John Dunn

Suspended Judgments, 1916, by John Cowper Powys

Thursday, 23 November 2023 at 10:39

Published on the blogger website Powysian

Suspended Judgments, 1916, by John Cowper Powys

The latest book to be added to my slow-growing blog catalogue.

My objective is to add all the books from my Powys collection, especially items by John Cowper Powys, to the catalogue, but it will be a slow process given my many other competing interests.

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.

Inaddition is a listing, with photographs of items from my collection, of the Haldeman-Julius Little Blue Books, published in 1923, that were derived from Suspended Judgments.



© John Dunn.

Mystery of the encounter

Wednesday, 22 November 2023 at 21:40

Painting with tags: Sex, Love, Embrace, Kiss, Union, Universe, Spirit, Man



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. (Simone Weil)



Mystery of the encounter

The great blasphemy and the intervention of Love

Tuesday, 21 November 2023 at 12:15

Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car, Part of the Illustrations to Dante's Divine Comedy, by William Blake










The great blasphemy and the intervention of Love



The very day-to-day lives of most individuals are belief-ridden and idolatrous. Blasphemy is rife, before God, gods and religion come into it at all, whatsoever. 
Gods and demons are but metaphors for the more mundane or workaday scope for blasphemy, which happens in every moment of most people’s lives. The truth is we only have metaphors to begin to explain such matters, until of course we come to what I have called the Originatory Principle, the point beyond which there is no recourse to metaphor, simply because there is nothing comparable to the mystery. It has one name, and you must take it or leave it, and that name is Love.


The side of the good lives in a state of perpetual Love. In contrast, the corrupted state is the pre-awakened state, a loveless state. On the one hand there is the Originatory Principle of Love. On the other there is the principle of Ananke, the feminine-demonic substance, the infinite and interminable cycle of oneness, entropic death, of which the representative to man is Urizen. There is good versus evil.



It is necessary to restore this conception of the good as being the justification and highest consecration of any hegemonic aspiration to power. What clouds the issue are the left-right politics of the Ananke civilisation and its claim for freedom to lie in a pluralist conception of the good. This is the false bifurcation, whereas the real counter-poles are the Good versus the corrupted thinking of the Ananke civilisation.



The side of the good associates freedom with oneness with the Logos. The more the ‘I’ realises its free being, the more it is identical to the Logos. To be more human is to be more like God. How to attain oneness with the Logos is therefore the goal; but how do we attain this state of freedom? The spiritual practice of thinking might well be the path to the Logos, but man will first need to attain the will to overcome corrupted thinking. Corrupted by Urizen, ordinary thinking about ‘matter’ and ‘reality’ is thought petrified, belief-ridden and idolatrous; and all this false thinking is cerebral and logical. It is the state of immersion into the One. It is the pre-awakened state, a loveless state. Corrupted thinking is conditioned by thinking bound to the senses, which only sense a reflected, pre-given ‘reality’.

For thinking to connect to its source as an unsullied living thinking, we need to attain the will to end the great blasphemy and impose the good. However, we cannot recover such a will, except by taking it away from the demonic forces of Urizen. This demands of the individual an awakening, and that awakening needs an intervention in the form of Love.


© John Dunn.

…fills the gap vacated by the Logos

Monday, 20 November 2023 at 20:56

William Blake, Satan


…fills the gap vacated by the Logos


William Blake chose his words carefully. His famous metaphor, the Synagogue of Satan, was not only about a fallen state of mind, it was also about the evil force which holds men there.

The task of thinking is to incarnate the element of life that already lies within it and from which it alienates itself. What is that ‘element of life’? It is the source of the thinking by means of which we think. The ‘source’ is equated with the Logos. Thinking man is the incarnation of the Logos. This is not any old thinking, but only that thinking which is pure, unsullied and from the source, the source being the Logos. I have already stated that all creation and origin mythologies should be treated as metaphors for the individual experience. So, rather than ask: ‘What was there before the Beginning?’, it is better to ask, what was there before the pure and unsullied thinking from the source, i.e. the Logos? The answer to both questions is NOTHING.



Those who might be bothered think at all often believe they are connecting to something spiritual, but all they feel is a profound sense of nostalgia for something they think is lost and out of reach, a fantasy. The search for truth through the religion of their fathers turns into misplaced loyalty, or even a mind-numbing hobby. The impulses of asceticism and devotion in whatever form have been corrupted by the spiritual darkness of the corporal world, which leads us away from the Logos, not towards it. The apparently devout and mystical feelings of a modern human being are false, and amount to a false religion. Satan’s Synagogue was William Blake’s name for the false religion.

Blake knew that man must and will have some religion. If he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the Synagogue of Satan. Blake called it a synagogue because its participants murdered Love, adhering instead pharisaically to a vengeful law:



Urizen called together the Synagogue of Satan in dire Sanhedrin
To judge the Lamb of God to death as a murderer and a robber. (Blake’s Jerusalem)

Blake did not see the Creator as an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controlled the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity Blake described rather as Urizen, the demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter. By implication, this made 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 for Blake had carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the followers of Jehovah, which made it, essentially, Devil Worship. The demiurge fills the gap vacated by the Logos, for the Logos is not to be found amongst the murderers of Love, for God is Love. The devout and mystical feelings described above as false are for a god who is also false.



Only those in whom the Logos lives have the capacity for freedom from this bleak conditioning and animal-like existence, in thrall to Ananke.

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



For those in whom Love dwelleth, the task of thinking is not to comprehend or intuit the Logos - an empty rhetorical undertaking, conceivable only on the basis of a false understanding of the Logos as an entity wholly apart, as Him ‘up there’, as Urizen.



The task of thinking is to incarnate the element of life that already lies within thinking itself and from which it alienates itself, i.e. the element of suprasensory life from which it moves and without which it would not be, even when it takes on the error. The task of thinking is to realise its own intuitive nucleus, in which the Logos is present as an original force. The way to the Logos does not lie within feeling, but at the source of the thinking by means of which we think. There must be an awakening to Love, which is the Originatory Principle, in the Beginning, always.

© John Dunn.

Transfigurating power of Love



Sunday, 19 November 2023 at 12:02

Transfigurating power of Love



The reversal the ages-old petrification of thought entails allowing ourselves to bear the force of the Logos. As such, the goal of our times is that of incarnating the Logos. In pursuit of this goal, all feeling,all things mystical must be thrown out. New ageism, eco-cultism, food faddism, Tarot, star reading, hermetic-alchemical symbols, yoga, occultism, magic, church and temple ritual, masonic ritual, drug-induced zombieism, above all, kabbalism, do not escape the sphere of feeling that is captive to reflected thought and its false (material) ‘reality’,rather they reinforce it. As such, mysticisms, wherever they are found,whatever they are, must be considered as belonging to the weaponry wielded by the Children of Urizen in their control of the innocents.



Through Spinoza this mysticism entered the Enlightenment and infected mainstream thought with its obsessive return to the One, which reverberates too, politically and socially, in the globalism of our day.Operating behind the revivification of traditional spiritualism is the impulse to block the living experience of the Logos. Kabbalah and other mysticisms are just as much a part of the reflected, ready-made world as anything materialistic or otherwise mundane to the apparently spiritual mind.



The conscious discovery of the living thinking that shapes our world, that which is lost almost at the moment of its inception, only to be reflected back to us as material reality, or Nature, is the discovery too of the Logos. It is the discovery of the Logos inside of the ‘I’. The ‘I’ must be the centre of dominion and power, which is synonymous with creative power. To be at the centre of creation is to reject Urizen and to deify the ‘I’, which is the Logos incarnated and resurrected.



How is the conscious discovery made? What awakens the consciousness? The Divine becomes human; the human connects with the Divine. Whoever treads the path of initiation knows, at a given moment on the path, that there is no initiation without a teacher; and a teacher there must be. Connection with the Logos is an individual experience; but it is not something the individual will experience without external intervention. There must be an encounter; a transfigurating moment of epoptika. This is certainly not a kabbalistic, mystical or religious experience, but rather the metaphysical principle of absolute individuality and freedom - which we encounter as Love.

© John Dunn.

Whores for Eleusis

Saturday, 18 November 2023 at 10:54

Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis. (1889) By Henryk Siemiradzki



Whores for Eleusis

And yet, what stands between non-being and the Beginning? The question must first be on the table before it can be answered. A debate needs two sides. Today there is one side, therefore there is no debate, be it political, philosophical or scientific. The real socio-political bifurcation is hidden. It is in questions about the self and its objectives that we lay bare the truth of the real bifurcation, not the pathetic banter between various branches of psuedo-Marxism, which passes for democratic debate in the thought-controlled political talk-shops and media.



The ‘I’ must be the centre of dominion and power, which is synonymous with creative power. To be at the centre of creation is to reject Urizen and his followers and become one with God as the unadulterated self. The rightful role of man is to model the world after his thinking; and consciously being the master of his thinking he is to be master of what the thinking produces. The real bifurcation is between those who want this and those who promote the de-centring of the self, which means replacing it with a globalist unicultural non-self which has its thinking done for it.


If the Originating Principle is Love, then its opponents are the anti-Love. They crucified Love and continue to crucify Him in their rejection of Love. As the murderers of Love, their hope is to snuff out the light of the world, the light of life, and return us to the darkness that preceded and continues to precede the Beginning. But these half-beings will ultimately fail. The Beginning is born from the death that precedes the Beginning. That which preceded Love was death. Love walked the Earth and there was life. The intervention of the Logos is the Beginning, cosmically and individually.Indeed the former is the metaphor representing the latter. Such is the turning point of the Cosmic Eleusis, the individual’s Epoptika. Death will finally be overcome in the victory of Love, but this will only happen when the half-beings, these children of Urizen, are rooted out for good and for all. Until then, they bring whores for Eleusis.




© John Dunn.

...destroy unthinkingly accepted nature

Friday, 17 November 2023 at 20:43

Dante and Beatrice before the Light, from an Illuminated copy of The Divine Comedy, illustrated by Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia (ca. 1403-1482)






...destroy unthinkingly accepted nature

This is the difficult part - impossible for anyone who has spent a life on his knees to Urizen, for one must embrace the role of destroyer wholly and internally, annihilating the parasitical children of Urizen, to live a life open to the Logos shining through. This act of annihilation is the only true revolutionary goal, and puts the awakened man at odds with the determiners of globalist ethical culture and socio-economic processes. Our truly revolutionary act of annihilation will lead to a discovery of the “I” of Dantesque proportions, the discovery of the “I” in the Logos and vice versa.



We seek the Logos because, obscurely, we seek the originating principle that delivers us from evil, from error and from destruction, but we cannot find it as long as we ignore our own “I”, which bears the force of the Logos within it. The originating principle is Love; and the Beginning is the violation of the interminable cycle of nature by Love, and the the birth of the “I” as self-consciousness is the issue of this union. The “I’ as self-consciousness has one goal, not to be bound to pysycho-physiological nature, not to become a kind of epiphenomenon of it but, rather, to achieve an ascension from it. That ascension is the Beginning.

© John Dunn.