John Dunn

This inner core

Thursday, 24 October 2024 at 21:58

This inner core

But what is this love? Some insist repeatedly that it is derived from agape, but this has nothing to do with love; it is ‘do-gooding’ or charity which was the word in the Bible where the meaning of love was lost in translation. Love is internalised. It comes from the inner core of man. It comes from the God within. Define it? It cannot be defined. Here lies the mystery. If you are looking for mystery in your life, then here it is. There are no criteria by which love can be defined. It is this inner core of the individual that Jesus saves.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The authentic moment

Wednesday, 23 October 2024 at 22:09

The authentic moment

I am aware that in this idea of trumping God, or building God, I am in danger of succumbing to a polarity of thinking. Deification of the human may be the opposite pole to Spinoza’s Absolute Substance, but it is polarity nevertheless and thus Spinozist. In order to escape this trap let us reassess some of the recently introduced themes and then ask - where do these themes come together? First of all the themes:

• To remain distinct from God 


• To pursue Evola’s point and trump God by somehow internalising Him 


• The freedom to choose 


• The need for creativity and constant renewal 


• The love encounter - the authentic moment when nothing else matters

The themes come together in John’s Gospel and the reconfiguring words of Jesus of Nazareth. Reconfiguring because Jesus confronted the Jews with a cosmological understanding that overturned old certainties. This rebirth of consciousness was centred on the love encounter and this love encounter is dependent upon the inner core of humanness. It is not dependent on law, be it natural necessity or man-made such as Marxian historical necessity, which is to be subject to externalities.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Creation is always

Tuesday, 22 October 2024 at 21:51

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Creation is always

The chance encounter, love, has no pre-existence. God is love and love is God, but there is no need for the God metaphor in the sense of needing to define an object as pre-existing knowledge. To define God in such a naive way is nothing short of idolatry. Creation is always now. Gentile recognised this. Nothing pre-exists creation. Nothing begets the creator. Coleridge thought that those individuals who acted at the creative level of the ‘secondary imagination’ attained a God- like power.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Becoming more conscious

Monday, 21 October 2024 at 22:22

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Becoming more conscious

I would not say that in trying to become divine we search within ourselves for the Nietzschean superman. We have already emphasised the need to be more human, not super- human, or Übermensch (beyond-man). We become more divine by becoming more conscious, more human. By Coleridge’s definition, we exist through most of our lives in a dead state - a sub-human state, i.e. not thinking or creating, but rather accepting the pre-existing. We live at the frozen pole, afraid to shoot the albatross. The implication is that there is an alternative, a resurrected state, a fully humanised state. The implication also is that we can know an object when the object is neither found nor discovered by our thought as existing before we began to know, i.e. we can truly create - and in Evola’s and Rilke’s terms this means creating God.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

As bees collect honey

Sunday, 20 October 2024 at 21:50

Rainer Maria Rilke

As bees collect honey

The only way to remain outside of God, distinct and separate from God, is to trump Spinoza by creating God, in effect, trumping God. In his 1925 work Essays on Magical Idealism, Julius Evola declared that ‘God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine’. The youthful Evola was onto something here. He was rejecting God as a presuppositional object of idolatry, locating the Divine instead in the mind of man. I sense too that this was something Rainer Maria Rilke was expressing in his Letters to a Young Poet when he wrote of God - ‘As bees collect honey together, so we fetch the sweetness out of everything and build Him’. Notably, Rilke added parenthetically to this ‘(so long as this comes about through love)’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Love belongs over here

Saturday, 19 October 2024 at 21:49

Eros kisses Psyche

Love belongs over here

Nothing is extinguished in the human personality’, emphasised Tomberg. So if weare not to be extinguished in the oneness of Spinozist Substance, and if we are not to be lost in the oneness of a Fichtean or Gentilean ego, how is the apartness or the consciousness of mankind to be preserved?

If consciousness and mind cannot be subject to rational explanation, then the answer to this question will not be found in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid. Love is the only starting point of such mysteries of body and soul. It is a dizzying reflectiveness without reference points. I am not referring to love in the agape giving sense; I mean unrelieved sickness and nausea, Eros, sexuality, destructive lust. To be stuck in the domain of the problematical and the objectively valid is to be enveloped in assurance and certainty. And yet what are the criteria of true love? There are none. Criteria only exist in the order of the objective and problematical. Criteria, those presuppositions, belong over there, with them, ‘the they’. Love belongs over here, with me as an individual and the mystery.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

No purposive power

Friday, 18 October 2024 at 21:59

E. V. Ilyenkov

No purposive power

This is not to say that consciousness is to be understood as an adjunct to cosmic evolution per se, i.e. mankind at ONE with the Logos in carrying out the work of the latter. This is where we left Steiner. This is wherethe theories of Ilyenkov and Vernadsky ended up, with man as central to the evolutionary stage of the Noosphere. These were all Spinozist theories in the end - Ilyenkov’s openly so - arguing that man exists to serve some purpose greater than himself, repeatedly introducing a passivity into man’s existence. This is all wrong. Man’s power is not purposive, it is unconditional. If consciousness and conscience define what it means to be human, then man is the chooser of his own purpose.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.