John Dunn

Deny the self-deluded and anxious shaper of pre-existent matter

Tuesday, 24 October 2023 at 22:03

Deny Urizen! (Blake's depiction of the demiurge)

Deny the self-deluded and anxious shaper of pre-existent matter

It is no surprise that man’s concepts of God equate Him to Love and Creator. A fully human life is one of love and creativity. An innocent life devoid of love and creativity is less than human. The creative imagination is central to the conception of God and what it means to be human; and an ‘imagination’ untouched by Love is a misnomer.

The Creator is not an entity apart, an all-knowing God who controls the affairs of man from across a divide. To conceive of such a distanced entity is to revere a demiurge, a self-deluded and anxious shaper of pre-existent matter. By implication, this would be to make of the Bible's Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.Christian religionism has carried over the worshipping of an idolised demiurge from the followers of an idolised Jehovah, which makes it idolatrous Devil Worship.

God is the Human Imagination. Instead of being saved by a distanced Christ, I will be saved through the salvation of my own awakened imagination; I must be my own Christ, i.e. the Christ narrative made personal narrative, or I will be less than human; whereas to be more human is to be more divine.

© John Dunn.

Cosmic eggs to be smashed

Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 21:01

Cosmic eggs to be smashed

Just as Eros, the primordial god of Creation and Life and Orphic symbol of the divine likeness of man, broke out of the Cosmic Egg to disrupt the goddess Ananke’s equilibrium of Chaos, I too can break the rules. I can break out of the straitjacket of closed systems be they religious, economic, Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalist, Marxist etc.

To accept a system as closed, to accept freedom as necessity, is to withdraw into nature, to return to Mother Nature, to Ananke and an amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being. Closed systems are the pathways to entropic death. The systems I compose for myself can neither be closed at their beginning nor at their end.

Each breakout from a closed system is an echo of the Orphic myth of Eros, be this my break with the womb, innocence or animal nature (Earth Mother). Each of these and more is a cosmic egg to be smashed. Each break is both an act of violation and creativity, ultimately prompted by Love. Each is an act of violation, ending the cycle, penetrating the egg, giving rise to birth and new life. Each response to Love is a death and resurrection of man in the image of God.

To the ones living a fully human life of love and creativity are opposed those who lead a sub-human existence without love, who never make the break from Mother Earth and Animal Nature. These are the ones who worship the One, who promote the closed system, be it Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalist, Marxist etc.

This is the divide of all ages that is masked by the politics of Right and Left, which are two sides of the same coin. The real and only meaningful opposition is between those whose banners bear the symbols of love and creativity and those devoid of love, life and humanity who would have us return to the One, the ‘amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being’.

© John Dunn.

Beyond idolatry

Sunday, 22 October 2023 at 20:45

‘He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ (1 John 4:16)

“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.” (Angelus Silesius)

“Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.” (Simone Weil)

“God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine.” (Julius Evola)

Beyond idolatry

Casting idolatry aside is the Beginning. Moving beyond idolatry is the perpetual Beginning. As an idolater I lived in the realm of presupposition, making an idol of the already there. The ‘already there’ was the realm of Ananke before the Beginning, the indefinite cycle, the equilibrium before violation, the pre-determined non-being before the awakening of ‘be’ing. As an idolater where could I find God if not presupposed as existing before me as an idol?

Not to participate in God is not to apprehend God. Only like is known by like. I leaped clear of all that is ready-made and presupposed to make myself grow to like expanse with that greatness of the Creator which is beyond all measures; for it is the height of evil not to know God. I will not seek an idol in outer space. My heart is the only place in which to meet God face to face.

© John Dunn.

Logos dipping down

Saturday, 21 October 2023 at 21:33

Logos dipping down

My thinking arises unconditionally, from outside the phenomena of the world; as such it closely resembles Love; it takes me by surprise, it comes from ‘nowhere’. Thinking must surely in some way be related to encounter, not so much between another and me, but rather between thinking spirit and me.

My thinking is the power of love in spiritual form. Following encounters with lovers, there arose the feeling that there could be something more, something even more lasting and more fulfilling. This ‘more’ is the yearning for the absolute relation, the power of love in spiritual form. That my thinking is the power of Love in spiritual form, is another way of saying my thinking is‘the power of God in spiritual form’.

Encounter awoke me to Love, and thence to thinking as the Logos dipping down in to the phenomena of the world, the dipping down that occurs with a power that flows forth in the activity of my thinking.

© John Dunn.

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.

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.

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.