John Dunn

Of the mind rather than in the mind

Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 21:41

J. Gilman, Friedrich Nietzsche

Of the mind rather than in the mind

What is worshipping an idol? It is worshipping a dead thing, an inanimate thing, as opposed to worshipping the living God. Just because you cannot see your god, does it make of him any less an idol. God is of the mind rather than in the mind

God is dead, announced Nietzsche. Thought is dead is the implication of Nietzsche’s insight, that is thought that is believed to be a reflection of an objective world. Such thought upon thought accumulates in a storehouse of dead thoughts which we each call our own. These dead thoughts, which we later recover from the storehouse, are so many idols.

God is Love. Hence the need to exist in the medium of Love, to be in Love without cease. Active and creative thinking, living thinking, is the pathway of the Logos into the world - in the Beginning, always.

© John Dunn.

Love, without cease

Monday, 29 January 2024 at 20:15

Angelus Silesius

Love, without cease

“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”

To agree with the assertion made by Angelus Silesius is to accept that the I and the Logos live together or die together. There can be no presupposition, either one coming before the other; that would be to fall into idolatry, and the idolator’s world is dead. Once the world is dead, without form, void, dark, undisturbed and inevitable, then it is returned to Ananke as the One; and 1=0. So without presupposition, the Logos and the I must dwell one within the other for the world to live.

It is the world sold to us by Urizen and his followers that is dead. We feel apart from it, subject to it and beholden to it. Urizen’s offering is not the product of active and creative thinking, rather it is ‘reality’, separated from the divine, served up on a plate, take it or leave it. Living thinking, in contrast, is not the reflection of an objective world apart. Active, creative, living thinking is Love ‘in the Beginning’ always, breaking the equilibrium cycle always, breaking Ananke at each moment. Only that which is being created and still to be created is true, leaving that which was created as false. Thus the need to exist in the medium of Love, without cease, to be in Love. Lives that do not encounter Love, or worse, murder Love when he is encountered, are not fully human.

© 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.