John Dunn

Neither can history exist apart from me



Friday, 22 March 2024 at 21:48

Interventionist Demonstration (Manifestazione Interventista), 1914, by Carlo Carrà

I am past, present and futurism

Neither can history exist apart from me



Everything I know about the world is the being of my living thinking, not what is determinately thought and passed down from generation to generation as knowledge or history. The being of my living thinking is the Logos, or Originatory Principle, that thinks the whole of human thinking, never renouncing the source from which it arises. 


Nature and history appear to be two different types of reality, other than myself. The other than my mind, which is outside of my mind, appears to be nature; and
the other in my mind appears to be history. For example, the American continent is a natural fact, and the discovery of America by Columbus is an historical fact. Granted, historical facts exist within a socio-lawful framework, which every one who submits to the history must respect, and it is this law which establishes an absolute form of otherness, but nature and history are not different in themselves as facts. Nature and history coincide in so far as they imply a form of otherness from me who knows. This otherness is abstraction. The truth is that if nature and history are to have a concrete reality they cannot exist apart from the being of my living thinking.

© John Dunn.

Absolute I and absolute world


Thursday, 21 March 2024 at 20:52

Absolute I and absolute world



Even if I try to think of nature as a concrete reality, as an object in itself, the only object I can think is an aspect of me. The object is then no other than the life of my thinking, it is the absolute I. As such it is the ultimate reality. I may try and tap into it for separate objective knowledge, but ultimately I will find only the absolute I.



As the absolute, I have nothing to counterpose to myself and find all in myself. I am therefore the actual concrete universal. I am the absolute is, in so far as I affirm myself. Deprived of my internal causality I would be annulled, pulled down by the fallen angels. But in causing myself I, create a world which is the most complete that I can think, the absolute world.

© 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.