John Dunn

Radicalising the void



Thursday, 9 November 2023 at 21:54

Radicalising the void



Nature without man is the vast oneness, the interminable infinite, the undisturbed equilibrium. It is before the Beginning, it is death. For the Beginning to be, the grip of nature must be released, death must be overcome and life installed in its place. Life depends upon the destruction of nature, its repeated destruction. Life depends upon the violation of Ananke, her repeated violation.



A sense of a freedom might feel ephemeral, and just out of reach, but how is the ephemeral made to be enduring? What is this ephemeral feeling? It is a sense that the equilibrium of the accepted might be disturbed, i.e. the interminable cycle of nature might be broken. This equilibrium in my mythological terms is the undisturbed realm of Ananke, i.e. the vast, the infinite, the One. The violation of Ananke is the Beginning. In the Beginning is Mind.

The ephemeral feeling of freedom is the light of the Logos breaking through. The light of the Logos can only permeate nature by destroying it. This destruction of nature must be the overcoming of that which was shaped by living thinking, but which is reflected back to us as ready-made material nature devoid of any thought (or spiritual) content,i.e. devoid of our own content.



Before this can happen, the chaotic equilibrium of the individual subsumed in nature must first be destroyed. The intervenor, the destroyer of that equilibrium is Love. Only the Elect, touched by Love, are newly conscious of that which is missing, i.e. the Logos, or the shaping power of living thinking. Only the Elect can wilfully violate Ananke and break the interminable cycle, thereby radicalising the void and opening the threshold to the light of the Logos.


© John Dunn.

Matter - as eternal as the thinking which thinks it

Wednesday, 8 November 2023 at 21:40

Making a stab at reality 



By making it your own, you deprive thinking of life. You separate thought from the world within yourselves by seeking to reconstruct the world for yourselves. You do not think, because your thought is dead. (Thus spake Eros)


Matter - as eternal as the thinking which thinks it

Materialism,or acceptance of matter, is idolatrous. Matter has no living content of its own, yet to accept matter is to treat it as though it does; it is to invest matter with magical powers. Matter is dead and to worship it is to worship death. This is part and parcel of the black religion that misleads the dumb masses into believing that the cosmos could exist without man. Matter is petrified thought, the original power of which is unnoticed, lost, and reflected back as an entity in its own right. This reflected entity is in fact dead matter which, having no life, takes on the symbology of death.This reflected entity will remain a symbol of entropic death until it is de-crystalised and re-infused with living thinking. To think that matter comes in and out of being or evolves is superstition, blunder, and obscure faith. In truth, matter opposes movement, being as eternal as the thinking which thinks it. Unless matter’s hold over mind is overcome, then the relationship to it will beone of worshipper to idol. The ‘believer’ will continue to make a mythical entity out of matter.



Matter exists only where it is perceived and not beyond. It does not have an inner shaping power of its own; it remains indiscriminate until shaped by thought; and yet we repeatedly succumb to the superstition of matter,some more than others, some so totally that they remain themselves objects to be shaped by others, for exploitation and debt burden.



What is the inner shaping power that matter does not possess? It is the experience of the living content of thinking which allows man to know the secret of the three dimensions. This ‘living content’ is that aspect of thinking that shapes the world in which we live, but is lost at the moment it is thought, leaving a world reflected back to us that we believe is shaped materially even before we enter into it. This is the idolatrous faith in matter promoted by the followers of Urizen. It might be simplified as follows:



Of the dimensions, only one is sensory. The other two are internal, as suprasensory structural relations of the first, constituting its living content. The point is that without the living content of thinking, perception would be one-dimensional, experiencing the world notionally, somehow, as line only, if there could ever be such a thing as a one-dimensional world. Such one-dimensionality is that symbolised by Ananke’s realm, infinite and undisturbed, where 1=0, until violated by mind.



Volume and spaciality, i.e. the shaping of the world out of its one-dimensionality, are given to the world by us, by our living thinking. We shape the world in a way unknown to us, a way in which lies the Originatory Principle.

© 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.