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Absolute individual
Friday, 20 October 2023 at 22:04
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818
Absolute individual
To know God without image, without naturalistic attributes, and without semblance, is to know my self. My centring of the self is the opposite of the post-modernist pursuit of the de-centring of the self. In these opposing goals for the self is laid bare the real political bifurcation,not the pathetic banter between various branches of Marxism which passes for democratic debate.
I will be the centre of dominion and power, which is synonymous with creative power. To be at the centre of creation means that I must put myself in the place of God; not to replace God, but rather to find the true God. My rightful role is to model the world after my thinking; and consciously being the master of my thinking I must be the master of what my thinking produces. In this lies the true political bifurcation. My action versus passivity.
As the absolute individual I am the exemplar of absolute freedom and power. The only one way I can prove God is to make myself God. My absolute freedom is the principle sign of being God. My body as the absolute individual is the universe. In being independent from God I will be deified myself, internalising the qualities of God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality.
Understand that independent of God in this context means to be independent of a presupposed idol, it means to be free of idolatry.
Kirilloff, one of the characters in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed,does not believe in God in the sense of inventing an imaginary God like many generations had done before him. Instead, he is forced to manifest his own divinity in order to demonstrate that God exists. Free will is an attribute of Kirilloff’s self-deification. This free will can be called upon to prove his insubordination to the imaginary God of generations. In a passion of exhilaration and terror, this freedom is most convincingly proved, according to Kirilloff, by committing suicide.Was Kirilloff’s example and path followed by Otto Weininger and Carlo Michelstaedter one wonders?
‘God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine’, wrote Julius Evola.
© John Dunn.
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Oneness in a state of apartness
Thursday, 19 October 2023 at 20:48
Catherine and Heathcliff by Fritz Eichenberg
Oneness in a state of apartness
Love yearns for oneness in a state of apartness. Love emparadised is something that imprisons, something stifling and claustrophobic, something complex and sometimes horrific. Loss and unrequited love are where open airy uplands lie… across the lonely wuthering heights of heath and cliff. Emily Brontë has Cathy say:
Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
I find that I am not concerned with the question of whether God (as a True Being) exists or not; rather my concern is how (in what manner or mode) He exists. There are metaphors, there have always been personalisations and anthropomorphisms, but these always slide into presuppositions and sink into idolatry. How can God be known? Answer: without image, without naturalistic attributes, and without semblance, neither visible or imagined.
But if I am to know God without theses things, then there must be nothing between me and Him. I must really become He and He me. God must really become me and I must really become God. In the dialectic of incarnation and spitualisation this 'He' and 'I' become ‘Is’, and it is in this ‘self-identity’, this perpetual Beginning, this 'He' and ‘I' - that ‘Is’, that the Logos will be found.
Nothing between Him and me? No, the differences will be infinite, there could be no melding into one entity. The dialectic is where truth lies. There must be encounter and there must be Love: oneness in a state of apartness.
‘He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ (1 John 4:16)
© John Dunn.
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Fall
Wednesday, 18 October 2023 at 21:19
The doors of perception must be opened
Fall
The Fall was from different degrees of consciousness, to physical thought, to an inner activity in which the Logos no longer acted, but was reflected back as a seemingly ready-made world upon my senses. No matter how much I could grasp the whole outside world, I could not grasp the depth of inner reality. The superficiality of my intellectual level did not allow me to find the Logos, but I found idols which gave me the answers, gave me the possibility to organise the world, knowledge, the economy, the future, everything that can be understood and organised through fallen thought. I worshipped idols.
That same level, that of fallen thought, however, was the only one in which I might encounter the Logos. It can be said that at that level I encountered the presence of the Logos and the presence of idols on the same level. Of course this was not because the Logos and the idols are on the same level, but they are for the man who thinks with fallen thought. On the level of fallen or reflected thought I found more easily a force that gave me everything pre-organised: knowledge, physical, mathematical, philosophical knowledge, ethics, logic, administrative capacity, and also politics, the judiciary, medicine, even art, religion, metaphysics and meditation.
I was in a position to know this dazzling power, but I also had the ability to perform an act of freedom and reject the easy path of presuppositions and idols, to find the more difficult one of the Logos. But I would never have found the Logos if I first did not know the “reality” of the world.
And yet… and yet, the reality of the world is Ananke’s realm. The doors of perception must be opened. There must be encounter. Eros must enter.
© John Dunn.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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