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Vajra Comment: William Blake—A Tantric Retrospective

      Online Buddha dharma communications signal many things, both positive and negative, like the nature of karma itself. One thing that alarms me is how it totally socializes the teachings, contextualizing them in dependency upon others’ views, mores, and habits, conventionalizing the Buddha’s speech and one’s hearing of it to the extend one’s own insights are drowned-out. To wit, comments are often just cookie-cutter (emojis) on Dharma posting sights. So is it a great leveler, making teachings more available? Or a constant invitation just to relax efforts in traditional practice—like isolated retreats—and forestall more genuinely advanced attainments? 

     Virtual reality is ostensibly another ‘sealing off,’ a phrase the Romantic artist-poet, William Blake, used to describe the alienating effects of the Industrial Revolution (with its soulless, ‘satanic mills’) on society. Notably, from his revelatory fourfold, heavily anagogical, vision of the newly reduced conventional reality trapped in an empirical three dimensionally, enforced by the Renaissance use of perspective in painting. This, as opposed to the four dimensions of religious artists like Giotto and his later, post-contemporaries in the Pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood. Both the Brotherhood and Blake harped on immersion in Imagination as opposed to dalliance in Fancy. 

     Similarly, what virtual reality seals off is self and phenomenal nature through its ‘hyper-text-you-lies’ media mindset. Sure, hyper text is more ‘dynamic,’ allowing content and structure modification, updates, and “an evolving information landscape.” One might also think perspective in paintings is more dynamic in its advancing of eye organ and sense object interplay, than, at first glance, a one dimensionality strictly perceived in ‘flat surfaces’ of traditional religious art. 

     But in both these instances, during the Industrial Revolution and the Digital one, this ‘sealing off’ is, in Marxist philosophy, the dialectical-materialistic-categorical equivalent of the Buddhist concept of ‘endless elaboration,’ immobilizing will, collapsing one’s ability to isolate body, voice, and mind, necessary for a sustained, calm-abiding meditative state allowing one the presence of mind to transform ordinary perception into the extraordinary. 

     

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