John Dunn

Love is the only starting point



Friday, 3 November 2023 at 21:53

Simone Weil

Love is the only starting point



The cosmic creation turns on the intervention, the penetration of Chaos, the overturning of an interminable equilibrium. The cosmic creation is a metaphor for the individual’s wakening; both require the intervenor, the Originatory Principle.



We are looking for something external to ourselves. Where does being start, and what is the Originating Principle? Simone Weil confirmed, or at least supported, my suspicions, in that she proffered the view that the only way in which we can know that there is something external to ourselves (and by that I mean our own little world, our own set of ‘given’ circumstances), is through Love.



Some words by Simone Weil come to mind:



The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Gravity and Grace.)



Love as the Originatory Principle, it cannot be explained; something I tried to express in Child of Encounter.



Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. 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, with its ‘implications for eternity’, we cut right to the heart of religious mystery. For what is Love? Love is God.



Does this mean that for being to be we must be in Love? in God? Well yes, is the answer, now and at every moment.



…he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)



It seems that the intervenor in our own chaotic equilibrium is God, is Love.

© John Dunn.

Of the mind rather than in the mind

Thursday, 2 November 2023 at 22:24

Friedrich Nietzsche by Alessandro Lonati

Of the mind rather than in the mind

Whatis worshipping an idol? It is worshipping a dead thing, an inanimate thing, as opposed to worshipping the living God. Just because you cannotsee your god, does it make of him any less an idol. God should be of the mind rather than in the mind

God is dead, announced Nietzsche. Thought is dead is the implication of Nietzsche’s insight, that is thought that is believed to be a reflection of an objective world. Such thought upon thought accumulates in a storehouse of dead thoughts which we each call our own. These dead thoughts, which we laterbring forth from the storehouse, are so many idols.

God is Love.Hence the need to exist in the medium of Love, to be in Love without cease. Active and creative thinking, living thinking, is the pathway of the Logos into the world - in the Beginning, always.

© John Dunn.

Love, without cease

Wednesday, 1 November 2023 at 21:20

Love, without cease

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

To agree with the assertion made by Angelus Silesius is to accept that the I and the Logos live together or die together. There can be no presupposition, either one coming before the other; that would be to fall into idolatry, and the idolator’s world is dead. Once the world is dead, without form, void, dark, undisturbed and inevitable, then it is returned to Ananke as the One; and 1=0. So without presupposition, the Logos and the I must dwell one within the other for the world to live.

It is Urizen’s world that is dead. We feel apart from it, subject to it and beholden to it. Urizen’s world is not the product of the active and creative thinking of the mutual indwelling, rather it is ‘reality’, separated from the divine, served up on a plate, take it or leave it..

Living thinking, in contrast, is not the reflection of an objective world apart, i.e. Urizen’s served up ‘reality’, or Ananke’s dead realm, Active, creative, living thinking is Love ‘in the beginning’ always, breaking the equilibrium cycle always, breaking Ananke at each moment. Only that which is being created and still to be created is true, leaving that which was created as false. Thus the need to exist in the medium of Love, without cease, to be in Love.

This last statement denies the legitimacy of lives as untrue that do not encounter Love, or worse, murder Love when it is encountered.

© John Dunn.