InsaneJournal

Before the Fall, Man was absolute wisdom, and was the circumference of everything. Nothing then existed outside Albion: sun moon, stars, the center of the earth and the depth of the sea, were all within his mind and body, a body fully conscious of being alive, not only in its brain but in all parts of itself down to the feet. Hence "opening a centre", as described above, is the imagination's way of reversing the fallen perspective of the world, and uniting an individual imagination with the universal one. This union is completed when in our vision the recurrent throb of existence which we know as time becomes the pulsating heart of a sleeping Man, and the revolving globes of the sky, seen as within instead of outside a human mind and body, becomes the corpuscles in a human bloodstream which is also the fourfold river of Paradise. That is what Blake means when he says that time is a pulsation of the artery, and space a globule of blood. In eternity all the homes of the soul, the body, the palace, the city and the garden, are one; and the eternal community of men is also the real presence of a divine body, whose blood is the new wine created from the water of nature.