This will take time.
Some people experience life as being more than just mundane. They sense, at times, that reality has depth and that there is something shimmering beneath the visible surface. They see ‘between the lines’ or grasp the full truth of a fleeting scene. As William Blake famously wrote, they perceive ‘the world in a grain of sand’. Having lived through the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and the American and French Revolutions, Blake understood keenly how societies can become mechanistic and dehumanising. In opposition to this limited vision, he advocated what he termed the ‘fourfold vision’, a way of seeing in which the infinite permeates the ordinary.
I recognise something of that disposition in my own life. As a child, however, it bewildered me. When I came across poetry or richly descriptive prose, I didn’t just read the words, I entered them. Like many children, I immersed myself in stories, but my imagination did not stop at the page. My dreams disturbed my parents. I saw presences in the shadows that seemed more real than the certainties of daylight. Concerned, my family took me to see a psychologist. Meanwhile, our frequent moves as a military family meant that I never received a proper education, so I never learnt how to articulate what I was experiencing. My inner world expanded, but my vocabulary lagged behind.
As an adult, I discovered that this intensity of perception was not confined to English literature. When I read in German, I encountered the same depth. Rather than being confused by this, I resolved to cultivate my ability to express myself. I worked hard at the language until my German became more nuanced and expressive than that of many native speakers. It was during this period that I became a Christian and began reading the Bible with a similar intensity. Once again, I found myself reading ‘between the lines’. The narrative yielded layers; the historical became archetypal; and the literal opened into the transcendent. The text was not diminished by this; it became luminous.
Gradually, I recognised that my lifelong encounters with what might be termed visionary perception, through poetry, prose, shadows, and scripture, echoed Blake’s own assertion that imagination precedes language and dogma. He spoke of humanity’s ‘poetic genius’, an innate capacity for imaginative apprehension that education often stifles rather than nurtures. Schools, with their emphasis on rote learning and empirical ‘single vision’, can inadvertently dim the inner light they ought to cultivate.
Blake urged the daily practice of deeper sight: sketching visions, writing prophetic fragments and refusing to reduce reality to mere, measurable fact. During this phase of my life, my nursing background and philosophical inclination unexpectedly converged. I painted. I wrote. I delivered sermons. I acted in plays. I began to see patients in hospital wards and strangers on urban streets as microcosms of a greater drama. This was not in a fanciful sense, but rather as living symbols of the tension between fragmentation and wholeness. Suffering ceased to be merely clinical; it became existential and, at times, prophetic. Through reflection and poetry, I sought to express what lay hidden within the visible.
Yet, as you demonstrate, such a perception is not always welcomed. It can be dismissed as unorthodox, excessive or dubious. Visionary language unsettles systems that prefer containment. What cannot be easily classified is easily rejected. I lost myself in management, doing myself no favours by subduing my nature, and only escaped by retiring.
It was only then that I realised what I had feared might be a pathology was better understood as participation - perhaps even theosis - the gradual awakening to our share in the divine life. Seeing ‘the universe in a teacup’, or glimpsing eternity in an industrial shadow, is not elitist mysticism. It is a human birthright. As Blake wrote, 'Man is all imagination. God is Man, and Man is God, and we exist in Him.” Regardless of one’s views on his theology, the insight remains: imagination is not escapism, but a way of engaging with the depths of reality.
Blake described four levels of vision:
- the single (mere fact),
- the twofold (empathic perception),
- the threefold (intuitive insight),
- and the fourfold (prophetic unity).
When our vision expands in this way, even patient suffering, urban hardship, and the harsh machinery of the Industrial Age can be transformed into meaningful scenes. The mundane reveals something sacred. Fractures carry symbolic meaning, and shadows are recognised as catalysts for transformation rather than being denied.
This way of seeing things is often stifled by industrial dehumanisation or narrow forms of education, yet it can be reclaimed. This process begins when we trust imagination not merely as fantasy, but as a faculty through which the infinite glimmers within the finite. When that faculty awakens, life ceases to be merely endured and becomes something to be interpreted and participated in. In some small but real way, it is redeemed.
The ironic thing is that the visionaries of the world’s religions probably went through a similar process. Many were rejected at first, prophets were incarcerated or killed, and yet their witness became scripture. I don’t see myself as something special, except that due to circumstances beyond my control, I slipped through the system that tends to dim the light.