John Dunn

Active creator: Logos or me?

Thursday, 26 October 2023 at 20:29

Active creator: Logos or me?

What does it mean to say that the truth is something I create? Truth never confronts me as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’. The truth is the Logos, the foundation of all. The Logos of course is also known variously as the Word, God, Christ, as well as the Truth. To continue then, the Logos as something I create is akin to the words of William Blake, i.e. that ‘imagination is God’.

I am called upon at this point to pause and consider a question related to the proposition that ‘the Logos is something I create’.

In the above proposition, is not the ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway? I am in a damned if I am, or damned if I’m not scenario, because if the ‘I’ does not precede the Logos, the Logos exists without the ‘I’. In either case the ‘I’ as active creator is lost. Blake’s imagination, under the above logic, turns out not to be God. The Logos stands external to the individual as an object to be idolised. Can the following statement by Silesius be redeemed in any way?

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

© John Dunn.

Truth created

Wednesday, 25 October 2023 at 21:11

One amongst the many

Truth created

Truth is not something external to me to be won by following a given tradition. Such an external ‘truth’ is the demiurge, the Urizen of Blake. Truth is something that I create and it is this creation that dignifies me. It is a condition that the common man partakes of unaware, constantly degrading it in the series of trifles of which his existence is woven, which, in turn, condemn him to his own unfreedom.

Rising above the condition of the common man means that I must overcome the interminable series of esoteric mirages to realise that initiation has only one source, the Christ. This Christ is certainly not the mystical or gnostic Christ or that of religion, which is really the demiurge, the given mirage of ‘truth’ that is external to us, but rather the cosmic Christ, the metaphysical principle of absolute individuality and freedom.

How can the one source be, at the same time, the principle of absolute individuality? Surely being in thrall to the one means the opposite of individuality and freedom. The answer lies in the statement above, i.e. that the truth is something that I create. Truth never confronts me as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’, an idol. The one source therefore is something personal to me, existing in a state of mutual dependence with me. I will leave you to ponder the words of Angelus Silesius once again, which are very much pertinent to my point.

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

© 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.