John Dunn

In the Becoming

Thursday, 16 February 2023 at 21:44

Prior to this I have used the word ‘Beginning’ as the expression of the Originatory Principle of all things. Beginning resonates with the words from John’s Gospel, the opening lines of which in their usual form I have long considered to be a mistranslation.

My nearest approximation to a correct translation until now has been:

In the Beginning is the Word, the Word being the Logos, or God, or Love. In the Beginning is Love.

I now assert that the opening words are better expressed as In the Becoming, thus:

In the Becoming is the Word, the Word being the Logos, or God, or Love. In the Becoming is Love.

The Becoming is a better expression of what I have until now described as The Beginning, always.

The following is therefore to read as a transitional piece.

In the Becoming

When I wrote in the preceding blog ‘my thinking is the Logos’, I meant thinking in process. I might try to explain my position further as present thinking in process, but that would imply a present which is a chunk of time between the past and the future, which is an abstract concept and something that does not exist in reality. The now cannot be captured. All aspects of thought considered in such a way are idolatrous considerations, the stuff of fallen angels.

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.

The Beginning always is thus better expressed as the Becoming.

My thinking is self-caused and therefore it is freedom. My thinking is the Becoming, the Originatory Principle, therefore it is in the mystery which will not be explained that my freedom lies.

My thinking becomes, the thing of nature is.

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.

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 Becoming, 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 god upstairs.

For were there to be a reality outside the infinite unity without multiplicity of my thinking, i.e. my mind, then there is no Becoming, there is no Creating, no being.

© John Dunn.

Thinking the Logos

Wednesday, 15 February 2023 at 20:33

We must pass from being created beings to beings that create according to our own principle - the Logos. For each creature bound to earthly conditions, waits for us to liberate it. (Massimo Scaligero)

Thinking the Logos

I have come to know the Absolute, the Beginning, the Logos, which is my thinking, 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.

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, instead of being the foundation of everything and therefore having the whole within myself.

The absolute, the cosmos, everything is my thinking. Were my thinking not the process itself through which the whole, the absolute, the cosmos is, then it would leave something outside it as a presupposition, which is the stuff of idolatry and mysticism, the trap into which the Platonists, Berkeley,Kant, Fichte and Hegel ultimately fell.

My thought comes not from nature and nature from the Logos, but my thinking is the Logos.

© Dr John Dunn.

Nature without and within

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:50

We must become. We are not passive receivers of earthly experience, but cooperators in its fulfilment. This demands that we change from being nature-dependent creatures to being free beings whose moods are no longer the play of nature within us but the stirring presence of the spirit. In this way, we realise within nature our true state - the supernatural state. (Massimo Scaligero)

Nature without and within

Once 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, turning instead to the life breath of the Whole whose reality culminates in my self-consciousness.

© Dr John Dunn.

My non-being

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:47

The object of thought has always been abstractness in need of reanimation - that is, what has already been thought by us or by the universe: nature.

However,the reanimation sketched each time, is never carried out, because abstractness is normally thought by the thinking activity, but not resolved. It is led back to the moment “of its becoming abstractness,” but not to “its not being abstractness,” where true thinking arises. (Massimo Scaligero)

My non-being

Dr John Dunn 2022

I descend into my soul and take it by surprise, as it is in the living act, in the quivering of my spiritual life, that nature which grows so formidable in all the vastness of time and of space which I confer on it. What is it?

It is the obscure limit of my mind beyond which my living spirit is ever traversing and to which it is ever returning.

Seen from within my soul, this nature is my own non-being, the non-being of my own inward commotion, of the act by which I am to myself.

It is not my non-being as something existing for others to recognise.

It is the non-being which belongs to my thinking act only; what I am not and must become, and which I bring in to being.

Any object of my thinking whatsoever can be no other than my own thinking.

It is what I am thinking and is the object in my consciousness.

It is my non-being to which I must counter-pose myself in order to be myself a reality.

© John Dunn.

Landmark over the Roman Road

Sunday, 12 February 2023 at 10:38

This is now the fourth time that I have blogged about a motorcycle excursion I made last year to the great windmill of Chesterton in Warwickshire. (Previous posts can be found by scrolling through I made a video of my visit which I will shortly be publishing on my YouTube channel. As I post the words up on this website I am in fact also pulling together the notes from which a commentary to the video will eventually emerge. Bear in mind mind that it's written to speak.

Landmark over the Roman Road

…And there it is again. I’ll park here and take a walk to see it up close.

There you are, the great landmark that is the Chesterton Windmill and, as I’m sure you can see, it is not just any old windmill this, but one built to a one-off design by John Stone. When he commissioned the windmill back in 1632 Edward Peyto certainly wanted something unique, and he got it.

The location is most suited to catching the wind, standing high above the flat plain below. From here you can see the site of a Roman town that once stood on the Fosse Way Roman road below.

The most striking feature of the windmill is the way that the cap and turning mechanism which holds the sales sits on six semicircular arches,on piers, the outer faces of which are arcs of circles radiating from a common centre.

Truly a unique design, there being no other anywhere in the world.

© John Dunn.

Identity as difference

Saturday, 11 February 2023 at 21:16

This synthesis is required of thought, because thought bears it within itself as transcendence, continually on the verge of redeeming the world according to the Logos, but continually impeded by the will that is not free and that permeates its reflected form, dialectics, duality. (Massimo Scaligero)








Identity as difference

My thinking would be inconceivable if I as the subject were not at the same time the object, and vice versa.

The opposition is inherent to my self-concept.

The opposition is between myself and myself.

The difference and otherness belong wholly to me.

I cannot express the opposition in any other way.

My own identity is the basis of my own difference.

Both my being and not-being as subject are a synthesis.

The synthesis is not subject and object, but only subject.

The synthesis is the REAL subject, which trumps the falsity of the pure abstract subject and the pure abstract object.

The synthesis is the concrete reality of my self-consciousness, which is not fact but act, living and eternal act.

To think anything truly, I must realise it.

It is towards this realisation that my mind is working to establish the fulness of freedom, the reign of mind over nature and the progressive spiritualisation of the world.

© John Dunn.

Meeting the man who commissioned the 17th Century Chesterton Windmill

Friday, 10 February 2023 at 17:50

Last year I motorcycled to Chesterton in Warwickshire to see the great seventeenth century landmark windmill, the unique design of which can be seen from miles around, most especially from the Roman Fosse way.

I recorded my two-wheeled excursion, with a view to publishing a memory of the day on my YouTube channel. The publication date will be announced on this website.

What follows are some notes towards a commentary on the video. They cover the part of the ride that leads to my meeting with the man who commissioned the windmill and its designer-architect.

Meeting the man who commissioned the 17th Century Chesterton Windmill

Walk up to the church

St Giles at Chesterton is a long low church mostly dating from the 14th and 15th centuries.

There’s the sundial over the porch, embellished with the words “See me and be gone about your business”.

Take note of the ancient graffiti on the stone seats in the porch. Are those types of board game scratched into the surface?

Enter church

There’s no structural difference between the nave and the chancel, which creates a tunnel-like effect down the building

But it is the west end that interests me today.

At the west end of the church are Baroque memorial monuments to the Peyto family, the local lords of the manor.

On the south wall is a late sixteenth century alabaster tomb of Humfrey Peyto and his wife, Anne.

On the north wall is the memorial to William Peyto, 1619, and his wife Eleanor, which was commissioned from by the Sculptor and Architect Nicholas Stone, who was famous for being the master mason to James I andCharles I.

Here is the man I have come to see. This is the memorial to Edward Peyto 1643 and Elizabeth his wife. It was Edward Peyto who commissioned the great landmark windmill.

The memorial was made by John Stone, son of Nicholas Stone. As mentioned before (earlier blog), John Stone was also the designer of Edward Peyto’s windmill, and also the architect who designed the Peyto mansion behind the church.

Leaving the church

Outside there is a Doomsday plaque to record that Chesterton was long ago substantial enough to be entered into the Doomsday Survey of 1086.

Around the back of the church there remains the gateway arch designed by John Stone to stand above the pathway that led from the Peyto’s mansion to the church. The mansion is no more, having been demolished in 1802.

Edward and Elizabeth Peyto would have walked from their grand home, through the arch, to their special entrance to the church through that door there, long since bricked up.

Right, having met the man who commissioned the great windmill of Chesterton, as well as some examples of work done by the windmill’s architect, it’s time to ride over to the hilltop landmark itself.

© John Dunn.