Illumination: the Secret Religion

William Blake, the Prophet of Energy

William Blake (1757- 1827) spent all but three years of his life in London. He never went to school. He said, "There is no use in education. I hold it wrong - it is the great Sin." He regarded the stultifying education of his time as more likely to damage intelligence than enhance it. Even today, much of schooling is concerned with churning out dutiful drones who will do the bidding of their Old World Order masters, and who have little initiative and creativity. It has all been sucked out of them, deemed unnecessary in a world where most people will end up doing tedious office jobs or menial tasks. You don't need to be smart to flip hamburgers, photocopy documents or read from a script in a call centre as you make 1,000 sales calls each day.

"Improvement makes strait roads," Blake said, "but the crooked roads without Improvement are roads of Genius." In other words, if you can escape the production line approach to education, being force-fed the "answers" by your tutors ("Improvers"), you are more likely to discover and unleash your own genius. Schoolchildren should be allowed to explore, make mistakes, experiment, rebel and find what truly engages their passion. They shouldn't be passive recipients of "Improvement". Such an education kills the possibility of genius. We need a new approach to education that is designed to release everyone's inner genius as far as possible. Who would object to such an education? - only the Old World Order who seek conformity and obedience. They have no need of clever people pouring out of schools, people who might pose a serious challenge to their dominance.

Blake not only avoided school, he never attended church either. He found organised religion repellent, as all creative people do. He always championed the cause of the persecuted, and it was often the Church, in whatever form, doing the persecuting. All of his life, he railed against tyrants, whether religious, royal or military.

Blake was regarded as stubborn, proud and argumentative. He was uninterested in money and worldly success, yet he was extremely industrious and conscientious, always seeking to be his own master and the servant of no man. His relationship with clients who commissioned work from him was often strained. He was a zealous Republican (he despised monarchy), and supported the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, even wearing the red Phrygian cap of the revolutionaries. He would certainly have agreed with Thomas Jefferson's assessment: "The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind."

A fiercely independent man (although he had a devoted wife), Blake spent most of his adult life in near poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Blake was a friend of Thomas Paine and other political radicals such as Joseph Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. He warned Paine to flee the country when King George III wanted to take action against Paine for "wicked and seditious writings". The others were forced underground. Blake adopted an increasingly opaque and obscure style to forestall being arrested for sedition.

Blake didn't tolerate bullies. In 1803, he was involved in a fight with a soldier who had intruded into his garden. He was charged with assault and uttering treasonable statements against the King (he apparently said, "Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves."). Miraculously, Blake was acquitted.

He was a supremely anti-establishment figure who hated all authority figures. (He also, it has to be admitted, had a difficult relationship with the leadership of the Illuminati. He was not a regular participant at Illuminati meetings and came to believe that his visionary gift was so strong that he did not need anyone's help to harness it.)

Blake claimed to enjoy frequent contact with higher states of consciousness, and he saw himself as a channel for higher, angelic powers. He often said that much of his poetry was dictated (just as Mohammed imagined that the Koran was dictated to him by the Archangel Gabriel). He claimed he was regularly visited by spirits and angels: "I am under the direction of messengers from heaven." He considered most humans blind in a spiritual sense: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

Blake was highly influenced by the mystical writings of Jakob Boehme, Emanuel Swedenborg, Paracelsus, Fludd, Agrippa, the Neo-Platonists and the Western Esoteric tradition. Despite his lack of schooling, he was a keen reader, particularly in all matters esoteric.

He had a terror of people being treated as mechanisms and automatons: clockwork men and women guided by a clockwork God such as the one conceived by Isaac Newton. He hated the increasingly prevalent philosophy of materialism (that is now entirely triumphant in scientific circles), which he symbolised as dense and dark water in which humanity was drowning. He felt humanity was increasingly in bondage to hyper-rationalism, to the inflexible Newtonian laws of the universe. Human beings seemed to be enslaved by a narrow ego that was no longer capable of tuning into a higher spiritual reality.

This world, increasingly, is the grave of the universe, where the vast majority of its denizens are spiritually dead. Humanity has betrayed its divine potential. It has turned away from the stars and imprisoned itself in the gutters of materialism and egotism. We are tuned to the wrong channel.

How many humans could say, as Blake did:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand,

And heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake's Religion

Blake created an enormous religion of bewildering symbolism and complexity that evolved over several decades, with many of the meanings of certain symbols and characters changing over time. Therefore it is impossible to give anything other than a flavour of Blake's religion. To do it justice would require an entire book.

In the early versions of his religion, Blake contrasted Reason (personified by a character called Urizen) with Imagination and Energy. (Imagination was personified by a character called Los. Note that Los is "Sol" backwards, and hence Los is a solar deity, a god of light. Orc, Los's son, is the embodiment of creative passion and energy. Blake describes him as a "Lover of Wild Rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law". Blake by no means judges these as intrinsically negative qualities; quite the reverse.)

Urizen is always depicted as a ferocious, bearded old man, symbolic of both the authoritarian father and the dictatorial "Yahweh" style of God. He is the unfeeling creator of systems and laws, opposed by the "God Within", the ruler of the human soul. He is a blind tyrant, unhappy, self-deluded, misguided by his reason. His obsession with order, rules, systems, moral codes, commandments - the whole repressive machinery of "Thou Shalt Not" - leads to a world groaning under his tyranny, a "sickly charnel house".

Urizen writes a book of laws - The Book of Brass - and imposes his rules upon the whole of creation. He encloses himself in a "dark globe", this monstrous king of the world - Rex Mundi. "Nature is the work of the devil," Blake said.

Urizen is hyper-rational, obsessed with rules, laws, and complex scientific systems. He creates the material world - "a wide world of solid obstruction" - in which the divine spark is held prisoner. He is not straightforwardly evil. Rather he is imbalanced, deluded, too self-regarding. He's a control freak, terrified of ever letting go. He wishes to involve himself with every detail of his creation, and shape and direct the lives of everyone within his world. He is as trapped in his world as any of his creations. His deluded nature has led him to the conclusion that he is the Supreme Being of the universe. He is blind to the existence of the True God.

Urizen caused to come into being a number of prophets and holy scriptures that identified him as the Creator, the source of all power, life, knowledge and morality. Through them, he set down the repressive laws of religions such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Wherever they went, his prophets preached the message of Thou Shalt Not. They were stern, bearded, angry, vengeful men: women-haters, sex-haters, pleasure-haters, determined to control everyone and make them conform to rigid systems of rules and laws. They hated freedom, "heresy", independence of thought, those who refused to bow down to them and their God.

Blake loathed organised religion, regarding the Judaeo-Christian Bible as infernal and diabolical. Moral law was tyrannous, he thought. He equally distrusted science, and the mechanical, clockwork universe described by Newton that seemed to eliminate the scope for human freedom. Between the two, he saw them as destroying human liberty and creativity, stifling the imagination, obstructing the road to the True God. He characterised mainstream religion and science as "mind-forged manacles". We had to transcend them if we wanted to know the True God. This is a highly Gnostic vision of the world, with Urizen as the Demiurge.

Blake, like Nietzsche decades later, saw Christianity as attempting to exterminate passion, natural desires, and all earthly pleasures. Everything joyful was forbidden. Sex was for procreation alone, never for enjoyment. Pleasure itself came to be regarded as "evil". Look at the Puritans, the Amish, the Orthodox Jews, the Islamic women in burqas: all the black-dressed, dreary people who hate life.

Blake saw energy as the counterpoint to sterile rationality. "Energy is eternal delight," he said. Energy was dynamic, creative, chaotic, bringing change and innovation. It powered the world, fueled desire and ambition, gave humanity the longing for the divine. Without energy there would be nothing but heavy, lifeless, immobile matter - a static, stagnant, dead universe.

Christianity, in a sense, was trying to kill energy. It wanted people to be kneeling in prayer all the time, heads bowed, denying themselves every pleasure after which they secretly lusted. Energy, conversely, is good, positive, unrestrained. Certainly, it has a dark aspect that can bring disaster in its wake - war, greed, hate, selfishness - but without it humanity has no glory, no lust for life.

Blake, like Jung a century later, was certain that opposites ("contraries" as Blake called them) had to be brought into balance, into a healthy synthesis (of thesis and antithesis) as part of a dialectical process. Blake said, ""Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.""

If you emphasised one quality at the expense of another, it always led to trouble, to imbalance, and became a source of psychological neurosis and even psychosis. Mainstream religions, especially the Abrahamic faiths with their insistence on a strict, inhuman morality, are a breeding ground for disturbed people. The Hindu caste system breeds mental illness, as does Buddhism with its bizarre doctrine of "desire is suffering". As Blake said, "Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained." Buddhism certainly didn't help Tiger Woods.

"Sin for Salvation" was the Illuminati's antidote to the obsessive pursuit of an illusory moral perfection. The idea of being sinless has never been anything but the surest way to guarantee sin. Human beings must enjoy themselves. What would life be like if it contained no pleasure? Would it be worth living?

In "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", Blake argued that opposites were essential to the human condition and for allowing people to progress from innocence to experience, ignorance to knowledge.

Blake regarded Christianity as leading to a stagnant, putrid, poisonous way of life, bereft of energy. Reason - "moderation" - caused people to stop before they had reached their limits. But those who want to live life to the full must test their boundaries, discover what is too much. Again, this is a similar teaching to "Sin for Salvation".

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.

You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

The Socratic equation reason = virtue = happiness is utterly rejected by Blake. He was a champion of passion and desire, and thus he accepted the destruction they could bring in their wake. The idea of killing passion, embraced by so many religions, can never work. The real issue is how best to constructively harness passion.

Contrary to the usual science versus faith debate, Blake said that the two are on the same side. Science, the gospel of materialism, strips humanity of dignity and reduces the human condition to an epiphenomon of atomic interactions. Science binds humanity to the laws of Nature. Faith strips humanity of dignity by reducing the human condition to one of enslavement to an egomaniac tyrant who calls himself "God" and craves worship, glorification, and slavish obedience. This monster demands submission. The name of one of his main religions - Islam - actually means "submission". Faith binds humanity to the words of holy books and holy prophets.

Blake rebelled against both visions. He thought the Enlightenment, although it had initially served the cause of liberty, had turned into a dictatorship where inflexible, dogmatic Reason had simply replaced the inflexible, dogmatic Demiurge of the Bible. (In the present day, Richard Dawkins is often accused of being as intolerant and authoritarian as the religions he opposes. Contrast his drab, desiccated atheism with that of Nietzsche, whose Godless vision elevated humanity to the celestial plain if they had the strength and desire to get there, if they had the courage to turn themselves into gods.) Blake was an advocate of mystical and artistic gnosis, of free-thinking, of personal rather than organised religion, of expanding the mind, allowing your inner energy to take you to astonishing, wondrous destinations forbidden by science and faith.

The House of Death

Blake's Later Religion

The "Divine Man", the primordial being from whom all humans are descended, is called Albion in Blake's mythology. He falls into a deathly sleep in which nightmarish events transpire: the "Fall". Albion has a four-fold nature, each part being called a Zoa (Greek for "living one"), and treated as if it were a separate living being. Blake's central theme is that Albion's four faculties, once divided, war against each other to establish their power over the others. They never cooperate, never appreciate each other and never complement each other. Only when they do will Albion be truly whole and divine. (The task of humanity, like that of Albion, is to harmonise its conflicting parts that currently work against each other.)

Albion's four Zoas are:

1)   Tharmas: representing instinct and strength.
2)   Urizen: representing reason and law.
3)   Luvah: representing love, passion and emotive faculties.
4)   Urthona (also known as Los): representing inspiration and the imagination.

(Note the similarity to Jung's four personality categories of Thinking, Feeling, Intuition and Sensing.)

Each Zoa has a negative counterpart (akin to Jung's concept of the shadow), sons, daughters, and an earthly avatar. Each Zoa also has a female "emanation" that has separated from the male, as Eve separated from Adam:

1)   The motherly Enion is an emanation from Tharmas.
2)   The heavenly Ahania is an emanation from Urizen.
3)   The seductive Vala is an emanation from Luvah.
4)   The musical Enitharmon is an emanation from Los.

The mission of the emanations is to reunite with their male halves, thus bringing the female and male aspects into balance and wholeness (similar to Jung's ideas concerning the "anima" and "animus").

While Albion is in his dormant, passive state, one of his aspects - Urizen - becomes dominant. Only Urthona/Los retains any of Albion's divine nature.

The "Fall", for Blake, was an internal, psychological matter, not an external event. Satan/Urizen/the Demiurge is to be equated with Selfhood and Ego while the God Within is the Self/Imago Dei (in Jung's terminology).

"All deities reside in the human breast," Blake said.

At the end of Blake's mythology, Urizen is redeemed and balance is restored to Albion. He is now able to awaken from his sleep of death because all of the Zoas are fulfilling their proper, healthy roles. As with Jung, Blake thought that it was essential for all of the different aspects of our personality to be brought into harmony. If you are overly rational, you should cultivate your feeling side. If you are overly intuitive, you should take more time to physically sense the world around you. If you are obsessed with sins, rules and commandments, you should realise you're being controlled and try to free yourself, or you will become a dangerous religious fanatic (with which the world is already vastly overpopulated).

"To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes

Of man Inwards, into the worlds of thought, into Eternity."

In the preface of his epic poem Milton, Blake quotes the Book of Numbers: "Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets." This is one of the few wise Biblical statements. We suffer because of the prominence given to a handful of prophets. If everyone were a prophet, no single prophet would be treated as a demi-god (as Mohammed is, for example). We all need to become prophets. We all need to be the holy men and women of our own religions. And then religious fanaticism will perish. Who would object? - only those who wish to control us with their religion.

The City of Imagination

In Blake's mythology, Golgonooza was Los's city of Art and Imagination, a divine city that stood between heaven and earth, a veritable New Jerusalem. All imaginative and creative acts (which are eternal in nature) peformed by humanity help to build this fabulous city, which is permanently under construction and will only be completed at the end of time. The city is outside time, space and nature and, when it's finally finished, the scaffolding will be knocked away, and humanity will then live there in paradise, in this city of God, this heaven. It is the repository of all of culture and civilisation. Every artistic contribution by any human being, no matter if they have been ignored, overlooked, and unrecognised in their own lifetime, is ever spurned in Golgonooza. Nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Everything is prized and treasured. All of human creativity and imagination is here. Every precious creative act is preserved and burnished until it's sparkling like diamond. All the good humanity has done is here, together with all of humanity's best intentions and highest, noblest aspirations. All that went unfinished on earth is gloriously completed in this celestial city. Every dream is realised.

Urizen's old Jerusalem on earth, riven with conflict and division, is the anti-Golgonooza where all great hopes come to grief.

Golgonooza brings about a transformation of humanity through art and imagination. It is the city for all creative, meritocratic people. Isn't it time for humanity to start building a real Golgonooza here and now?

The Illuminati have always aimed to be the architects of Golgonooza, where the great creativity and imagination of humanity can finally be released. The Old World Order will have no part to play in this city of transcendent imagination. They will be banished to old Jerusalem where they belong: the benighted people, the damned, the accursed.

William Blake's most prominent art works can be viewed here:

http://www.william-blake.org/

A glossary of his religious terms can be found here:

http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/gloss.htm

"He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only."

Feedback

William Blake insisted that he had regular conscious encounters with higher powers. For most people, dreams are where they make contact of this nature.

Several people have contacted us recently, with interesting stories to relate.

"CJ" said:

"After reading the recent article on Dream Gnosis, I felt an urge to write about an experience I had that drastically changed the way I view the world.

"After several years of practicing meditation and learning to lucid dream on occasion, I fell asleep one night and had a profound experience. Before losing consciousness, I had attempted to induce an astral projection and failed (I had never before been able to move from being awake to a dream state without a break in consciousness). I fell asleep and then awoke to consciousness in a dream state.

"I found myself on the couch in my living room where I had fallen asleep, only I couldn't move. I was fearful for a second but managed to calm down and assess the dream. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched a glass of water rise from the coffee table and float over my head. The glass upended and poured the water over my head. This startled me a little, but after it was over I felt a sense of danger coming from my kitchen. I looked to the doorway leading to the kitchen and found myself looking at a human shape. This shape had the same dimensions as I do, same bald head and height, only the shape was complete darkness. I was looking at a double of myself made of light-drinking blackness. I stared at the shape for a few moments, then it dissolved. I woke up immediately after, vibrating from head to toe.

"It was then I experienced my first conscious shift from waking to dreaming. In the dream state, feeling elated, I wandered outside and down the street, finally entering a large house for no particular reason. In this house I saw a woman who shone with an inner light. We walked toward each other and when we were close she said, "What is the secret?" I responded by saying, "Love. All we need is Love." She smiled and touched my shoulder and I felt an indescribable bliss. She walked away and I continued on towards a large staircase leading upwards. I climbed several steps but was smothered by darkness and assaulted by what I can only describe as flying monkeys, like the creatures in The Wizard of Oz. I then awoke and nothing has ever been the same in my eyes.

"To this day, that event has been the most powerful in terms of changing how I see things."

Our Response: Your dream has many archetypal elements. First of all you encounter your dark double - your shadow. You overcome it by refusing to flee from it. It then dissolves, allowing you to move to a higher level. You wander into a large house and encounter a woman shining with an inner light. She is both an anima figure and an image of the Higher Self. Like the keeper of the Holy Grail, she asks you a Grail Question. You give a good answer, but not the whole answer: you have not yet attained gnosis. She touches you reassuringly to give you encouragement and you feel blissful, but you then proceed to the next stage (symbolised by the staircase) too swiftly. You try to ascend, but you are not yet ready and your progress is thwarted by new shadow figures: the flying monkeys. They beat you back and you wake up.

Illumination teaches that there are several stages like this. Eventually, when you achieve gnosis, you will have overcome every obstacle, resolved all of your shadow elements, followed all of your guides upwards to the Higher Self, and, finally, attained complete knowledge of yourself, the nature of existence and of the True God.

"LF" said:

"When I was four years old, I had two experiences, one while awake and another in a dream that I remember today as though it just happened. Both experiences were within a few days of each other - the time between them is not very clear to me now. Firstly, I was in my yard. No one was there with me at the time. I looked up to the sky and saw what appeared to be a vortex of some kind in the clouds. Suddenly, I had this overwhelming sense of sadness and desperation. I remember thinking - I want to go home. I cannot do this. It's going to be too hard. I fell to the ground with grief. I was crying so loudly, my mother ran out of the house to see what had happened. I could not explain to her what I saw or felt. How could a four year old mind understand or convey that to someone else? All the rest of that day, I remember observing my mother and anyone else that was around me, and I could feel what they felt, and I felt so sorry for them.

"Within the next couple of days, I had a dream, very vivid and colorful (unlike most dreams). I was out in the country, walking up a steep hill. The sun was beginning to set. I was terrified of the dark, so I started feeling afraid because it would soon be night and I was all alone. There was a clearing to the right, with a white building, a church of some kind, but completely dark inside. I went up the steps and entered the church. Inside, I saw a luminous male figure in a long white robe. He was light! He told me not to be afraid, that he would always be with me, and then he told me to look into his eyes, which I did. He asked me what it was that I saw in his eyes and my response was - myself. At that moment there was a tremendous light that engulfed everything. The walls of this church fell away. End of dream.

"Since that moment, I felt that I had something special to do here. I do not mean in any way that I feel I am special. It is a soul knowing. I don't know how to describe it any better than that."

Our Response: These are remarkable experiences for a four-year-old. They are the same type of thing that happened to William Blake regularly. Imagine how special Blake must have felt, yet though he is now recognised as a genius, he was practically ignored in his own lifetime. So were other geniuses such as Nietzsche, Vincent van Gogh and Franz Kafka. Schopenhauer was an old man before his genius was acknowledged. Many of the greatest artists and thinkers endure a similar fate.

But Golgonooza never forgets.

"WOJ" contacted us with an intriguing message:

"XXX was sent a very strong message last night while she slept. She was viewing a room: a temple that had panels of gold all around the walls. There was an object in the centre of the room on a mahogony-coloured stand with symbols on it in three lines at the top, middle and bottom. Connected to the stand was a dark metal crescent moon facing upwards and on it sat a glass orb filled with a purple, pink and blue substance. The room was guarded by knights who wore Corinthians helmets. They also wore full plate metal. On the chest was a red banner. Swords were sheathed by their sides. One hand was left free while the other gripped the sword's hilt.

"Something came out of the orb: a hand. The orb showed the future and was not evil, but the hand knocked out all of the knights and killed them, then came to XXX and said, "You are next." At that moment, I was sitting downstairs and I heard a thud coming from her room. XXX was then physically jumped on by an entity (on her stomach). She cast the symbol of the goddess in her mind and the being, which definitely had evil intent, lost its grip and she awoke.

"She went to the bathroom as she was convinced she had wet herself and was in pain from being landed on. She had not wet herself.

"I have a clear image of the room, and whether you respond or not does not matter to me, but be warned that if you know of the location in which that room sits and the knights that guard the object, please advise caution to the knights. I intend to remote view it tonight and split my chakras and cast the symbol of the goddess in that room. By the way, I have since learnt that long ago I was in an order in the Italian lands. I wore a black hooded robe.

"This message is intended for the man with the dark brown hair of slim build who has an extremely intelligent mind, the one who is fond of solving and creating problems on a cryptic level. I can also see him writing, although I haven't attempted to tune in yet and do not intend to as it's wrong to pry without being invited.

"My family are very strong in ability, so please heed this message. I plan to banish this entity. As you are probably aware, the children of the true Celtic bloodlines in this generation are now much stronger than their parents. My path is different now yet my mission is a very similar one to the one I had before. We do not wish to see the knights fall. We do not wish anyone to fall who is from the light. XXX does not know anything about the Knights Templar and yet the image she drew was of a Templar.

"XXX was in a bakery yesterday, and she clearly heard someone say, 'You fucking bitch,' but no one was there. XXX sensed she was in danger. Seconds later a woman in a mac walked into the bakery on her mobile phone and obviously very angry. She said to whomever she was speaking, 'You fucking bitch,' in exactly the same voice. Then she walked straight into XXX, almost knocking her over.

Good luck, wishing you good intent.

In truth and light."

Our Response. We were greatly intrigued by this message because there are a number of details concerning which it was highly accurate. We will not comment on what those were.

During the Cold War, the KGB and the CIA experimented with "remote viewing" and allegedly achieved some success, though the results were too inconsistent to be useful and these programmes were eventually closed down.