Milton’s Satan and the Fall of the Left Hemisphere, by Jordan Peterson

Totalitarianism and the Urizenic Mind

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Milton wrote Paradise Lost just before the rise of the nation states, and Milton also had the intuition that there was something wrong with rationality, and he identified rationality with the mythology of Satan. 

In the mythology of Satan, Satan was represented as the highest angel in God’s heavenly kingdom – so you can think about that as the highest psychological function, who had rebelled against God and then was cast into Hell. 

His hypothesis was this: Evil was the force that believes that its knowledge of the world is complete. And that it can do without the transcendent. And as soon as it makes that claim, it instantly exists in a place that’s indistinguishable from hell.  [“In Hell all is Self Righteousness” – Blake. As McGilchrist notes in his fascinating gloss on Blake, “He who sees the Infinite (looks outward to the ever-becoming with the right hemisphere) in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only [looks at the self-defined world brought into being by the left hemisphere] sees himself only (the left hemisphere is self-reflexive)”]. And it could get out merely by admitting its Error, and it will never do that.

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‘For Empire is no more’: Blake’s America, by Allen Ginsberg

Countering the Beast and the Whore: Revolution as Revelation

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In February 1979, the great American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg gave a series of remarkable lectures on the prophetic books of William Blake, providing teachings and commentary on their meaning. They were delivered to the students at the Naropa Institute (Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado.

This is an edited version of his lectures on Blake’s prophetic work America a Prophecy, which explores themes of empire, liberation, terror, the role of prophetic anger, and the centrality of imagination in the struggle to envision and to realise a better world.

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From Hell: Alan Moore and William Blake, by E.M. Notenboom 

Psychogeography: Occult London and the City as Psyche

The Ghost of a Flea c.1819-20 William Blake 1757-1827 Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N05889

Milton, Blake and Moore are philosophical wanderers who share a tendency to connect history, spirituality, and place in their works through philosophers of the past. They journey horizontally through urban, rural, or spiritual locations and at the same time delve vertically through history. As this article will suggest, their legacy is a transformation of familiar landscapes.

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Blake, Nietzsche, and the Death of God, by Jenny Hollander

How Blake Views The Sacred ‘Fall’ Of Judeo-Christianity As Triggering A Sacrilegious ‘Fall Of Man’

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To make use of the term ‘fall of man’ is perhaps ironic; it is associated with a Miltonic, Judeo-Christian ‘fall’, which has a semantic implication of the sort against which Nietzsche battles when he begs for the ‘death of God’ to be absorbed into society’s reasoning. The sacred theological ‘fall’ of man from the faultless prelapsarian Eden to the fallible realism of Earth is far from how Blake, and indeed Nietzsche, understands man’s sacrilegious ‘fall’ to his present state.

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Left Brain Angels and Right Brain Gods, by Rod Tweedy

The Divided Brain and Religion

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Which is Yours?

Harvard neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, commenting on the subtle but significant differences between how each hemisphere of our brain understands and engages with the world, observed that “the two halves of my brain don’t just perceive and think in different ways at a neurological level, but they demonstrate very different values based upon the types of information they perceive, and thus exhibit very different personalities” (My Stroke of Insight).

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