” (William Blake, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell [I have changed the pronouns from the original text])

Many of us spend our lives with mental blinders that we are unaware of. We perceive phenomena, unquestioningly, according to habitual patterns. For instance, we may find a winter landscape of bare trees and brown fields ugly and depressing. Or we may view an obese person negatively, assuming they choose to overindulge in food.

We thus put limitations on our mind which prevent us from experiencing the non-restrictive infinitude of the phenomenal world we are intrinsically part of. We impose subjective values on that which lies beyond or beneath our artificially constructed “caverns” of perception.

What would happen if we cleansed our doors of perception? If we allowed the restrictive ego-self to evaporate, at least momentarily?

We would then burst out of the tunnel of our complacency and see and directly experience every thing as it truly is – infinitely crisp and clear ultimate reality!