John Dunn

“Whoever is a Seraph, that is a lover…”

Wednesday, 24 January 2024 at 21:38

“Whoever is a Seraph, that is a lover…”

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote in his Oration on the Dignity of Man that “Whoever is a Seraph, that is a lover, is in God and God is in him; even, it maybe said, God and he are one.”

I was ignorant of the living power of thinking until I was awakened, through encounter, to receive it with the impetuous of a self-giving resurrection. I have set so much store by encounter and the life-changing impact that it can have. A chance encounter certainly has implications for eternity. I have written about this from the point of view of one who has been awakened,but who were they on the other side of those encounters? Need they have been awakened fully human beings themselves? Or were their bodies occupied by the Seraphim; and if so, what of this metaphor?

Might it be that the lasting impact of an encounter is not so much a transfer of ‘knowing’ from one being to another, but rather an awakening of something already present in the newly humanised individual. The ones in whom the Seraphim were ‘present’ were catalysts for change. They brought forth the flower whose potential was already present in the seed implanted in me; they added the water so to speak to an arid land. This is a way of saying that the Logos was never something apart, but rather resided within as the divine destiny whose fulfilment was never inevitable.

© John Dunn.

Living thinking: the truth, the Logos, the perpetual Beginning

Tuesday, 23 January 2024 at 20:52

Cosmos in your head by Kuiantia

Living thinking: the truth, the Logos, the perpetual Beginning

No objective reality exists in opposition to my thinking. If such a thing as an objective reality exists, it does so because it already rises up as my thinking. Does this not mean that the ‘I’ is prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway? The answer is yes… in this sense the ‘I’ is an abstraction, but only if the ‘I’ and its thoughts are considered to be something complete, done and dusted for all time, before it comes up with the Logos as another idea. Such an ‘I’ would be lost in the dead, indiscriminate world of Ananke; such an ‘I’ would be subsumed in the Onebefore the Beginning. That ‘I’ would be a product of dead thought, or, to put it another way, it would be an abstraction, nothing.

The real, concrete ‘I’ exists only in my active thinking. My thinking can have no predecessors. All past, all futures exist now in my thinking. My thinking is the Beginning, always, the perpetual Beginning. My thinking is the truth, the Logos, in the Beginning.

Living thinking is active, ‘in the beginning’ always, breaking the equilibrium cycle always, breaking Ananke in perpetuum. Only that which is being created and still to be created is true, leaving that which was created as false, hence the need to violate Ananke without cease, hence the role of Eros, the Originatory principle, the Beginning, always.

Thus the need to exist in the medium of Love, without cease, always to be in Love. Unless this be so, all would return to the false, dead realm of Ananke, as it was before the Beginning, before ‘be’ing, before, Logos, God, Love.

The statement by Angelus Silesius can be redeemed, as long as there is Love.

“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.

Active creator: Logos or me?

Monday, 22 January 2024 at 21:44

Active creator: Logos or me?

What does it mean to say that the truth is something I create? Truth never confronts me as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’. The truth is the Logos, the foundation of all. The Logos is also known variously as the Word, Christ, God, Love, as well as the Truth. To continue then, to say the Logos as something I create is akin to the words of William Blake, that ‘imagination is God’.

Here I pause and wonder at the proposition of the Logos being ‘something I create’. The ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway? I am in a damned if I am, or damned if I’m not scenario, because if the ‘I’ does not precede the Logos, the Logos exists without the ‘I’. In either case the ‘I’ as active creator is lost. Blake’s imagination, under the above logic, turns out not to be God. The Logos stands external to the individual as an object to be idolised. Can the following statement by Angelus Silesius be redeemed in any way?

“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.

Truth never confronts me as external

Sunday, 21 January 2024 at 20:29

Truth never confronts me as external

Truth is not something external to me to be won by following a given tradition. Such an external ‘truth’ is the demiurge, the Urizen of Blake. Truth is something that I create and it is this creation that dignifies me. It is a condition that the common man partakes of unaware,constantly degrading it in the series of trifles of which his existence is woven, which, in turn, condemn him to his own unfreedom.

Rising above the condition of the common man means that I must overcome the interminable series of esoteric mirages to realise that initiation has only one source, Love. This Love, this Christ, is certainly not the mystical or gnostic Christ or that of the religionists, which is really the demiurge, the given mirage of ‘truth’ that is external to us, but rather the Cosmic Christ, the metaphysical principle of absolute individuality and freedom.

How can the one source be, at the same time, the principle of absolute individuality? Surely being in thrall to the one means the opposite of individuality and freedom. The answer lies in the statement above, that the truth is something that I create. Truth never confronts me as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’, an idol. The one source therefore is something personal to me, existing in a state of mutual dependence with me. I will leave you to ponder the words of Angelus Silesius once more, which are pertinent to my point.

“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.

Eros demands that we deny the failed architect

Saturday, 20 January 2024 at 17:28

Deny Urizen! (Blake's depiction of the demiurge)

Eros demands that we deny the failed architect

It is no surprise that man’s concepts of God equate Him to Love and Creator. A fully human life is one of love and creativity. An innocent life devoid of love and creativity is less than human. The creative imagination is central to the conception of God and what it means to be human; and an ‘imagination’ untouched by Love is a misnomer.

The Creator is not an entity apart, an all-knowing God who controls the affairs of man from across a divide. To conceive of such a distanced entity is to revere a demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter. By implication, this would be to make of the Old Testament’s Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser ofthe World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault. Christian religionism has carried over the worshipping of an idolised demiurge from the followers of an idolised Jehovah, which makes it idolatrous Devil Worship.

God is the Human Imagination. Instead of being saved by a distanced Christ, be saved through the salvation of your own awakened imagination You must be your own Christ, the Christ narrative made personal narrative, or you will be less than human; whereas to be more human is to be more divine.

© John Dunn.

Burst the straitjacket of closed systems

Friday, 19 January 2024 at 21:24

Burst the straitjacket of closed systems

Just as Eros, the primordial god of Creation and Life and Orphic symbol of the divine likeness of man, broke out of the Cosmic Egg to disrupt the goddess Ananke’s equilibrium of Chaos, I too can break the rules. I can break out of the straitjacket of closed systems be they religious, economic, Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalist, Marxist and more.

To accept a system as closed, to accept freedom as necessity, is to withdraw into nature, to return to Mother Nature, to Ananke and an amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being. Closed systems are the pathways to entropic death. The systems I compose for myself can neither be closed at their beginning nor at their end.

Each breakout from a closed system is an echo of the Orphic myth of Eros, be this my break with the womb, innocence or animal nature (Earth Mother). Each of these and more is a cosmic egg to be smashed. Each break is both an act of violation and creativity, ultimately prompted by Love. Each is an act of violation, ending the cycle, penetrating the egg, giving rise to birth and new life. Each response to Love is a death and resurrection of man in the image of God.

To the ones living a fully human life of love and creativity are opposed those who lead a sub-human existence without love, who never make the break from Mother Earth and Animal Nature. These are the ones who worship the One, who promote the closed system, be it Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalist, Marxist and more.

This is the divide of all ages that is masked by the politics of Right and Left, which are two sides of the same coin. The real and only meaningful opposition is between those whose banners bear the symbols of love and creativity and those devoid of love, life and humanity who would have us return to the One, the ‘amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being’.

© John Dunn.

Lincolnshire Knights Templar, from a medieval military order with a global reach

Thursday, 18 January 2024 at 21:37

Digital reconstruction. Source: Lincolnshire Heritage website


Please find below the text commentary in support of a video that I recorded last Summer.

I plan to publish the video to YouTube in the next week or two, where it will be seen on my YouTube Channel.

Lincolnshire Knights Templar, from a medieval military order with a global reach

I’m just leaving the A15 Sleaford to Lincoln road to follow a lane to a place with connections to the medieval Crusades in the Holy Land.

What’s that got to do with a quiet lane in Lincolnshire you might be asking? Stay with me.

Thanks for joining me on the ride today, it’s good to have your company.

(Show captions “A like, subscribe and share would be most welcome”)

(Show map)

South of Lincoln, I’m in an area of open agricultural land with extensive views, lost villages, and isolated churches.

This is a strange lane. It appears to have been deliberately planted with an avenue of trees, relatively recently, the trees are not large.

My lane veers off left here, but Warren Lane, now a bridleway, carries straight on to a small isolated church, the church of St John, at a place where five lanes meet.

Still I follow the tree lined lane.

There’s the farm I’m looking for, up ahead, on the right.

Here it is… or is it? Looks like I’ve turned too soon. There’s definitely a bridleway through the farm here, but that’s not what I’m looking for. There looks to have been much recent housing development here too that’snot on my map.

I’ll shuffle back and look again.

Here it is, the track past Temple Farm.

Did you see that tower on the right?

It’ll come into view again soon.

There it is. That’s what I’ve come to see, the great tower of the Preceptory of the crusader knights, known as the Knights Templar.

Let’s take a walk.

The Templars were military monks who established a Europe-wide network of preceptories, which were religious houses from which they administered their estates and raised funds to support their crusader work in the Holy Land.

Wow, this is an impressive piece of medieval architecture, standing here, all alone, in this farmyard.

The tower is the one to the fore in this mock-up from the Heritage Lincolnshire website. (add Link)

This surviving 13th century tower once formed part of a great Templar church, the most important outside London.

It was attached to a circular church that replicated circular Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Parts of the circular nave were still standing in 1726 as shown here. There is no visible trace of it now.

The size of this truncated tower gives you some idea of the scale of the former intact church in its heyday,

It’s one of the few Templar sites still to have standing remains. A rare survivor.

This ground floor probably served as a side chapel or chapter house.

That’s a grave cover of a knight excavated from the farmyard.

On the floor lies the excavated section of a stone pillar that once stood elsewhere, most probably in the lost circular nave.

That decorated stonework is the base to an altar that stood against the wall where now rubble is exposed.

To the right of the altar, just as in most medieval churches, is the stone basin used for washing holy vessels used during the Mass.

Those small arches known as blind arcading once had columns running down to the ground, between which were seats for the priestly knights. You can make out the column bases next to the grave cover.

There’s the blind arcading, with an entrance to the spiral staircase on the right.

Who knows what this room was used for. You guess is as good as any one's.

That’s the remnant of a further spiral staircase that once went up to a floor above.

The roof dates from the early 20th century, when the tower was saved from further decay and made watertight.

Before then it was open to the elements.

There’s graffiti everywhere. Some recent, others much older.

Temple Bruer has been a visitor attraction for hundreds of years.

There’s Thomas Lancester, who made his mark in 1827.

C. Robertson, Navenby, joiner; and is that 1817 underneath his name?

Annie Glasier, 1872.

The initials I R from 1782

And is that date 1688?

Also,three RAF Pilots who 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.

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.

(On screen) 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. Link below.

So there you have it, the Temple Bruer Tower.

Such a history is here; connections with the tumultuous events in the Holy Land of the Middle Ages.

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, and so remains all around here in re-purposed forms.

By the end of the 13th century the popularity of the Knights Templar was waning and they were beginning to be viewed with suspicion. They were accused of misconduct and corruption and their arrest was ordered. In 1308 William de la More, the Preceptor of Temple Bruer and the Grand Prior of all England, was arrested at Temple Bruer along with his knights and imprisoned at Lincoln.

The Order was suppressed in 1312 and their property passed to the Knights Hospitaller, until the suppression of the monasteries in about 1540.

But in their heyday, the Knights Templar, from a medieval military order with a global reach, would have ridden out from here to inspect their farm holdings in the countryside for miles around, and here, on this Lincolnshire lane, I’m following in their tracks.

When you think about it all, well, it’s just amazing isn’t it?

Thanks for riding with me today, if you’ve enjoyed the trip, please Like, subscribe, perhaps even share, and I’ll then let you know when I’m next out and about.

For now, I’m done.

© John Dunn.