Toward Gologonooza

Daniel Pinchbeck
10 min readMay 7, 2023

Liberating the human imagination through a Blakean revolution in the age of AI

“The Eternal Body of Man is the Imagination, that is, God himself… It manifests itself in his Works of Art (In Eternity All is Vision)…” - William Blake

To live by the imagination is Blake’s secret of life. The ‘gods’ of reason, feeling, inspiration and the physical senses are but aspects of that single life of Imagination, ‘the human existence itself’ which embraces all in unity. There is nothing outside the Imagination, which is immortal, eternal, and boundless…

He was a patriot of the inner worlds, of the England of the Imagination whose ‘golden builders’ he saw everywhere at work in the creation of Golgonooza, the city within the brain (golgos, skull), ‘the spiritual fourfold London eternal’.

— Kathleen Raine, Gologonooza, City of Imagination

A few days ago, I wrote about my anarchist vision for the future. Common Dreams journalist Tom Valovic, commenting on my utopian proposal for a no-ownership society, notes:

Unfortunately, there may be a considerable amount of “creative destruction” to be endured before we get to a point of having that sort of blank slate with which to have the luxury of envisioning alternatives. But I certainly don’t think that…

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Daniel Pinchbeck

Author of Breaking Open the Head, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, and When Plants Dream. I teach online seminars at www.theliminalinstitute.com