John Dunn

The Beginning is always or it is nothing

Thursday, 14 December 2023 at 18:01

The Beginning is always or it is nothing

Correcting the mistranslated Bible

If there is an imminence possible with the Logos, and I have stated repeatedly that it is possible in the realm of living, active and non-objectifying thought, then where will the Logos be found?



A Logos that finds me, or to which I return, is out of the question, as that would involve a presupposed existence that is tantamount to idolatry; it would objectify the the idea of the Logos, making of it an abstraction, a non-entity. The Logos can only be living thinking, the Creation always, the Beginning always, Love. It is always present, never past. The mistranslation in the Bible must be amended to make this clear.


In the beginning was the Word should read In the Beginning is the Word. As discussed above, the Word, in the context of John 1:1, is universally understood to mean the Logos, which is a concept of the intellect meaning the Truth, a concept dependent upon the thinking Mind.

If the Logos is coterminous with Mind, then Mind is God and God is Love. This means that any one of Logos, Mind, God or Love, would be better in the correct translation than Word. I choose one of these in my preferred translation: In the Beginning is Love, and Love is with God, and Love is God.

The Logos, the living God, as the living thinking of Mind, dwells in rather than amongst us. There is agreement with this elsewhere in the Bible: God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16)


To understand the Beginning as a Big Bang, one-off, event is to objectify the Logos making of it an abstraction, a non-entity. This is exactly what the mistranslation of the Bible does; it crucifies God. Where then is the Beginning, and how can it be discovered without objectifying it and thereby idolising an abstraction?



The answer to this is that the Beginning is always or it is nothing. The Beginning is living thinking, not dead thought. Here we come to the Originatory Principle for which there is no explanation. Here we come to the mystery. That which will not be objectified or rationalised into abstraction is Love. Immanence with the Logos is to be found in Love.

© John Dunn.

Before and after the Beginning

Wednesday, 13 December 2023 at 20:22

Before and after the Beginning



The thinking subject’s divine potential has its moment in the original connectivity with the Logos. However, this moment is not the thinking subject’s reality, who loses this moment. The thinking subject thus loses the possibility of an essential reality, since it believes that thought relates to objects or phenomena outside itself, and not to its own shaping power. Thought fails to see within itself the relation with the Logos that is immediate to it. It transfers this relation outside of itself. We not do the same to the Logos, i.e. to the Originatory Principle itself, and the resultant externalisation and deification of God is the act of idolatry that I have discussed repeatedly.

The departure from the possibility of an essential reality is that which is expressed through the metaphor of the Fall, which separates man from God. Loss of connectivity to the Logos, loss of God, loss of Love, is the Fall. Fallen thought relates to objects or phenomena outside itself,and not to its own shaping power. Thought which is one with the Logos at its inception falls away from the Logos, as a falling angel. Dead thought.

The fallen world is the world before the Beginning, Ananke’s realm. The indispensable condition of understanding life after the Beginning is that the object must not be detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, as though it could self-project its own existence. An object which appears to have its own self-projecting existence can only be presupposed abstractly in a way which renders it dead. It is the separation of the Logos from the thinking subject that results in the objectivising that I have described repeatedly elsewhere as idolatry.



Connectivity,or immanence with the Logos is an attempted metaphorical expression of living thinking. The Logos is living thinking, but there is no thought dead or alive without mind. Johann Angelus Silesius, 17th century priest poet knew this and attempted to express the coterminology as follows:



“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.

True will is the divine gift of Love



Tuesday, 12 December 2023 at 21:45

True will is the divine gift of Love



The deluded state before encounter might be interpreted as the personal choice of the individual. What right have I, or anyone else, to say it is deluded? Is it not the free will of the free individual?



Wrong.



‘Freewill’ is the ‘choosing will’ that originates in thought reflected back as material ‘reality’, that believes it can pick and choose its way through the seemingly ready-made material options laid out before it. The uncontaminated true will originates in the divine will of the Logos,which distinguishes the self from all other selves. The divine will incarnates in the self as the living thinking which shapes the world. True will follows the divine intention for its deification. It is ‘free will’ that needs salvation.



The Fall resulted in ‘free will’ and reflected thought. ‘Free will’ makes choices in a fallen world of thought, which originated in the Logos, but is lost and reflected back to the self as a pre-existing, separate and self-sufficient material reality with an existence somehow emanating from itself. After the Fall,Adam objectified the world as a material reality. This was the forbidden ‘knowledge’ gained from the tree. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve saw each other through the eyes of true will, through Love, which isto say the Logos or God. Following the Fall, having gained knowledge, Adam and Eve objectified each other each other, discovering shame, rather than Love.



True will is the divine gift of Love. ‘Free will’ is false, deluded and evil, but we will it, we want it and take a sordid pleasure in the objectified. Only Love overcomes the need for this, there being no shame in love. Love does not belong over there with the objective and problematical. I quote a relevant piece from my Child of Encounter:



If consciousness and mind cannot be subject to rational explanation, then the answer to this question will not be found in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid. 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.



Love shapes the world. ‘A chance encounter can have consequences for eternity’.

© John Dunn.

The self originates in encounter

Monday, 11 December 2023 at 20:17

The self originates in encounter

Thus spake Eros...

Everyman lives a deluded life, but some are awakened to the divine potential for their being. Whether or not man acts out the potential given by God, his true self is nevertheless kept in God and, contemplated by Him.That is to say the divine potential is constant, and is the true self of any individual, regardless of the deluded persona under which he might exist. The point at which the deluded individual recognises that he is divinely interconnected with another being’s true self is Love. Love transcends the deluded state in which one or both or more true selves are enshrouded, and establishes a relationship of true selves, a communion, however fleeting, during which they more closely track the divine intention given to them.



The cosmic metaphor of Love’s penetration of Ananke’s dreary equilibrium and interminable cycle symbolises the impact of encounter upon the individual. The self originates in encounter, in Love, in the Beginning.

© John Dunn.

To be in accordance with the ‘I’



Sunday, 10 December 2023 at 20:45

Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1819)

To be in accordance with the ‘I’



This self is not an autonomous entity, a collection of properties however unique, haunting a ready-made world; it is, rather, an entity that is realised in a life characterised by being in accordance with divine intention. This is not a forward-looking intention, which would be an idolatrous presupposition. Intention means being directed by the Logos in-the-moment, always now, in the Beginning, forever.



I have already moved to the position of the Logos being coterminous with the ‘I’. In this sense the above should read: this self is not an autonomous entity, a collection of properties however unique, haunting a ready-made world; it is, rather, an entity that is realised in a life characterised by being in accordance with the ‘I’.



What is it to be in accordance with the ‘I’, or the coterminous Logos? It is to be in accordance with living thinking, as opposed to being subject to dead thought, the latter being an existence subsumed in a ‘reality’ of reflected entities understood to be the ready-made world into which we are thrown and must accept. Dead thought is the corruption, or Fall, of living thinking, which is the source of all reality, past, present and future, indeed, everything.

The light of the Logos shines in our world when our thinking remains alive, rather than being lost and reflected back to us as though it represented a presupposed and extant material reality. In this way we are the Logos and our thinking is the Creation that never ceases. It might be said that the Logos incarnates through our living thinking, unless crucified to become the dead thought of material ‘reality’. Even this would not be true, and cannot shake off the idolatry that clings on to our every thought. To think of the Logos entering the world through us is to limit living thinking to the wet spongy matter in our heads.



Living thinking is not limited by the skull, it is cosmic in its boundlessness. The limits to thought are the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of man himself, aided and abetted by the fallen angels that live amongst us. Such limited thought is fallen thought, dead thought, and man is born fallen. It is in Love that the Beginning follows death and thinking lives.

© John Dunn.

The ‘I’ in God and the God in ‘I’

Saturday, 9 December 2023 at 20:15

Those circles, that seemed to be conceived in you as reflected light, when traversed by my eyes, a little, seemed to be adorned inside themselves, with our image

Dante, Paradiso Canto XXXIII, (my underline)

The ‘I’ in God and the God in ‘I’



The essential characteristics of man are common at the universal, but never circumscribe one individual. For example, Peter, John and Paul are human beings and being a rational animal is an essential characteristic of such humanness. Rationality is essential for being the entity a human being; necessary, but not sufficient to be an individual. The essential characteristics are the forms which exist by themselves, whilst the individual carries the forms in the concrete sense.

The individual has essential characteristics that are common, while in addition he has the personal characteristics of being that belong to himself. The essence has only the essential characteristics of the species, whereas the individual has in addition that which is unique to him. Peter is in all respects human being; there is nothing in Peter that is not human. On the other hand, to be human being is not in all respects to be Peter. There is a distinction between being something and someone.



Let us move on from essential characteristics, which might be misinterpreted as being static, to modes of activity. The same principles apply. There are modes of activity common to all. We are all active as being something. However when an individual gives form to a mode of activity, he manifests himself as a someone. The character of being an individual is to give character to the mode of activity. A human being is an individual when he assumes the modes of activity common to all, with a potentiality of power, in such a way that he gives form to those activities as belonging to himself, as a someone. In order to be recognisably an individual an entity must be a someone who gives form to a mode of activity.


There is a further distinction beyond being something and someone, which lifts man above the collective of individuals. To be subject to dead thought is to be a someone who lives out the essential characteristics of humanness as found amongst the ‘they’ into which he is thrown at birth, whereas to live in accordance with living thinking is to be a self, an ‘I’. Let me expand upon this point.



In addition to being a something, distinguished as a someone by a set of properties, which give form to modes of activity, each has the potential to be not only an individual, but also a self, an ‘I’. Here the doctrine, or metaphor, of man being created in the image and likeness of God is helpful. It brings with it not only a distinctive dynamics, but also a mystery, since what we are in our deepest self is hidden in the divine potential for our being as a self.



Tobe a self is not our achievement, but rather originates in encounter, in Love, one might even describe it as a gift from God; God is, after all, Love. This Love is the Originatory Principle which will not be explained. The mystery of an individual’s selfhood is kept in the mystery of the divine being, the Logos, or Love. Whenever we act out the potential that we are given by God, we give form to the mode of action in accordance (or discordance) with the divine intention for our being, as a self.



It is possible to live as divinely intended, but one may also lead a life of delusions separated from one’s true purpose. (One can of course be imprisoned within these delusions by others, but this must be dealt with elsewhere.) The true self is kept in God and the true principles contemplated by Him. One’s self as a mystery is to be achieved in a stretching out for God. One’s self is to be found in Love.This adds a new dimension to the idea that the Logos is coterminous with the ‘I’.

© John Dunn.

The Divine is not something that was there once and is now lost and has to be found again The self is life after death, the resurrection and the creation

Friday, 8 December 2023 at 21:37

The Divine is not something that was there once and is now lost and has to be found again




The self is life after death, the resurrection and the creation

Living thinking at one with the Logos cannot be achieved by the type of thought that used to see the Logos outside of itself, but rather the thinking that draws on the light of life of the Logos within itself, thereby ceasing to be reflective. Thinking that still sees the Logos outside itself is identical to thinking that deifies matter outside itself.
To accept anything as pre-determined prior to the experiencing of it - be it the Logos, or the material world into which we are born - is nothing short of idolatry.



In truth, the purpose of the incarnation of the Logos on Earth is to overcome the idolising of the external, by the living dead, in a Resurrection to new life; but it is not to lead humanity back to the Divine. The Divine is not something that was there once and is now lost and has to be found again. To think in such a way would be to present the Logos as something outside of the self, to be found again, to be presupposed, to be worshipped now and in the future as an idol beyond the self, ultimately an idol existing without the self.

But consider the self. What is it? It is that which is distinguished from what surrounds it. Without the self there is nothing but indiscriminate oneness. It is the realm of Ananke, death. The awakening of the self introduces mind into the oneness, which introduces discrimination. Before the self there is nothing. In the awakened self there is all past, all present and all future, everything.The self is life after death, the resurrection and the creation. There is only Beginning. There is no chronology. The mystery is in the Beginning, and the mystery is Love. Which brings me back to my former statement. The self is life after death, the resurrection and the creation.

© John Dunn.