COLLEAGUESMANSHIP - The having of colleagues is an indispensable aspect of Blaketashi Darwishhood, for the way of the transmission of Reality is often from heart to heart.
VISUAL CONTEMPLATION: If real Sufism may be described at all, it might be said to consist of a process which stacks a series of impacts upon the mind and heart. The weight of these impacts can grow and sometimes cause sudden shifts, in an avalanche of the person. These are moments of epiphany, which are the lesser cousins of the experience of enlightenment. Were it possible to talk of enlightenment as an experience, as if amongst experiences.
Visual contemplation, of which William Blake was a master, is one of the key practices of the Blaketashi. In this, it is rather unique amongst Sufis, since the construction of images tend to be considered suspect amongst Moslems.
What is visual contemplation? Visual contemplation is the stacking of visual impacts upon the mind and heart.
Imagine, if you will, two people in, say, the Tate Gallery in London, looking at a picture. One is a famed art critic. One a watcher of professional wrestling, and is there at the insistence of his wife.
How does their experience of looking at that picture differ?
Mr. Huxley talks about there being a series of reducing valves in the mind, which attenuates and dims Reality, until it can at last be said that a person lives within the reality they deserve. Blake says this also, in Marriage of Heaven and Hell, when he says that "…man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." The art critic has removed the veils from his perception, so that he actually sees. His spirit is smote by the art. The wresting fan does not allow the art to penetrate, and views it, at best, a mysterious source of visual confusion.
The purpose of visual contemplation is to increase the size of the aperture through which we see. Again, Blake says: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite." He was being literal.
As Idries Shah says: "The visible institution of teachership exists in our dimension not because of the needs of the enlightened. It is there, to the contrary, because of the insensitivity of the ordinary person, who will not perceive what is there until this has been magnified into an external shape."
In Blake, we have a master artist, whose goal in each of his created images was to have a certain spiritual impact on the viewer. The goal of each is to help mankind awaken. Look at the following images. Does your heart not recognize in each one, an exit from the cave?