John Dunn

Eros always knew this

Sunday, 28 January 2024 at 21:28

Eros always knew this

When in Beulah, I confronted the World as something wholly apart, given and ready-made. My relationship with nature was conformity, dependence, and mystical submissiveness to ‘reality’. Faith arose, but in the lowest form - as faith in the physical fact. There was a token differentiation between the objects I confronted, but as I lived with faith in the physical fact, I lived too in thrall to the one reality of Ananke’s realm - and, as I now know, 1=0.

Now I grasp thoughts at their inception, rather than as reflections back from a presupposed ‘reality’.I hear the voices of angels. The potential for freedom lies in my successful reinstatement of the angelic voice into the process of thinking. Eros always knew this. The Logos and society, the world around me, is the product of active, creative, and living thinking. This echoes William Blake’s belief that ‘Jesus is the imagination’, not meaning that Jesus is imaginary in the fanciful sense, but rather that imagination, or mind, itself is the divine creator. This fits with my corrected translation of John 1,

In the Beginning is Mind, and Mind is with God, and Mind is God.

The angels enjoy the direct gaze of the divine creator. Each message to me from an angel is a differentiating act of creation, in a world otherwise received passively by perception.

© 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.