John Dunn

Barren, shrivelled-up womb of apparent “truth”

Sunday, 5 November 2023 at 18:03

Tree of Barren Women by Fradga 



The petrified world must be the means for thought to become conscious of being, that through which they manifest as forms which feign life, for they are merely the sign of life, the phantom pregnancy of the deluded.



Barren, shrivelled-up womb of apparent “truth”



To a child Heaven-sent everything is amazing. You only have to look at the face of a child in his first months of growth. This is the state of mind as it is before Blake’s cosmic Pharisee intervenes between the Logos and thought. After this, apparent “truth” is loveless, the cold, dry, barren, shrivelled-up womb of the unloved and never-loved. Apparent“truth” is the reality of the outer object; it is a cosmos without man, Ananke’s realm of non-being.



The individual who has shrugged off the power over him of Urizen has regained conscious determination of thought and can take his place in the eternal Beginning. For what is real does not come to us from the past but is created in the eternity of our present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future According to Urizen’s ancient impulse of non-freedom, or the submission to revealed truth, we are led to refer to a truth outside us, a god apart from us, with the world petrified in its alterity standing as the symbol of the death of the “I”. We are led to believe that truth lies in the outer object, in the quantifiable phenomenon, or in the physical-mathematical formula. Urizen’s world is untouched by Love, and a stranger to living thought; it is the cold, dry, barren, shrivelled-up womb of the unloved and never-loved.



Through living thinking the “I” is resurrected. Born as Eros, the light of the Logos enters the world, and Love is incarnated. Living thinking is where the stand is first made against the anti-Love; and Ananke is violated.



Origin story tribal,



Its mythos individual.



Origin awakening,



Everything amazing…



…To a child heaven-sent,



The eternal present.

© John Dunn.

Sickening non-truth

Sunday, 5 November 2023 at 18:01

It all blurs into one

Sickening non-truth



Nature, the past, history, even the predicted future, are forms taken up outside the process from which they have sprung, and having become sensations, images, and thoughts, are the non-truth that sickens us. The petrified world is the spirit which presses on in us as life, and though sickened, YOU, the sleepwalkers, continue on your way.

© John Dunn.

Suspended Judgments

Sunday, 5 November 2023 at 17:48

Damaged damp and devoured


Suspended Judgments

I’m adding a book to my Powysian blogger site - Suspended Judgments, 1916, by John Cowper Powys.

Overtime I hope to add all the books from my Powys collection. As I have prepared this unfinished description, I thought that I might add it to the home page of this website to give Google something new to chew on. The finished piece will eventually appear, together with pictures and a few bibliographical details, on my Powysian blogger site.

Never has so battered a book been added to a collection. Nevertheless, here it is, and with good reason - for it has been inscribed on the front free endpaper in 1920 or 1929 (sadly the exact date is obscured by damage) by Phyllis Playter, the partner of John Cowper Powys over many years.

About Phyllis Playter 1894-1982:

She was a reader for Haldeman-Julius, publishers of the Little Blue Books, to which Powys was a contributor.

She met the lecture-touring JCP in 1921, whereupon at the age of twenty-seven she became his 'femme de confiance’. From then until his death in 1963 she nurtured and gave direction to his chaotic, wayward genius.

She accompanied Powys back to England in 1934, following their five years together in up-state New York, where A Glastonbury Romance, Weymouth Sands, and Autobiography were all written.

After Powys’s death in 1963 she continued to live in their tiny house at Blaenau Ffestiniog, North Wales.

Whatever the condition of the book when it was first acquired by Phyllis, its present condition would very likely have resulted from the various domestic upheavals over the years. She and JCP moved from Patchin Place in New York City, to Phudd Bottom in up-state New York, across the Atlantic to Corwen in Wales, ending up in a tiny little damp house in Blaenau Ffestiniog, also in Wales. Packing and unpacking, squeezing into more and more confined living spaces have all taken their toll on this book, with its worn out covers, grubby pages, water damage and, at some time, paper-consuming insects and grubs. Patina I say! The book’s condition certainly tells its own story.

© John Dunn.

To the dumb masses trapped

Saturday, 4 November 2023 at 22:30

To the dumb masses trapped


William Blake's Beulah

No objective reality exists in opposition to thinking. If such a thing as an objective reality exists, it does so because it already rises up as thinking.



Nevertheless,to the dumb masses trapped in Beulah, with their normal realistic-naive attitude, life as an outer scenario pre-exists thinking. They do not notice that they imagine life and, by imagining it, they identify it with what they see, without really seeing it. This is because they see only the physical-sensory manifestations of life, not life itself.

© 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.