John Dunn

Riding with the Knights Templar

Saturday, 27 January 2024 at 21:57

Newly published on YouTube

Riding with the Knights Templar

Join me as I ride my motorcycle along a quiet Lincolnshire lane to seek out an architectural treasure with connections to the Knights Templar of the Middle Ages.

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

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.

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

As one of the few Templar sites still to have standing remains it is a rare survivor.

NOTE: the source of the computer-generated image of Temple Bruer in its heyday is Heritage Lincolnshire’s website https://www.heritagelincolnshire.org/explore/historic-sites/temple-bruer-knights-templar-preceptory-tower

© John Dunn.

Dictates of the angels

Friday, 26 January 2024 at 21:06

Dictates of the angels

Who cares whether William Blake consciously used metaphors or not, he was trying to express a reality that is lost to the common thought of innocents. The reality he attempted to share is the living thought that arises simultaneously with sensory perception, but which is lost and seemingly reflected back in the form of a pre-existent ‘reality’.

I am under the direction of messengers from Heaven daily and nightly…. But if we fear to do the dictates of our angels and tremble at the tasks set before us, if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears or natural desires! Who can describe the dismal tortures of such a state. (Letter Blake to Butts 1803)

To accept passively the lost inner content of the falsely assumed pre-existent ‘reality’ is to be blind and deaf to the messengers from Heaven, the living thinking from which all in the cosmos springs. By responding to the dictates of our angels, Blake saw the reality born of active creative endeavour, rather than a passive acceptance of the seemingly given and ready-made all around us. The metaphor of the dictates is a valiant attempt at describing the incarnation of the Cosmic Christ, the perpetual Beginning of living thinking.

© John Dunn.

Escaping the animal realm

Thursday, 25 January 2024 at 21:16

Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the sea of fog

Escaping the animal realm

Now the world has no existence in my absence. I have escaped the animal realm to possess a human relationship to the world around me. This human relationship is the Beginning, for which the cosmic Beginning is but a metaphor. The beginning is the proactive element, the imaginative element, which nature cannot produce, and is the product of my mind alone. Imagination is the violation of Ananke; it is Love. It is Love without cease, it is the perpetual Beginning.

My perception has an additional component which lifts me above an animal-like relationship to the world around me. Vision for me is reality, not the simple cataloguing of sense impressions as the psychologists maintain to be true. I possess a proactive element, an imaginative element, which is something that nature cannot produce. Thus these words of William Blake are my reality.

I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would a window concerning a sight; I look through it and not with it.

© 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.