OPEN THE DOOR

Wikipedia Commons
Book of Urizen
Copy G, Plate 26

When I asked Larry which of Blake's pictures he liked best he selected this one without an explanation. His response to the picture was not rational but emotional and intuitive. I can now give a rational explanation to his reaction to the image.

Larry saw through the image to those who stand outside of the closed door. The pleading child and the howling dog are on the outside without a way to get in. To Larry and to Blake this was the plight of humanity; the door is not closed because we are locked out of Eden but because we fail to open it. Built into the mind of man is his Divine Humanity but it is up to the conscious man to open the door or gate and invite the expression of his spirit into his expanded mind.

The poignancy of this image to me is that in adolescence when individuals are re-accessing the assumptions of their childhood, they may close the door to a perception of the internal vision of the Divine. Once the door is closed there has to be a decisive action to reopen it. If the mind of the individual has been turned over to the reasoning faculty exclusively, and the intuition and imagination have been stifled, there is little probability that the door to spiritual experience will be reopened. 

But all is not lost. Some become disillusioned with a one-sided dependence on reason through seeing its failure to provide a balanced way of living. Some are given an opening into a fuller life through a spontaneous awakening of the spirit. Some quietly find the lost piece from their childhood by continuing to seek for it in beauty, truth and love. As Pilgrim learned in Pilgrim's Progress we already possess the key, we needn't wait for someone to give it to us.