John Dunn

A child alone at play

Saturday, 30 November 2024 at 22:14

A child alone at play is absorbed in the creation of a world that has no audience. Fanciful we say, merely childishness. Who knows which way the child will turn next,what harmonies disturb, what frail objects upset?

Śūnyatā,nothing, void or emptiness, the starting point, the nature of the Supreme Consciousness or Shiva. Śūnya, the word for zero, the Bindu beyond one and many and beyond human intellect. Sacred symbol of the cosmos in its unmanifested state, the point around which the cosmos is created, applied to the forehead. Śūnya, 0, the ultimate self-regulating system, the ultimate equilibrium. Even its symbol a circle is closed, admitting of no intervention. Yet an intervention was made, a breaking open of the circle. What was capable of a spontaneous act of such creativity, such immense childish frivolity?

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Wilful Frivolity

Friday, 29 November 2024 at 22:18

Wilful Frivolity

The figures emerged into life out of the cave’s rocks, cracks and fissures.‘Don’t forget’, said the guide, ‘the cave floor was much higher then. He would have crawled in here through the pitch-black darkness apart from the flame held in one hand from some sort of taper. With the other hand he created this artwork’. That is the cave art at Creswell Crags created some 15,000 years ago. So hidden and without apparent purpose and yet we struggle to impose a purpose upon it, our purpose. This was art not meant to be seen, let alone shared or sold. There was no name or personal mark even; no personal longevity or immortality. In modern terms it was a waste of time, a frivolous act. Were the gods invoked?

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Zarathustrian struggle

Thursday, 28 November 2024 at 21:32

Zarathustrian struggle

The struggle seeking expression beneath Ilyenkov’s cosmology was as old as religion and the cosmogonic dualism of spirit and matter lies deep in the oldest of beliefs. In Ahuru Mazda, Zarathustra recognised the Supreme Being, and prayers were raised to this creative deity in the presence of light, be it fire or the sun. The light and flame were symbolic of the truth sought in a reaching out to the Supreme Being. To participate in the Divine would be to free our spirit and escape the limitations imposed upon us by our earthly circumstances. The contesting force to Ahura Mazda was Angra Mainyu, or angry spirit, later personified as Ahriman, the Devil. Here was the destructive force, the force of darkness, which would tie us to this world, to matter.

This was the Zarathustrian struggle, the eternal cosmic struggle. The oppositional forces of light and darkness symbolise man’s struggle to free himself from the shaping forces of external reality and find from within his own internal resources the power to create something new where nothing existed before, the divine power to create something from nothing.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Cosmology of the Spirit

Monday, 25 November 2024 at 21:23

E. V. Ilyenkov

Cosmology of the Spirit

Despite this heavy qualification, it appeared to me that man’s unique role as the thinker might have some significance in answer to the question - ‘who am I?’ Ilyenkov certainly drew implications from Spinozism which caused his own Marxist materialism and necessitarianism to wobble. If not the primacy of mind, then Ilyenkov at least felt compelled to restore some equanimity between mind and matter in his Cosmology of the Spirit, which was written in the 1950s, and published posthumously only at the end of the 1980s, as it was too heretical to be published in the Soviet era. In Ilyenkov’s cosmology, thinking remains a part of the natural process of the motion of matter, conditioned by it but also reciprocally affecting it. It is in this reciprocity that Ilyenkov desperately seeks for signs of creative originality in the mind of man. Thought may be an attribute of matter, but it fulfils its necessary purpose by reason of its creativity.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

False grail

Saturday, 23 November 2024 at 20:20

I learned much from thinkers and questers along the way and was pulled in many directions. There was many a false path, but I found that no experience was wasted. I discovered that the much-acclaimed goal of individuation is a false Grail, which in reality is but another path of subsumption into the whole; and yet it seems that we must pass through this impasse before smashing the idols of our culture to discover the real path to truth. Beyond individuation, and here lies the paradox, the quest for the ‘I’ is about encounter; not only the encounters with other minds and thinkers along the way, but encounter as something fundamental to the very consciousness of the self in its relationship to the Divine.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Freed of totemic pronouncements

Friday, 22 November 2024 at 20:52

Freed of totemic pronouncements

Whilst trapped in the darkness we will experience slavery as freedom, in other words the ‘freedom’ to pursue actions prompted by others, human or machine. There are forces that have a political and economic interest inthis death of the self, the dehumanisers who do not want you to see the human as a disrupter of equilibria, but rather as a colluder serving the interests of their equilibrium.

The would-be escapee must first win a personal battle to save the ‘I’ or all is lost - forever. This is the point of this book, a quest for the Grail of our times, the answer to the question - what is the I? Or to put it more personally - who am I? It builds upon two of my previous books - Traditionalism: the Only Radicalism and Renaissance: Counter-Renaissance, and so continues to follow my break with Marxist materialism in a search for an original worldview, even a cosmic view of deeper significance, freed of socio-cultural influence, normative histories and the totemic pronouncements of selectively canonised prophets.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Shoot down the albatross

Thursday, 21 November 2024 at 20:36

Shoot down the albatross

Why did Dante chose Virgil to guide him out of Hell? There are many theories, but mine is this - that in Virgil’s Ecloguesa defiant Gallus defies the gods and reason with the words ‘Amor vincitomnia, et nos cedamus amori’ - ‘Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love’.

If my guides did not wholly explore the infinite depths of this simple truth, they at least possessed a shared motivation, which was to save the individual sovereign self from Spinoza’s grip on modern thought, even if they did not fully escape themselves. I learnt from these encounters that the all- conquering power of love will overcome kabbalistic Tikkun and Spinozism. Consciousness and new life will overcome the death of the self. To know this is to reject idolatry,shoot down the albatross of necessity and abandon the ship of fools.

And what is the answer to the Grail question? Once more John, be my guide.

‘Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God’ (1 John 3:1)

Child of encounter; son of LOVE.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.