John Dunn

Breaking out of closed systems



Tuesday, 17 October 2023 at 21:42

Breaking out of closed systems



Life has always something to do with breaking out of closed systems. The very act of birth is the physical act of breaking free - but life is more than this animal emergence. A closed system is an equilibrium of one sort or another that remains unviolated.



In my mythology, the realm of Ananke had to be violated for life to break free, just as an individual must be violated to attain life. All origin stories are at the service of the individual experience. Breaking out of a closed system is a coming to consciousness. It is the emergence of Mind. I am equating life therefore to something that is uniquely human; to humanness.



The emergence of life as consciousness and mind has been argued for before on an evolutionary basis. For example, Rudolf Steiner argued that only the mind of man can continue and complete the evolutionary purposes of God. There was also Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the noosphere, in which the sphere of nous, i.e. of mind, is an evolutionary stage higher than the biosphere, i.e. the world of minerals, plants and animals; but yet again, Vernadsky placed the emergence of consciousness and mind within a structured evolutionary process. Both Steiner and Vernadsky had consciousness and mind within processes of evolution and therefore remaining in closed systems, unviolated. The doors of perception remained closed

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This leaves open the question of how to truly to burst out of closed systems; how to violate the equilibrium in order that there might be life, or that life might be. For to break free is a coming to being, with the implication that not to break free is to exist in a state of non-being, or subsumed in the oneness of Ananke’s realm, where 1=0.



© John Dunn.

Opening of the doors of perception

Sunday, 15 October 2023 at 17:55

Opening of the doors of perception

The presence of the living God on Earth is dependent upon the active participation of man, and that participation is the living thinking of Mind. If the living God is dependent upon the living thinking of Mind, then so too is everything else. Indeed, God in this context means everything.

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) emphasised the importance of the active participation of man. “I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.” Silesius knew there could be no presupposition of any kind. The living God, or everything, is dependent upon living thinking. To establish God,or anything, outside of living thinking, is to fall into idolatry, and the idolator’s world is dead. To fall into the worship of idols, or any form of presupposition outside of living thinking, is to enter the fallen world of dead thought, to fall outside of being. Once the world is dead, without form, void, dark, undisturbed and inevitable, then it is returned to Ananke as the One; and 1=0.



And what is living thinking? It is the opening of the doors of perception, without which the light of the Logos would be unable to shine a light upon the darkness of Ananke’s realm. It is Love that opens those doors. Love is the Originatory Principle, the mystery that will not be explained.

From this follows the need to exist in the medium of Love, without cease, always to be in Love. Unless this be so, all will return to the false, dead realm of Ananke, as it was before the Beginning, before ‘be’ing, before Love, Logos, God. This is to deny the legitimacy of lives as untrue that do not encounter Love, or murder Love when it is encountered. Such idolatrous lives belong to Ananke and her realm.

© John Dunn.

Cosmic awakening as metaphor for man’s own awakening

Sunday, 15 October 2023 at 17:44

Cosmic awakening as metaphor for man’s own awakening

Love is the Originatory Principle, because it will have no explanation. Love is the Beginning. It is so in my cosmic mythology of Ananke, and is so too in the world of man. Love is known variously as the Beginning, the Logos, the Word, the Cosmic Jesus, living thinking, Mind, God and God is Love.



Love cannot be subject to rational explanation, and the answer to the question of its origins will not be found in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid. Love is the only starting point of the Beginning. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust.To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.



I think about those chance encounters. They left deep and lasting scars on all my life. I would never have predicted that. How did this happen? I am asking a metaphysical question here. I am asking about causality. I am in the presence of a mystery, a reality rooted far beyond the domain of the problematical and the day-to-day challenges of just getting by. And this is no fanciful reminiscence, for in the chance encounter’s awakening of consciousness, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.



Here is the critical point.

The cosmic awakenings of all origin stories are but metaphors for man’s own awakening, as Love pushes open the doors of perception. Understand that living thinking is not limited to the skull. Man is not a passive sense receptor, but rather a dynamic transmitter.

© John Dunn.

The eternity of present consciousness

Saturday, 14 October 2023 at 20:53

That which is beheld will never pass away

The eternity of present consciousness

Eros will violate Ananke, without cease

Living thinking has as its source the Logos. Thoughts are not the abstract reflections of things that appear ready-made to the senses of man; these would be abstract thoughts, chimeras, nothing.

The light of the Logos shines through the doors of perception opened by living thinking. In this light all past and all future are beheld in the eternity of present consciousness. That which is beheld may pass in and out of consciousness, but will never pass away. This light shone upon the darkness is the Beginning, and that Beginning is perpetual.

The source of the light is Love. Eros will violate Ananke, without cease.

© John Dunn.

Who will be the violator?



Friday, 13 October 2023 at 22:30

The Rape of Lucretia, Robert Ficherelli, (1603-1660)

Who will be the violator?



What will end this interminable equilibrium, this undifferentiated oneness? From whence the intervention? Minerals, plants and animals have no part;they are in nature and of it. They are in and of the one entity that is Ananke’s realm, not apart from it. It is the living thinking of Mind that is needed, the intervention of the Logos.



In the Beginning is Mind, and Mind is with God, and Mind is God.Without Mind’s power of distinction, i.e. the ability to differentiate one thing from another, there is the polar-opposite of biodiversity, or any diversity for that matter; there is only amorphous oneness, nature as one viscous soup.



Without Mind, Ananke would persist infinitely as the Cosmos, an equilibrium, with her own self-regulating mechanisms, her own necessities. Our world and others will be swallowed up in the formations and destructions of inter-Galactic events over aeons of time, but Ananke would continue, infinitely, as an equilibrium,as one entity.



Without Mind, there would be no observer to confirm upon Ananke’s realm the status of being. For what is it to be? ‘To be’ is to be distinguished as one thing from another. To be is the ‘that is’ of the observer's mind. In an infinite Cosmos without Mind, there would be no ‘that is’, there would be no ‘be’ing. Where there is no being, there is void, no-thing; there is 0. Without Mind, 1=0. For being to be, Ananke must be violated.



Who will be the violator?

© John Dunn.

The idolatry of death A bogus reality

Thursday, 12 October 2023 at 20:54

The idolatry of death
A bogus reality

When all is reduced to its absolute limit of reduction, i.e. the reduction of the religionists, the supposed nought (0) before the supposed one-off beginning, or the supposed nought (0) before the so-called big bang, then we are dealing with a nought (0) that is one and all. 0 = 1.

With the beginning the infinite space of nothing was bounded. To be bounded it had to become observed and known, but perhaps that is simply to objectify it, make of it an abstraction. The Beginning is now in living thinking, or it is nothing, an abstraction. The concrete actuality of anything can only exist now, in the Creation, in the Beginning , always.

As such, the concrete reality of the oneness of nothing can only exist now as created now in the eternity of the present, behind which there is nopast and in front of which there is no future. All past, present and future is now in living thinking.

The darkness of nothing that is death, as preserved by the Prince of Darkness and his followers, is uncovered for what it is, a pre-existent ‘reality’, a bogus reality, a presupposition, an idol to worship.

© John Dunn.

Perpetual Beginning

Wednesday, 11 October 2023 at 20:16

Perpetual Beginning
There is no progression

In unbounded nothingness all is one, all is subsumed in one. What is all? All is one. There is only one and 1 = 0. How do we get from no-thing to some-thing? (How do we get from something to someone?)

In the Beginning is Mind. Before the Beginning there was nothing and 0 = 1. With the Beginning the infinite space of nothing was bounded. For the one has no past but is created in the eternity of the present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future. There is only Beginning, perpetual Beginning.

I so want to say “Becoming”, but “perpetual Beginning” better captures the essence of the eternal moment that is devoid of chronology. There is no becoming, there is no progression.

© John Dunn.