John Dunn

Only like is known by like

Sunday, 14 January 2024 at 20:46

Only like is known by like

Casting idolatry aside is the Beginning. Moving beyond idolatry is the perpetual Beginning. As an idolater I lived in the realm of presupposition, making an idol of the already there. The ‘already there’ was the realm of Ananke before the Beginning, the indefinite cycle, the equilibrium before violation, the pre-determined non-being before the awakening of ‘be’ing. As an idolater where could I find God if not presupposed as existing before me as an idol?

Not to participate in God is not to apprehend God. Only like is known by like. I leaped clear of all that is ready-made and presupposed to make myself grow to like expanse with that greatness of the Creator which is beyond all measures; for it is the height of evil not to know God. I will not seek an idol in outer space. My heart is the only place in which to meet God face to face. Only encounter will suffice.

© John Dunn.

Independence from God means independence from a presupposed idol

Sunday, 14 January 2024 at 20:32

Independence from God means independence from a presupposed idol

To know God with­out image, without naturalistic attributes, and without semblance, is therefore to know my self. I will be the centre of dominion and power, which is synonymous with creative power. To be at the centre of creation means that I must put myself in the place of God;not to replace God, but rather to find the true God. My rightful role is to model the world after my thinking; and consciously being the master of my thinking I must be the master of what my thinking produces.

As the absolute individual I am the exemplar of absolute freedom and power. The only one way I can prove God is to make myself God. My absolute freedom is the principle sign of being God. My body as the absolute individual is the universe. In being independent from God I will be deified myself, internalising the qualities of God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality. Understand this: my independence from God means my independence from a presupposed idol, it means to be free of idolatry. God does not exist. My Ego must create him by making itself divine.

© John Dunn.

He I is

Sunday, 14 January 2024 at 20:23

He I is

I find that I am not concerned with the question of whether God (as a True Being) exists or not; rather my concern is how (in what manner or mode) He exists. There are metaphors, there have always been personalisations and anthropomorphisms, but these always slide into presuppositions and sink into idolatry. How can God be known? Answer: with­out image, without naturalistic attributes, and without semblance, neither visible or imagined.

But if I am to know God without theses things, then there must be nothing between me and Him. I must really become He and He me. God must really become me and I must really become God. In the dialectic of incarnation and spiritualisation this 'He' and 'I' become ‘Is’, and it is in this ‘self-identity’, this perpetual Beginning, this 'He' and ‘I' - that ‘Is’, that the Logos will be found.

© John Dunn.

Eros addresses the fallen

Saturday, 13 January 2024 at 22:33

The doors of perception must be opened

Eros addresses the fallen

Your Fall is from different degrees of consciousness, to physical thought, to an inner activity in which the Logos no longer acts. You are concerned with processing a seemingly ready-made world reflected back upon your senses. No matter how much you grasp the whole outside world, you cannot grasp the depth of inner reality. The superficiality of your intellectual level does not allow you to find the Logos, but you find instead idols which give you the answers, give you the possibility to organise the world, knowledge, the economy, the future, everything that can be understood and organised through fallen thought. you worship idols.

The level of fallen thought, however, is the only one in which you might encounter the Logos. At that level you encounter the presence of the Logos and the presence of idols on the same level. Of course this is not because the Logos and the idols are on the same level, but they are for you who thinks with fallen thought. On the level of fallen or reflected thought you find more easily a force that gives you everything pre-organised: knowledge, physical, mathematical, philosophical knowledge, ethics, logic, administrative capacity, and also politics, the judiciary, medicine, even art, religion, and metaphysics.

You are in a position to know this dazzling power, but you also have the ability to perform an act of freedom and reject the easy path of presuppositions and idols, to find the more difficult one of the Logos. But you are condemned to never finding the Logos without first being thrown into the reflected ‘reality’ of the world. That ‘reality’ is Ananke’s realm. Your doors of perception must be opened. There must be encounter. Eros must enter.

© John Dunn.

Cosmic Christ

Friday, 12 January 2024 at 21:03

Cosmic Christ

‘The word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory' (John 1:14) is an English translation that conceives only an image of the incarnation and ministry of Jesus in the past. Remove the past tense, however, and insert Mind for Word, and the text emphasises that Mind becomes flesh that dwells amongst us now.

The Mind becomes flesh and dwells among us, and we behold his glory.

The time-limited and historically provincial Jesus is thus restored to his true glory as the Cosmic Christ. The world that we behold is his glory, not the reflection back of some ready-made and pre-supposed, externalised idol.

The Word, in the context of John 1:1, is universally understood to mean the Logos. Given the better translation of Word, then the living thinking of Mind is the Logos, and the Logos is God and God is Love, the Cosmic Christ. Following my argument, we might then consider the Logos, the living God, as the living thinking of Mind, dwelling in rather than amongst us.


This notion of in, rather than amongst, was after all favoured by John:


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

© John Dunn.

Lincolnshire Knights Templar, graffiti and Lawrence of Arabia

Thursday, 11 January 2024 at 22:01

RAF graffiti

Lincolnshire Knights Templar, graffiti and Lawrence of Arabia

I have added below a few more words to the commentary for a forthcoming addition to my YouTube Video Channel.

The video records a motorcycle excursion that I made last Summer to the ruined tower of Temple Bruer, home to the Knights Templar in medieval Lincolnshire.

There are many examples of historical graffiti. Some of them are recent. Many were made in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and there are some with17th century dates. Temple Bruer has been a visitor attraction for many years.

There is graffiti everywhere, dating from the 1600s to the present time. I pick out just one of many for the purposes of this home page.

Three RAF Pilots left their initials here with a date of 1919. The RAF had only just been formed as an independent service a year earlier. These initials must have been those of personnel from the nearby RAF Cranwell Training College. You can walk across fields from there in an hour or so.

It is highly likely too that Lawrence of Arabia would have visited Temple Bruer. Under the pseudonym T. E. Shaw, he worked at RAF Cranwell from August 1925 to December 1926. As an archaeologist and author of a book about crusader castles, he would surely have ridden his Brough Superior to this historic Lincolnshire home to the crusading order of Knights Templar. However, he famously came to Cranwell seeking anonymity, so I suppose he wouldn’t draw attention to himself with graffiti. See an earlier video I made about Lawrence in Lincolnshire, entitled, rather long-windedly, T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, aka T. E. Shaw races a Bristol Fighter on his Brough Superior.

There’s also a considerable number of mason’s marks. Masons’ marks were used to identify the work of individual masons, when they were paid by piecework rather than by day rates. The marks were straight-line designs scratched on the surface of the stone. Just think, scratched in the 13th century!

As I leave this hidden corner of Lincolnshire, it’s hard not to think that the ruined then lost preceptory of the Knights Templar ended up as building material for the farm and farm buildings, barns and the like that surround the tower, and so remains all around here in re-purposed forms.

Such a history is here; such connections with the tumultuous events in the Holy Land of the Middle Ages. When you think about it all, well, it's just amazing isn't it?

© John Dunn.

Karl Marx and the Realisation of Self

Wednesday, 10 January 2024 at 21:40

A book still available on Kindle. Published in 2012, this book on the face of it is a million miles from my current position, and yet it was an essential step in the progress towards that position.

Karl Marx and the Realisation of Self

By suppressing the fact that Marx saw the ego as ‘the point of departure’ for all human understanding, the forces resisting individuation have turned him into a weapon against change. Marx was the champion of the individual, the freedom of the individual, but has been turned into an ideologue of the state. In opposition to Marx’s revolutionary ideas of individual freedom, capitalist interests have re-formulated Marxism as an ideology of the state, the underpinning theory of state capitalism.

So whilst the historical process of individuation has reached its zenith in the present era of corporate capitalism, the capitalist forces seeking to resist change are forced to resist individuation. In doing so, these forces maintain communal ethics, moralities of citizenship and‘old ways of life in general’.

The countervailing forces at capitalism’s disposal – educationalists, artists, dogmatic religious ideologues – might seek to maintain a communal ethic of selflessness, but they cannot resist history and necessity.

Marx postulated communism as the alternative to capitalism’s drab uniformity. It would be a selfish rather than a selfless aspiration of the workers; and nothing disturbs bourgeois sensibilities more than selfish workers.

Marx’s communism undermines all that workers are taught and led to believe by the ideological functionaries of capitalism. This book is written to add further disturbance to the bourgeois sensibilities that are inculcated in all our minds.



© John Dunn.