John Dunn

Creator into a discoverer

Thursday, 26 September 2024 at 21:34

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, on the canon

Creator into a discoverer

These apparent seekers of the mysteries, these writers, poets, philosophers and mystics, who apparently stood aloof from the day-to-day mundane world of rationality and reason, in the end sought to kill the mystery and believed that in all their self-seeking that they had actually closed the door on it.

In the recovery of a lost Totality, of the Total-Man, of the Absolute Self, of the Selbst of Nietzsche, of the Unus Mundusof Jung, they had turned the creator into a discoverer and, if the creative imagination is the defining element of humanness, then they were dehumanisers. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity was founded upon a belief that both the observer and connected phenomenon ultimately stem from the same source, the Unus Mundus, which means One World. Jung was the Spinozist par excellence.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The whole canon swept

Tuesday, 24 September 2024 at 21:52

Yes - even Jung

The whole canon swept

The roll call of Spinozists, not surprisingly, sweeps up the whole socio-cultural, literary and philosophical canon of the West. The canon of ‘rebels’ duped by Luria’s rehashed kabbalism is long but, in my new enlightened context, a few of its members come randomly to mind: Jung, Nietzsche, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley, Baudelaire, Blake, Steiner, Marx and Engels, Heidegger and more, my own hitherto heroes and villains alike and yes, even Fichte, Coleridge and Gentile.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Alchemical lie

Monday, 23 September 2024 at 20:23

Spinoza at the root of the problem

Alchemical lie

Our socio-economic and socio-cultural environment is steeped in kabbalism, Freemasonry and Spinozism, making it almost impossible to escape, achieve freedom and full humanness. The process of individuation, the Absolute I, the arrival at the ‘I am I’, call it what you will, do not oppose assimilative Tikkun, they comply with it, they are it. Opposition to assimilative Tikkun is not individuation, the Absolute I or the I am I. To believe such a thing is to fall into the Spinozist trap. The whole alchemical way is a lie and its adherents, consciously or not, arethe participants on one side of an unspoken global war that is routing a feeble and dehumanised opposition.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Prometheus enchained

Sunday, 22 September 2024 at 22:03

Nicolas-Sébastien Adam's Baroque marble sculpture Prometheus Chained

Prometheus enchained

In the Grail quest and all the apparent life journeys, there is always an obsession with ‘return’ and, in particular, a return to wholeness, whereas this is the very opposite of what it means to be human. To be human is to be a disrupter, an over-turner of equilibria. The human mind does not abide by the laws of nature - Dante recognised that much. This is the very mystery of mind.

With Steiner, I had finally read myself into a black hole. I realised that the road, in my case the very long road, to individuation was nothing other than Spinozist. Paradoxically, individuation is the ultimate goal of Spinozism. It is the fulfilment of Tikkun. Individuation on the one hand, and re- assimilation into the original Substance on the other hand, appear to be contradictory standpoints, but they are not. They are one and the same thing. It is as though Prometheus kept re-chaining himself to the rock.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Lost solipsistic self

Saturday, 21 September 2024 at 21:30

Julius Evola

Lost solipsistic self

Gentile may have been right to insist that the pure act must be an act of creation in itself, reflective of first creation. To this extent ‘reality is a tale told by a thinker,’ but perhaps it does not signify everything after all. There is a flaw in the argument and Evola felt uneasy with it, in the same way that I had identified the kabbalism in Hegel.

It seems to me that this solipsism, this stage of individuation, this conflation of the 'transcendental I' with the Creator God, had to be reached repeatedly before the reintegration of the soul became possible.We had to establish that it is active, creative thinking that defines the individual as human, as opposed to the passive thoughts that accompany arbitrary and externally driven sub-human activity. But this ‘truth’, this ‘gnosis’, found within the human individual, is in danger of being treated as the very Substance that Fichte, Gentile, Steiner et al sought to escape, but in which the solipsistic self ends up losing itself.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Cosmological individualism

Friday, 20 September 2024 at 21:54

Giovanni Gentile

Cosmological individualism

The Creation was not the one-off event which kicked off time. Such nonsense is the scientific language of the Big Bang, a conjuring trick based on the ‘rabbit in the hat’ deception that something now exists that did not exist before. Creation is Logos ‘is now and ever shall be’. And Gentile knew at least that creation is now in thinking. We ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ as though the answer were held outside of us, in the mind of a priest or guru, when all the time we are the meaning. We draw upon the cosmic pool of thoughts as Steiner said, but that cosmic pool was not a one-off creation event in some infinitely distant past to which only a clairvoyant can reach back. Rather, the cosmos is ‘now and ever shall be’, in thinking. ‘Who am I?’ It seems that I am not determined by the world, but am rather a determiner of the world and even the cosmos. God is in me. I am deified in some way. Elevated to one of the Trinity - there from the beginning. Here is the cosmological individualism with which to oppose the mind-forged manacles of Lurianic Tikkun and Spinozist determinism.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Alpha and Omega

Thursday, 19 September 2024 at 22:05

Alpha and Omega

In giving man a fulcrum status to the future of the cosmos Steiner is conflating, or confusing, purpose with meaning. In being granted this necessary purpose, man becomes an adjunct to cosmic evolution, a mere ‘apparatus’. Steiner is in danger of returning man to the passivity of serving Spinozistic ends.

Given the times in which he lived, it is hardly surprising that Steiner was smitten withthe notion of evolutionary progress. Even if he had rejected Darwin in favour of the morphogenetic principles of Goethe, progress across time was central to Steiner’s cosmography. The ‘elevation’ of man to an instrument of evolutionary progress is purposive. It might nudge us towards an answer to the question - ‘who am I?’, but if we are to discover meaning, it will not be in purpose.

I am brought back to Giovanni Gentile because the notion of evolutionary time as a progression, linear time, in Gentile’s terms, is an abstract (or presuppositional) rather than a concrete truth. I am also brought back to the Gospel of John for timeless expressions of the cosmic truth.That which was ‘in the beginning’, the ‘Word’ or Logos in John 1:1-4 recurs in Revelation 22.13.

I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.