John Dunn

Taking my soul by surprise

Friday, 15 March 2024 at 22:07

The art of living is the art of exploration, beyond reality, beyond dreams

Taking my soul by surprise


The object of my thinking is always abstractness in need of reanimation - that is, what I have already thought must no longer be understood as a dead presupposition, something which can self-exude an existence apart from me, and without me, as if by magic. 



However, the reanimation I attempt each time, is never carried through, because abstractness is normally thought by my thinking activity, but not resolved. It seems always to be led back to the moment of its becoming abstractness but not to its pre-abstract, pure and unadulterated origin,the Logos, where true thinking arises.



I must descend into my soul and take it by surprise in its art of living, in the quivering of my spiritual life, where my thinking lives and grows so formidable as the vastness of time and of space. What is the limit of my living thinking? It is the obscure limit of my mind beyond which my spirit is ever exploring, beyond reality, beyond dreams, and to which it is ever returning.

 Seen from within my soul, this obscure limit demarcates my own non-being, the non-being of my own inward commotion, of the act by which I am to myself. It is not my non-being as something existing for others to recognise. It is the non-being which belongs to my thinking only; what I am not and must become, and which I bring into being. Any object of my thinking whatsoever can be no other than my own thinking; it is what I am thinking and is the object in my consciousness. My own non-being is the object to which I must counter-pose myself in order to be myself a reality.

© John Dunn.

Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike

Thursday, 14 March 2024 at 20:21

The old turnpike crosses the railway at Shippea Hill Station

Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike

Starting from Mildenhall, I followed the route of the Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike. Opened in 1828, this must have been one of the last turnpike trusts to be established. The trustees must have wanted a connection to Littleport and roads leading on to the ports of Wisbech and Kings Lynn, for exporting agricultural produce and importing raw materials of various sorts.

It was possibly so late because of the problems posed by constructing a road across the wide stretch of fenland to Littleport.

Dropping off the higher ground at the exaggeratedly named Kenny Hill (hardly a hill), the road is banked up for much of the way in an effort to keep it level and above shrunken fenland to either side.

From Kenny Hill the road follows the course of the Mildenhall Drain as far as the countyboundary with Cambridgeshire and Shippea Hill Station (named after nearby Shipea Hill, which rises to the dizzying heights of 0, yes, sea level!

From here the road to Littleport is dead straight, as the crow flies, but it undulates and bucks up and down over the shifting peat of the fens, following a narrow serpent-like contour, which winds form one side of the road to the other, each time lifting the road above sea level, before allowing it to sink again, up and down along it goes.

The rich agricultural land of Burnt Fen only exists because of the constant pumping of water into the drainage ditches and on to wider water-courses, such as the River Great Ouse which passes by Littleport.

The old Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike is now the A1101, and has the honour of being the lowest A road in the UK.

© John Dunn.

Resolution of nature in mind



Wednesday, 13 March 2024 at 22:38

“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” [Gen 1:26–28].








Resolution of nature in mind



If mind is the defining and differentiating factor of humanness, then who are the anti-humanists? They are the ones who would retreat before the forces of nature, who regard nature as an entity apart from mind with a magical self-expressed existence of its own. These are the idolators of our times and all times, and nature is the Urizen to whom they scrape and worship and sacrifice their children.



And yet… what is the historically ever more complete harnessing of the forces of nature by man, this progress and increase of the life of mind triumphing ever more surely over the adverse environment, conquering and subduing it; what is this but the empirical and external representation of the immanent eternal victory, the full and absolute victory, of mind over nature, of the immanent resolution of nature in mind? The spiritualisation of the world no less.


© John Dunn.

Fallen Angel

Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 20:08

Fallen Angels, Anselm Kiefer

Fallen Angel

Beginning is a constant, now, in active thinking.



We are all born fallen (Fallen angel tempted Adam and Eve).



Death, comes before life

.

The cosmic Beginning is the metaphor for man’s own Beginning.



The fall away from active thinking is that of the fallen angel, the Devil and the Devil’s children who live amongst us today. Adam and Eve were tempted to fall too, with the result that we are all born fallen.



What are all these falling metaphors driving at? The answer is that to exist outside of the constant, active, creative, Beginning, is to be subsumed into the one, i.e. the interminable equilibrium of Ananke that comes before the Beginning, the state of objectified ‘reality’, the ready-made nature into which we are seemingly dropped.



The saving grace is that this state of subsumption, this death, comes before the awakening, this life. The cosmic Beginning is the metaphor for man’s own Beginning.

© John Dunn.

Spiritualisation of the world



Monday, 11 March 2024 at 22:26

Spiritualisation of the world



My thinking would be inconceivable if I as the subject were not at the same time my object, and vice versa. The opposition is inherent to my self-concept. It is between me and myself. My difference and otherness belong wholly to me. I cannot express the opposition in any other way. My own identity is my own difference.



Both my being as subject and not-being as object are a synthesis, but the synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject. The synthesis is the REAL subject, which trumps the falsity of the pure abstract subject and the pure abstract object. I think of me and am thought of by me. The thought of me cannot escape from the thinking me. The synthesis is the concrete reality of my self-consciousness, which is not fact but being, living and eternal being, simply just being.



Past,present and future are realised in my living thinking. It is here that the path to freedom lies, in the reign of mind over nature and the progressive spiritualisation of the world.


© John Dunn.

Now all is different

Sunday, 10 March 2024 at 19:05

Now all is different

I once led a life that I truly did not live. I perceived only its sensory manifestations. By deceiving myself into believing that I lived, I did in fact die. My death in spite of my apparent existence began with the dying of thought into reflectivity and into abstractness. This give me the image of life, but not life itself.

Now all is different. My mind is all, now I am all. There is no process of thinking without me because thinking is me. My thinking is not mere activity but activity which is self-sufficient, and is me as a person. I realise myself as an object of knowledge.



When I envisage myself as the subject, then myself as the object is also conceived. Each is real since my thinking is real, but nothing is real outside my thinking, there is no being outside my thinking, only the abstract realm of darkness from which the children of Satan haunt the lives of the damned, i.e. those who have an image of life, but not life itself.

© John Dunn.

On evil and its eradication

Saturday, 9 March 2024 at 20:32

The Great Red Dragon, William Blake's depiction of purest evil

On evil and its eradication

The living thinking of my mind rises like a dawning sun rises. Such thinking has all the wisdom and love that flows as the light of the Logos into the cosmos. No hatred, or pain, or fear can exist before it. Its presence does not imply a struggle. It is everything.

The living movement of my thinking has no limit of space and time or external boundaries. In conceiving the universal I conceive myself as reality itself. Nothing in the living movement of my thinking is expelled to fall outside, inert and brute.

Outside there remains only the darkness inhabited by the children of Satan, the world of the material and graspable, where the innocents of Beulah are held in thrall. Only the dawn of the vivifying sun will cleanse the shadows of this evil.

What else is this evil but the contrary to the gain that I seek for myself? My mind's not-being is the darkness that must be extinguished by the rising sun. As I am thinking I am doing, bringing to life that which is not yet being, that which is before the perpetual Beginning. It is in that which is not yet being, the realm of Ananke into which angels have fallen, that my mind seeks fulfilment. The need to violate Ananke is the driving force of my being. Before the Beginning there is non-being, after the Beginning there is everything. This is the Creation; and it is always, for ever and ever.

My mind always confronts itself as its own negation. There is no respite from Ananke, who spurs me on from task to task, the providential pain goading me on to penetrate her non-being as the condition of my being. I am always the error (non-being) opposed to the true (the Beginning) which is the Creation.

Evil is at the heart of my reality because the Creation must always move beyond non-being. Evil is not a fixed reality opposed to a static mind. Evil is always there, but metamorphosing, driving me forward to be. Evil is the non-being that I must and will determine to be.

The ultimate purpose of my thinking’s transcendence is to transform evil into good, to dissolve the darkness of Ananke’s realm and let the light of the Logos shine through, incarnated as the power of Love.

Deceived by the children of Satan, I once conceived the world as other than myself who conceived it. I observed the world and its moral necessities as though it did not concern me. I proclaimed the unhuman mantra - 'freedom is the recognition of necessity’, where that necessity stood apart from me as a self-sustaining idol.

But that was before the Beginning, and now I survey the world as my own reality, there being no other. Unlike before, I cannot suppose the world outside the necessity of my own cosmic conception as though moral law did not concern me. The transcendent rationality of my own cosmic conception is my own law, my duty. This duty is the unity of the law of my own doing, which is the law of the universe. In other words, what I do is law and moral. This contrasts with my former immorality, with eyes only for my own interest, which separated me from the world, from its law and my law.

The formation of my moral consciousness as the realising of reality as self-conceived has deepened the spiritual meaning of my life. Spiritual fulfilment will come with the dawn of the vivifying sun, and the final eradication of Satan and his children from the darkest recesses of my psyche.

© John Dunn.