John Dunn

Isis unveiled


Wednesday, 20 March 2024 at 12:34

The unveiling of a statue of Isis as a personification of nature, depicted as the climactic moment of an Isiac initiation, in an 1803 engraving by Henry Fuseli

Isis unveiled


Once I left the false standpoint of fallen thought I rid myself of a delusional slavishness to natural reality. The forms of nature are no longer my reality, desire, or thought. Instead, they are means for my thinking to become conscious of being. Nature might manifests as forms that feign life, but they are merely the sign of life. Life is never perceived by me, but only thought by me.



The common herd represents nature as concrete and actual reality. It ignores entirely the true character of thinking as absolute reality. Naturalism is the necessary consequence of such ignorance, a naturalism which is the fallen thought of fallen angels. Fallen thought is the conception of a reality which is the opposite, and nothing but the opposite, of mind. If my mind had such independent reality confronting it, I could only know it by presupposing it as already realised, thereby limiting myself to the role of simple spectator.



What is this apparent other-than-mind that so seduces the common herd? It alone is nature, one which fallen thought does not require to be deduced from anything. To fallen thought nature is itself the first principle. This is idolatry. The fallen angels worship a god apart, whereas God walks the Earth as Love. Love, the mystery that will have no explanation, is the Originatory Principle. 



As soon as I had rid myself of the illusion of a natural reality then this mysterious nature, impenetrable to the light of the intellect, appeared as the perpetual Beginning of my living thinking. Isis, the spirituality of the cosmos, was unveiled in all her purity as soon as I began to think of her in the concrete from which I had previously abstracted her. I can no longer be surprised by a natural reality, because it is I who posit it as an idea in the first place, and I know that the seeming solidity of nature is no less than the translucent inwardness of my living thinking.

© John Dunn.

Oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything


Tuesday, 19 March 2024 at 21:01

Oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything




By ‘my thinking is the Logos’ I mean thinking which is absolutely mine, in which the ‘I’ is realised. My thinking in the process of realising everything is my Beginning, always, and, therefore, the Beginning, always. My thinking is self-caused and therefore it is freedom. My thinking is Love. My thinking is the Originatory Principle, the mystery which will not be explained.



That of which I am thinking is a thing of nature. The thing of nature is one amongst many, in relationship to other things, which implies multiplicity, number. This indeed is the Creation, that which overcomes the oneness of Ananke’s realm of nothing.



My thinking, on the contrary, is realised in itself as other. It is therefore a relation with itself, an absolute, infinite unity, without multiplicity. In the Beginning, with the violation of Ananke, the oneness of nothing becomes the oneness of everything.



This contrasts with, on the one hand, any transcendental idealism like Plato’s, which has the ideal outside the mind, or the crudest materialistic naturalism on the other, which has everything outside the mind, or the most sacrilegious idolatry, which kicks its god upstairs. For were there to be a reality outside the infinite unity without multiplicity of my thinking, then there is no Beginning, there is no Creating, no being. And for being to be there must be Beginning always, the repeated violation of Ananke.

© John Dunn.

My thinking is the Beginning

Monday, 18 March 2024 at 21:12

My thinking is the Beginning

My thinking is the Beginning, the Absolute, the Logos and no less. It is not a thought, or a moment in my thinking, or my thinking now, for now is a moment always gone. It is my thinking, always. Anything less leaves matter outside of my thinking. How could my thinking be absolute if it has something outside it on which it is based? My thinking is the foundation of everything and has the whole within itself. Were my thinking not the process through which the cosmos is, then it would leave something outside it as a presupposition, which is the stuff of idolatry and mysticism, the chasm into which the Platonists, Berkeley, Kant, Fichte and Hegel ultimately fell. My thought comes not from nature and nature from the Logos, but rather my thinking is the Logos.


© John Dunn.

My infinite responsibility

Sunday, 17 March 2024 at 18:36

My infinite responsibility

To be a reality is essential, for I am not the passive receiver of earthly experience, but rather the only way to its fulfilment. I have changed from being a nature-dependent creature to being a free being whose moods are no longer the play of nature within me but rather the stirring presence of my spirit. I realise within nature my true state - the supernatural state.



Before the Beginning I saw the face of nature from without, as a thing before me, a pure abstract object, and my mind was limited by it and ruled by it. I conceived myself mechanically, in space, in time, without freedom, without value, mortal.But I found the other face of nature when, awaking from my idolatrous dream of a distanced materiality, I found nature itself within my own mind as the non-being which is life, the eternal life, which is the real opposite of immortal death.



Nature now is the eternal past of my eternal present, the iron necessity of the past in the absolute freedom of the present. Embracing nature in this non-idolatrous way, I recovered the whole power of my mind and recognised the infinite responsibility which lies in the use I make of it, rising above the mindless chatter of insects who are happy to live as though on the back of an unfeeling Earth. This had to be so, for each creature bound to earthly conditions waits for me to liberate it.

© John Dunn.

Littleport

Saturday, 16 March 2024 at 21:04

Harley Monument

Continuing my road trip along the A1101 (See also Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike in the Blog)

Littleport

Approaching Littleport, I’m climbing above the sea level of the fens up onto the Isle Of Ely.

The Mildenhall Burntfen Turnpike ends at the bridge. The next stage of my journey follows the route of the Littleport to Welney Turnpike of 1824, again a late arrival in turnpike history.

After crossing the bridge over the River Great Ouse, I left the modern A1101 which continues as a bypass around Littleport, to follow the old A1101, along Wisbech Road, through the heart of the village.

At its heart is the church of St George. Fine and lofty, the 15th century tower can be seen from miles around. Around the top is a brick parapet, and there aregood large Perpendicular bell-openings. At the base, on the south side,there is a mysterious doorway: a large arch is set into the outer edge of the tower, within which is a section of wall containing a much smaller door. It is rather odd – one suggestion I’ve seen is that there was originally a walkway through the tower which was subsequently walled in.

The legendary founder of Littleport was King Canute. A fisherman gave the king shelter one night, after drunken monks had denied him hospitality. After punishing the monks, he made his host the mayor of a newly founded village.

William Harley, father of the William Sylvester Harley who founded Harley-Davidson motorcycles in 1903, was born in Littleport in 1835: the connection is commemorated with a sculpture of a motorbike to the south of the churchyard. This monument was commissioned to celebrate the 100th birthday of the company in 2003.

Continuing through the village, I rejoined the A1101 where the bypass reconnects with the old turnpike route at a roundabout.

© 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.