John Dunn

In thrall to Urizen

Sunday, 3 December 2023 at 21:13

In thrall to Urizen

William Blake's Urizen leads the congregation

The first steps to freedom will emerge from reflected thought’s adherence to the ‘truth’ of the other, the mineral ‘appearing’

Love is the awakener to freedom, which is the Beginning. The cosmic story, which is the metaphor for the individual’s story has Love as its Beginning. Love is the Originatory Principle, the founding principle beyond which there is not even a metaphorical explanation. Love has no explanation. In the words of the correct translation of John 1 ‘In the Beginning is Love.

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Until there is Love we live rhetorically, in thrall to Urizen, and worship at every moment in the 'Synagogue of Satan’.

Disenchantment is the necessary precursor to freedom. This applies at an individual and the wider human level. There is no freedom without awareness of error. The move towards the freedom that not even the angels possess has to occur in a world of error, where freedom can only ever be ‘rhetorical’, where to live ‘rhetorically’ is to be subject to the conventions of social life, rather than being in full possession of oneself

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If the pure unheeded relation with the Logos controlled thinking, we would completely realise truth; we would not know error, nor consequently evil, but we would not be free. Such is the fate of the angels. Each of us would be an impeccable spiritual automaton, whose imperfect and distorted counterparts are the blind adherents to faith, holding us to laws, religious and scientific, that oppose and block the unseen impulse of the Logos on Earth.

The first steps to freedom will emerge from reflected thought’s adherence to the ‘truth’ of the other, the mineral ‘appearing’, which separates subject from object, thought from life, man from God and man from himself. Before Love is known, man must take his seat amidst whole congregations in Urizen's 'Synagogue of Satan'.

© John Dunn.

Logos coterminous with 'I' 



Saturday, 2 December 2023 at 21:50

As I continue to refine my thinking prior to publication, I find that I have once more arrived at what might be described as the ultimate question. Do I believe there is a God? To mangle the words of Jung, my current thinking is that I not only believe, but I know there is a god. What I do not know is what form that god takes. God is first and foremost a mystery, the mystery. It is in this sense of mystery that I can say that God is Love and the Beginning.

Below I wrestle with the idea that God, being coterminous with the Logos, is also coterminous with the ‘I’. This is not the animal ‘I’, the sub-human‘I’, it is the fully human ‘I’, one that has had an encounter with Love. Is such an ‘I’ the Logos incarnate, or is it the ‘I’ incarnate as the Logos? And is this belief or atheism? The refinement of the work seems never to end, but end it must.

Logos coterminous with 'I' 



The cosmic creation story is the metaphor for the individual’s shedding of dead thought, the acquirement of living thought, and the discovery of the ‘I’; the common denominator between the individual and cosmic stories being Love.



The Creation is our purpose, which is to recover the content of ‘living thought’ at its inception, before it is almost immediately degraded into ‘fallen thought’, or ‘reflected thought’ i.e. thought reflected back to us as though it represented an external reality with an external existence inherent to it.

 To live through the eyes of reflected thought is to live before the Beginning, to live before the Creation, to be beholden to Ananke and worship Urizen; it is to exist before Love.



It is the violation by Love, in the Creation, in the Beginning, that awakens us to the Logos within ourselves, enabling us to grasp the content of ‘living thought’, which brings with it the transformative and shaping force of the Logos. The 'I' is at last inserted into the process of thinking.

 The corollary of this is that in normal everyday accepted modes of thought the 'I' is absent. The connection to ‘living thought’, before it falls, is not only a connection to the Logos, but also to the ‘I'. This connection to the Logos and the 'I' is an encounter with the ‘source of life’. The Logos and the ‘I’ are coterminous at this point. The Logos is incarnated in the ‘I’.



So the earlier statement that ‘our thoughts are not our own’, might be restated as our thoughts are from the ‘I’, which has broken free of the normal everyday accepted modes of thought, becoming instead the ‘I’ which perceives thoughts at their originatory and uncontaminated source, whereas before it only saw the reflected ‘reality’ of Ananke.

 This leaves the question: is the uncontaminated source the Logos or the ‘I’ or both?


© John Dunn.

Love cleanses the doors of perception

Friday, 1 December 2023 at 21:14

Love cleanses the doors of perception

Liberation from fallen thought, the illusory medium of false ‘reality’ in which most of us spend our lives; where is it to be found? If living in a falsely perceived medium is no life, in other words, death, where is the source of resurrection? There is one source and that is Love, and Love is God. Many people experience a glimmer of the life beyond death, but it is usually snuffed out, often by Urizen, the demiurge of the false ‘reality’, and his followers. Union with the Divine seems impossible, because there is no identity between being and thinking.

The conditions must exist for the Logos to incarnate, but it does not have any other arouser and awakener than Love. Once Love is found, the Logos is found. The Logos virginally fertilises the soul. This moment coincides with the Creation. The presence of the Logos is realised because it is perceived. The doors of perception are opened. ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed,’ William Blake wrote, ‘everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.’

Love cleanses the doors of perception… for the elect that is. The rest, the innocents, are condemned to an existence in Beulah, from where rises constantly the nauseating refrain ‘we just want to be happy… we just want to be happy’. The followers of Urizen are only too happy to sell the delusional means to happiness… through loans with interest.

The murderers of Love contaminated the doors of perception, and continue to do so. The followers of Ananke, the worshippers of Urizen, the Pharisees of every age, would have the struggle for life cease. Their goal? A world of undifferentiated oneness, forever, undisturbed and inevitable. When the struggle for life ceases, when Love dies without resurrection, all is lost.

They that dwelleth without love, what are they?

The anti-Love; the masonry of hate; the children of Urizen.
Root them out, pleads Eros to the Innocents, root them out.
(From ‘Children of Urizen’, The Mythology)

Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the synagogue of Satan, calling the Prince of this World ‘God’
(From Selections from ‘Jerusalem’ ‘To the Deists’, William Blake)

© John Dunn.