John Dunn

Extract from Flowering Rifle

Wednesday, 18 May 2022 at 20:12

Extract from Flowering Rifle

Dr John Dunn 2022.

I'm taking a break from writing, the website and my other run-of-the-mill activities, choosing instead to do a little travelling.

So, whilst out on the road, I'll catch up with my reading of Roy Campbell's great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War, Flowering Rifle.

I'll certainly be adding a few lines to the 'Thought piece' reading, see here.I'll work on an explanation of the lines added from the poem sometime later. For now here is another extract for your delectation and education.

John Dunn ©

And when I Bolshevize for Royal Favour
Among her modern Southeys, henna-tressed,
By watering down the Vodka like the rest,
May my right hand lose cunning, flinch, and waver,
Salaaming there for baksheesh with their best,
Who’ll call you honest, daring, fearless, bold,
For blacking boots and doing what you’re told,
If only you unclench that “no” to life
And wish your Father hadn’t took a wife,
If only you renounce all Faith and Vision
Foresentencing your manhood to derision.
For King’s Gold Medals when I strive to please
Their winning will require a sterner test,
No defrocked Scoutmaster could Tupper these
That jingle with the Cross upon my chest:
When Britain and her poets stand for causes
That aren’t foredoomed by foul subhuman crime
They’ll change their present sanctions to applauses
And own me for the prophet of my time,
Since the whole trouble with the other chaps is
Whatever cause they flunkey for collapses
However well it flourished at the time:

What went before; but a small sample

Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 21:27

Anton Bruckner: a precursor

What went before; but a small sample

Dr John Dunn 2022.

A small blog transferred to the Archive, but an important one, and one that could do with further development and expansion. It gives a taste of the precursors.

It is about the catalysts to the awakening, variously this might be described as the beginning, or my awakening.

But these alone were not the light, but rather witnesses to the light. They contributed to bringing about what was to come, but as glimmers they were portents of the future.

Portents yes, important yes, but before the beginning, which is the critical point. In my own mythological terms each existed in the realm of Ananke, the cosmos of 1 =0. (see One nothing)

Precursors

“They were precursors to the light, not the light, but each bore witness of that light.”

John Dunn ©

Devoid of Love

Monday, 16 May 2022 at 19:54

Blake's Urizen. 'And Urizen cast the net of debt over all.'

Devoid of Love

Dr John Dunn 2022.

The fall into the objectified world needs a symbolic expression; that expression was the fallen angel, the fall of Satan.

Satan fell and dragged the people of the world along with him into the sub-human existence of Beulah. Beulah? Symbolic of dumb contentment.

This is the symbolism explored in the first of two blogs to be archived today, Devoid of Love. In the second archived blog, Contentment, the distinction between symbol and reality becomes blurred. There are those who lead the dumb masses into blind contentment. There are those whose only longing is ‘just to be happy’. Are there children of the fallen angel? Well there are those who hide amongst the innocents and feed off the innocents.

Devoid of Love

“Satan fell into the objectivised world, to become god of this world, and Adam and Eve and their issue worshipped Satan as the god Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.”

“And the children of Satan led men and women into Beulah with the promise of happiness to come, into the land of false innocence,that is innocence devoid of Love, from which arises the constant and nauseating refrain… ‘we just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…’”

Contentment

“The children of Satan led the innocents out of themselves with the promise of happiness to come …into Beulah. “We just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…”, the innocents droned on and on.”

“And the children of Satan led them into debt, and with this came the objectivisation of past and future; the future extracted from the present and the cost of the past born by the present.”

To be...

Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 21:40

To be...

Dr John Dunn 2022.

Find below extracts from a group of related blogs that I have recently transferred to the Archive.

They are related by their concern with;

. what was before being?
. how being came to be
. what is being

This building of the archive is all about pulling writings together for future publication. I am at the early stages, however patterns have long been forming. The challenge is getting theses across to the reader.

One nothing

However, would not that state, that everlasting equilibrium, be a single nothingness, an all-embracing oneness?

We have the paradox of one equaling nothing.

You might say that before the beginning there was not nothing, but rather there was one.

Beginning, always

How do we get from no-thing to some-thing?

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.

Before the beginning there was nothing and 0 = 1.

With the beginning the infinite space of nothing was bounded.

Forthe one has no past but is created in the eternity of the present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future.

There is only beginning, always.

Living thought as Logos

In the light of my current thinking, here is my own translation of John 1 - 5.

1In the beginning is the living thought, and the living thought is with God, and the living thought is God. 2 He is with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things are made; without him nothing is made that is made. 4 In him is life, and that life is the light of all mankind. 5 Thelight shines in the darkness, and the darkness is not overcoming it.

Beginning, always 2

The sons of Adam are born into a fallen state, i.e. the reflected and objectivised world.

Satan tempted Christ to come over to the objectivised world, where power might be exerted over a temporal realm. The rejection of Satan is the rejection of death and an acceptance of the beginning, always.

This time as as a personalised narrative

Satan tempted Christ to his realm, where power might be exerted over a temporal world; you know, stones into bread, defying gravity, ruling over nations. Christ’s rejection of Satan was an assertion of the point Imade above, that there’s nothing outside my thinking, that is, nothing but death.

Being: what is it?

The adoration followed the birth of Love; for to love is to worship. Being is active thinking, the Logos and Love. To be is to worship.

© John Dunn.

Questionable

Saturday, 14 May 2022 at 21:05

Johann Angelus Silesius, 1624 - 1677

Questionable

Dr John Dunn 2022.

Pulling material together to be shaped somehow into a work for future publication has entailed the saving of the following two blogs from January this year.

They are about our relationship with the Logos. What is the Logos?

I quote from my ‘Thought piece’, The Mythology. “Love: variously Logos, God, the Word, the Cosmic Jesus, living thought, creativity.”

God, or Logos, is Love. Is Love therefore, where immanence is to be found? Is Love where transcendence is to be found?

I suppose the critical point about these transferred blogs is that they leave questions for further rumination.

I note in both blogs that Silesius ruminated in the 1600s and concluded that transcendence and immanence were to be found within, to the point where he could say - “I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”

Unattainable transcendence

So where is the concrete reality?

It can only be in active thought.

But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.

What is thought before the fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?

Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?

Where the immanence?

The objectified Christ was murdered, the saving Christ was resurrected.

The objectified Christ was crucified, the resurrected Christ lives on as living thought, active thought; a mystery beyond understanding, but revealed as living thought.

But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.

What is thought before the Fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?

Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?

And where is immanence lived? In Love?

© John Dunn.

More St Maximus-led thoughts

Friday, 13 May 2022 at 21:02

More St Maximus-led thoughts

Dr John Dunn 2022.

I have commenced the task of pulling my most recent writings (blogs etc) together with a view to compiling them into a future publication.

What follows here is a further set of blog entries prompted by the writings of St Maximus, the principal theme here being selfhood.

Arguably,most people never achieve selfhood. They go through lives as empty shells, docile to the point of accepting the world into which they are thrown at birth as a ready-made entity.

St Maximus grappled with this issue, and his writings added a new dimension to my own thinking on the matter of the self.

The self

“For example, Peter, John and Paul are human beings and being a rational animal is an essential characteristic of such humanness. Rationality is essential for being the entity a human being; necessary, but not sufficient to be a self.”

“The essential characteristics are the forms which exist by themselves, while the self indicates a someone of those forms, i.e. someone, the self, who carries the forms in the concrete sense.”

Love and the true self

Most people are never awoken from their petty deluded lives; partly because they never think, partly because their delusions are fed and maintained by others.

Most people never experience love, and by that I mean real love, real painful passion. As a consequence the key to awakening is never turned. Love is all.

“The point at which the deluded individual recognises that he is divinely interconnected with another being’s true self is Love.”

“Love transcends the deluded state inwhich one or both or more true selves are enshrouded, and establishes a relationship of true selves, a communion, however fleeting, during which they more closely track the divine intention laid out for them.”

Gnomic wanting

Here I lay my reading of St Maximus’s thoughts over my reading of Massimo Scaligero. I find parallels between St Maximus’ natural and gnomic wills and Scaligero’s living and reflected thought.

“Before the Fall,Adam and Eve saw each other through the eyes of ‘natural will’, i.e. through Love, which is to say the Logos or God.”

“Following the Fall, having gained knowledge, Adam and Eve objectified each other each other, discovering shame, rather than Love.”

“‘Natural will’ is divine intention, i.e. Love.”

“‘Gnomic will’ is false, deluded and evil; but we will it, i.e. we want it, we take pleasure in the objectified.”

"Only Love overcomes the need for this, there being no shame in love."

© John Dunn.

Upon reading St Maximus

Thursday, 12 May 2022 at 21:26

Upon reading St Maximus

Dr John Dunn 2022.

There follow four blogs that I added back in January, which were influenced one way or another by my readings of St Maximus. To this extent they are rather loosely related, however each of them also relates to the key themes that I have been developing with regard to a future publication. I have been transferring blogs to the archive as a stage in the sifting of material for another book. The four pieces which follow are a small part of the sifting process.

Resurrected creation

“There can be no overcoming of the evil in the human-animal except by the lightning-bolt Logos of thinking, whose force on Earth arises from fulfilling the divine task at the roots of the human being - namely, the victory over death, the Resurrection.”

How He exists

“I find that I am not concerned with the question of whether God (as a True Being) exists or not; rather my concern is how (in what manner or mode) He exists.”

Living thought

“To accept anything as pre-determined prior to the experiencing of it - be it the Logos, or the material world into which we are born - is nothing short of idolatry.”

Life - death - life

The event of Christ is an allegory for the journey the individual must undertake. The Nativity to the Resurrection follows a path of sensory events in which we must discover the suprasensory content, which in turn refers to the cosmic content.

© John Dunn.