John Dunn

In thrall to Urizen

Sunday, 18 February 2024 at 10:31

Trapped in the nets of William Blake's Urizen 



In thrall to Urizen

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.’



Until there is Love you 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. Your 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 yourself



If the pure unheeded relation with the Logos controlled thinking, you would completely realise truth; you would not know error, nor consequently evil, but you would not be free. Such is the fate of the angels. Each of you 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.

Your 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, you must take you seat amidst whole congregations in Urizen's 'Synagogue of Satan'.

© John Dunn.

Eros warns, their quest is to impose a Loveless life upon you!

Saturday, 17 February 2024 at 10:51

William Blake's Urizen and the nets of debt

Eros warns, their quest is to impose a Loveless life upon you!

Satan fell into the objectivised world, to become god of this world, and Adamand Eve and their issue worshipped Satan as the god Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter. And the children of Urizen led you into Beulah with the promise of happiness to come, into the land of false innocence, that is innocence devoid of Love, from which arises the constant and nauseating refrain… “we just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…”

In a world devoid of Love, the children of Urizen objectify god, which is to say they idolise their god. Their god is an all-knowing god who controls the affairs of man from across a divide, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the ‘Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.



And you, deluded innocents of Beulah, have carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the children of Urizen, which makes you complicit in their Devil Worship.

Halliwell Sutcliffe: a brief overview

Friday, 16 February 2024 at 10:50

Halliwell Sutcliffe and his wife, Mabel

Halliwell Sutcliffe: a brief overview*

Halliwell Sutcliffe, born in Thackley near Bradford in 1870 and died in Linton-in-Craven in 1832, was an author of popular novels. Most of them are historical romances set in the Yorkshire Dales and the moors around Haworth, and many of them romanticise the Stuarts, especially Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Sutcliffe’s father was headmaster of Bingley Grammar School from 1873 to 1901, and Sutcliffe was educated there and at King’s College, Cambridge. In 1904 he married Mabel Cottrell of Twickenham, and they lived first at Embsay near Skipton, where their elder son Derek was born in 1905. After eighteen months in Embsay, they moved to Linton on the banks of the Wharfe, and here their younger son Noel was born in 1906. Their house was called Troutbeck, but about 1913 Sutcliffe renamed it White Abbey, believing that it had once been a grange of Fountains Abbey. It was here that Halliwell Sutcliffe died in January 1932, aged 61. Mabel Sutcliffe stayed in the house until 1950, when she moved to London to live with her unmarried sisters. She died in London in 1960, aged 93.

*Text building towards a new Halliwell Sutcliffe blog that I hope to start once content is sufficient.

© John Dunn.

Great Chishill Windmill

Thursday, 15 February 2024 at 21:41

My next YouTube video production is based upon a motorcycle excursion, beneath lovely summer skies, to the Cambridgeshire village of Duxford. However, on the way I was waylaid by the sight of the Great Chishill Windmill as I climbed the chalk escarpment to the Cambridgeshire Hills. What follow are the notes to a forthcoming commentary that cover this windmill part of the journey. In the meantime, please see the other videos on my YouTube Channel.

Great Chishill Windmill

I’m on the B1039 road out of Barley in Cambridgeshire.

I’m on my way to Duxford village, but can’t help but be impressed by the windmill up ahead.

I just have to stop.

This is the Great Chishill Windmill. Built on the site of earlier mills, it’s one of only seven open trestle postmills in the UK.

This is the only one fitted with a fan tail for automatic turning to wind.

Old photographs to be inserted at this point.
1892 Heyday of windmilling
1916 WW1 years
1936 Mill at work
1958 Mill after closure (with a distinct tilt to the right)
1965 Year before restoration

The first surviving record of a mill here is from 1592.

This mill was built in 1819 using timbers from an earlier mill of 1726.

It was last worked in 1951.

It’s an amazing example of rural engineering and is scheduled, quite rightly as an historic monument.

OK Better get on…

I’m now climbing the chalk escarpment to Great Chishill village which is the highest land in Cambridgeshire. A couple of videos ago some of you will have seen I was at the lowest point in Cambridgeshire.

These chalk hills extend via the Chilterns, to the North and South Downs in the South and, to the Lincolnshire and Yorkshire Wolds in the North.

© John Dunn.

Your thought is fallen thought

Wednesday, 14 February 2024 at 21:07

William Blake depicts Urizen, who would ensnare you in his nets

Your thought is fallen thought

Until your thought lives, it will remain the fallen thought of the passive onlooker. Your mind will remain wedded to an apparent external material ‘reality’, as though the latter had its own internal and self-projected existence. Your fallen thought is the state before the Beginning, an interminable equilibrium, an undifferentiated Oneness, in short Ananke’s realm prior to the penetration of Love.

Your fallen thought has taken on a life of its own, believing itself to be a representation of a pre-existing world of things and people, as though existence lay outside of thought, rather than shaped by it. The medium of fallen thought, in which you exist and have your being, is the realm ruled over by Urizen. Encouraged by the children of Urizen, you are dragged down into the passivity of Beulah, where is heard constantly the nauseating refrain - ‘We just want to be happy… we just want to be happy…’



Until liberated, you will suffer and rejoice illusorily, because the Logos content of each experience is lost. You may see a tantalising shadow of such liberation in human love, which is always imperfect. Love, the Originatory Principle, is the true celestial content of human love. All human love unknowingly moves from its celestial content. Most will never encounter love, but even those who do are pulled away from the hope of realising it, because within the sphere of the psyche it endures the enchantment of the appearing. Assumed as reality through reflected consciousness, the appearing generates irresistible desire, the continuous greed for the abstract and ephemeral; and the children of Urizen are only too ready to lend you the means of satiating your greed.

Overcome fallen thought, embrace the uncorrupted source of living thinking, which reveals itself in the creative perpetuity of the Beginning. Only in this way will Love conquer evil, for what is Love but the Logos, and Love is God.

…And yet…, I hear you ask, this achievement is dependent upon the awakening of the soul through the interjection of Love, the continuation of the first Creation in perpetuity. Where Love interjects there is joy and gladness now and forever, for Love never ends. But what of the unloved and never-loved, what is their fate?

You may experience a glimmer of the life beyond death, but it is usually snuffed out, because union with the Divine is impossible where 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 and the doors of perception are opened. ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed,’ William Blake told us, ‘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, repeating 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 innocents fall to the level of their oppressors to be conditioned by corporeality as human-animal, and have no value higher than any other aspect of nature. Their sub-human existence is bound up with nature, one with it, immersed in it and subject to its determinations and worth nought. Only with living thinking will they move beyond the animal to the beyond-human dimension, or to the Logos of the Creation, to achieve independence from the reflected thought of animal corporeality. The Logos would incarnate, but first there must be love. Who would prevent this? Who crucified Love and continue to do so? You know the perpetrators of evil in your midst.

The children 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. The life and death struggle could not be more stark: Love versus evil.

© John Dunn.

The great blasphemy

Tuesday, 13 February 2024 at 10:49

Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, Part of the Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, by William Blake

The great blasphemy

Your day-to-day lives are belief-ridden and idolatrous. Blasphemy is rife, before God, gods and religion come into it at all, whatsoever. Gods and demons are but metaphors for the more mundane or workaday scope for blasphemy, which happens in every moment of your lives. The truth is I only have metaphors to begin to explain to you such matters, until of course you come to what I have called the Originatory Principle, the point beyond which there is no recourse to metaphor, simply because there is nothing comparable to the mystery. It has one name, and you must take it or leave it, and that name is Love.

The side of the good lives in a state of perpetual Love. In contrast, the corrupted state is the pre-awakened state, a loveless state. On the one hand there is the Originatory Principle of Love. On the other there is the principle of Ananke, the feminine-demonic substance, the infinite and interminable cycle of oneness, entropic death, of which the representative to you is Urizen. There is good versus evil.

It is necessary to restore this conception of the good as being the justification and highest consecration of any hegemonic aspiration to power. What clouds the issue are the left-right politics of the Yaldabaoth civilisation and its claim for freedom to lie in a pluralist conception of the good. Left-right is the false bifurcation, whereas the real counter-poles are the Good versus the corrupted thinking of the children of Yaldabaoth.

To side of the good freedom is oneness with the Logos. The more the self realises its free being, the more it is identical to the Logos. To be more human is to be more like God. Oneness with the Logos is therefore your goal; but how do you attain this state of freedom? The spiritual practice of living thinking might well be the path to the Logos, but you will first need to attain the will to overcome corrupted thinking. Corrupted by the children of Yaldabaoth, ordinary thinking about the world is thought petrified, belief-ridden and idolatrous; and all this false thinking is cerebral and logical. It is the state of immersion into the One. It is the pre-awakened state, a loveless state. Corrupted thinking is conditioned by thinking bound to the senses, which only sense a reflected, pre-given‘reality’.

For thinking to connect to its source as an unsullied living thinking, you need to attain the will to end the great blasphemy and impose the good. However, you cannot recover such a will, except by taking it away from the demonic forces of Yaldabaoth. This demands of you an awakening, and that awakening needs an intervention in the form of Love.

© John Dunn.

Urizen fills the gap vacated by the Logos



Sunday, 11 February 2024 at 10:51

William Blake, Satan 



Urizen fills the gap vacated by the Logos



William Blake chose his words carefully. His famous metaphor, the Synagogue of Satan, was not only about a fallen state of mind, it was also about the evil force which holds men there.

The task of thinking is to incarnate the element of life that already lies within it and from which it alienates itself. What is that ‘element of life’? It is the source of the thinking by means of which you think. The ‘source’ is equated with the Logos. Thinking man is the incarnation of the Logos. This is not any old thinking, but only that thinking which is pure, unsullied and from the source, the source being the Logos. I have already stated that all creation and origin mythologies should be treated as metaphors for the individual experience. So, rather than ask: ‘What was there before the Beginning?’, it is better to ask, what was there before the pure and unsullied thinking from the source, i.e. the Logos? The answer to both questions is NOTHING, and 0=1.

If you bother to think at all you will often believe that you are connecting to something spiritual, but all you feel is a profound sense of nostalgia for something you think is lost and out of reach, a fantasy. The search for truth through the religion of your fathers turns into misplaced loyalty,or even a mind-numbing hobby. The impulses of asceticism and devotion in whatever form have been corrupted by the spiritual darkness of the corporal world, which leads you away from the Logos, not towards it. Your apparently devout and mystical feelings are false, and amount to a false religion. Satan’s Synagogue was William Blake’s name for the false religion.

Blake knew that 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. Blake called it a synagogue because its participants crucified Love, adhering instead pharisaically to a vengeful law:

Urizen called together the Synagogue of Satan in dire Sanhedrin
To judge the Lamb of God to death as a murderer and a robber. (Blake’s Jerusalem)

Blake did not see the Creator as an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controlled the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity Blake described rather as Urizen, the demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter. By implication, this made of the Bible's Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.

Christian religionism for Blake had carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the followers of Jehovah, which made it, essentially, Devil Worship. The demiurge fills the gap vacated by the Logos, for the Logos is not to be found amongst the crucifiers of Love, for God is Love. The devout and mystical feelings described above as false are for a god who is also false.

Only those in whom the Logos lives have the capacity for freedom from this bleak conditioning and animal-like existence, in thrall to Ananke.

He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ (1 John 4:16)

For those in whom Love dwelleth, the task of thinking is not to comprehend or intuit the Logos - an empty rhetorical undertaking, conceivable only on the basis of a false understanding of the Logos as an entity wholly apart, as Him ‘up there’, as Urizen. The task of thinking is to incarnate the element of life that already lies within thinking itself and from which it alienates itself, i.e. the element of suprasensory life from which it moves and without which it would not be, even when it thinks in error. The task of thinking is to realise its own intuitive nucleus, in which the Logos is present as an original force. The way to the Logos does not lie within feeling, but at the source of the thinking by means of which you think. There must be an awakening to Love, which is the Originatory Principle, in the Beginning, always.

© John Dunn.