John Dunn

Redcrosse Knight

Thursday, 30 June 2022 at 21:22

The Redcrosse Knight and Una by William Blake

At the risk of damaging my Google standings, I felt that I just had to re-issue the following blog on the home page. It is short and to the point and captures in essence my understanding of personal growth through encounter and love.

As I recycle my blogs during the build-up to a new publication I knew that this had to be included one way or another. We'll here it is, just an ultra-quick read.

Redcrosse Knight

Dr John Dunn 2022

Edmund Spenser’s rendition of the Redcrosse Knight in The Faerie Queene was his attempt at a back story to St George and the Dragon.

The Faerie Queene is a poem that works across numerous allegorical levels, including, as is well known, Tudor politics.

Whatever the layers, the Redcrosse Knight is a more rounded figure than most one dimensional representations of St George.

On personal level, the Redcrosse Knight undergoes an allegorical awakening though the encounters with Una and Duessa.

Taken together, these female characters represent a compound womanhood

Allegorically at the religious level, they stand for the Whore of Babylon and the True Church, but at a personal level they are just plain whore on the one hand, and pure object of love on the other.

Raw sexual lust and devotional love lead to the knight's awakening.

Only after the encounters is he able to kill his dragon, which is allegorical of a spiritual awakening and deification.

In the battle with the dragon he becomes the Christ figure. Over three days there is a death and resurrection, a descent into Hell and a return. There is victory over the old way of seeing the world; victory over those who would murder him. Victory of good over evil. The victory of Love.

Redcrosse undergoes a Grail journey out of the chaos of innocence into the clear sightedness illuminated by the light of the Logos. As a Parzival figure,the encounters with women are essential to his maturation and eventual fulfilment of his Grail quest.

John Dunn ©

Cosmic Beginning, personalised

Wednesday, 29 June 2022 at 20:46

Cosmic Beginning, personalised

Dr John Dunn 2022

In the archived blog, Truth: inside out it was asked - is not the ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway?

The answer is yes…

…if the ‘I’ is considered to be something complete, done and dusted for all time, before it comes up with the Logos as an idea.

But such an ‘I’ is lost in the dead, indiscriminate world of Ananke; such an ‘I’ is subsumed in the One before the Beginning.

That ‘I’ was a product of dead thought; it is a dead thought or, to put it another way, it is an abstraction.

The real, concrete ‘I’ exists only in active thinking. Active thinking can have no predecessors. All past, all futures exist now in active thinking.

The thinking ‘I’ is the Beginning, always.

The thinking ‘I’ is the truth, i.e. the Logos.

I quote from my archived blog Breaking Ananke, always

Creative thought is active, ‘in the beginning’ always, breaking the equilibrium cycle always, breaking Ananke at each moment.

Only that which is being created and still to be created is true, leaving that which was created as false, hence the need to violate Ananke without cease, hence the role of Eros, the Originatory principle, the Beginning, always.

Thus the need to exist in the medium of Love, without cease, always to be in Love.

Unless this be so, all would return to the false, dead realm of Ananke, as it was before the Beginning, before ‘be’ing, before Love, Logos, God.

His own sun

Tuesday, 28 June 2022 at 22:13

His own sun

Dr John Dunn 2022

I never thought that I might bring Marx into the argument.

I have commented before about the self-centring of God; I did so recently.

The argument made in the previous blog was that the Creator is not an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controls the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity is a demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.

Man should discard the demiurge (this is the sense in which God is dead), and realise that he will be saved through the salvation of his own imagination; he must be his own Christ, i.e. the Christ narrative made personal narrative. Imagination is God.

Illusions are discarded, i.e. the illusions happily encouraged by whatever ruling power, and God comes in from the externally bodied world.

The loss of the distant illusions of religion leads to the realisation that man is at the cosmic centre and that God must somehow be internalised. This recalls how, upon reaching the godhead, Dante’s protagonist saw the effigy of man in the glaring light.

It is at this point that I will bring Marx in.

“The criticism of religion is, therefore,” he writes, “the embryonic criticism of this vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” He argues that religion is like a chain of imaginary flowers man wears. Criticism plucks away those flowers and enables man to throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.

It empowers him to discard his illusions and regain his senses “so that he will move around himself as his own Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself”. He continues with a statement that is dazzling in its unerring understanding of the primary tasks of history and philosophy. “It is therefore, the task of history,”Marx writes, “once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world”.

To “move around himself as his own Sun”, and to internalise religion, echoes the point about how man must be his own Christ. The truth is here, now, not held in some distanced and illusory entity.

John Dunn ©

Deny the failed architect

Monday, 27 June 2022 at 20:56

Raise the symbols of love and creativity on your banners’ cried Eros.

Deny the failed architect

Dr John Dunn 2022

It is no surprise that man’s concepts of God equate Him to Love and Creator.

The creative imagination is central to the conception of God and what it means to be human; and an ‘imagination’ untouched by Love is a misnomer.

A fully human life is one of love and creativity. An innocent life devoid of love and creativity is less than human.

The Creator is not an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controls the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity is a demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.

By implication, this makes of the Bible's Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.

Christian religionism has carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the followers of Jehovah, which makes it, essentially, Devil Worship.

God is the Human Imagination. Instead of being saved by Christ, man will be saved through the salvation of his own imagination; he must be his own Christ,i.e. the Christ narrative made personal, or he is less than human.

John Dunn ©

Beyond idolatry

Sunday, 26 June 2022 at 21:20

Beyond idolatry

Dr John Dunn 2022

Moving beyond idolatry is the Beginning.

Idolatry is to live in the realm of presupposition, to make an idol of the already there.

The‘already there’ was the realm of Ananke before the Beginning, i.e. the indefinite cycle, the equilibrium before violation, the pre-determined non-being before the awakening of ‘be’ing.

Where is God to be found if not presupposed as existing before the self… as an idol?

‘Deification’, or ‘Becoming God’, is one direction open to the initiate and will put him in good company.

If you do not make yourself equal to God how can you apprehend God. Only like is known by like. Leap clear of all that is ready-made and presupposed and make yourself grow to like expanse with that greatness as the Creator, which is beyond all measures ... For it is the height of evil not to know God.

‘He that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.’ (1 John 4:16)

“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.” (Angelus Silesius)

“Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.” (Simone Weil)

“God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine.” (Julius Evola)

Thinking: the power of love in spiritual form

Saturday, 25 June 2022 at 21:22

Dante and Beatrice, Henry Holiday, 1883

“In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”
(Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova)

Thinking: the power of love in spiritual form

Dr John Dunn 2022

…a reality interwoven with light, dipping down warmly into the phenomena of the world. This dipping down occurs with a power that flows forth in the activity of thinking itself— the power of love in spiritual form. (Rudolf Steiner - The Philosophy of Freedom)

Absolute individual

Thursday, 23 June 2022 at 22:36

Was Dostoevsky trying to illustrate the pursuit of such a goal?

Absolute individual

Dr John Dunn

The goal of self-centring is to know God with­out image, without naturalistic attributes, and without semblance.

It is the opposite of today’s post-modernist pursuit of the de-centring of the self.

In these opposing goals for the self is laid bare the real Right-Left opposition, the real political bifurcation, not the pathetic banter between various branches of Marxism which passes for democratic debate.

The‘I’ must be the centre of dominion and power, which is synonymous with creative power. To be at the centre of creation means it is necessary to put the I in the place of God; not to replace God, but rather to find the true God.

The rightful role of man is to model the world after his thinking; and consciously being the master of his thinking he is to be master of what the thinking produces. In this is found the true Right-Left bifurcation. Right is action. Left is passivity.

The absolute individual - is the exemplar of absolute freedom and power.

The only one way to prove God is to make oneself God. Absolute freedom is the principle sign of being God. The body of the absolute individual is the universe.

Man in future should become independent from God and through this become deified himself, internalising the qualities of God such as omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality. Understand that independent of God in this context means to be independent of a presupposed idol, it means to be free of idolatry.

Kirilloff, one of the characters in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed,does not believe in God in the sense of inventing an imaginary God like many generations had done before him. Instead, he is forced to manifest his own divinity in order to demonstrate that God exists. Free will is an attribute of Kirilloff’s self-deification. This free will can be called upon to prove his insubordination to the imaginary God of generations. In a passion of exhilaration and terror, this freedom is most convincingly proved, according to Kirilloff, by committing suicide.

Was Kirilloff’s example and path followed by Otto Weininger and Carlo Michelstaedter one wonders?

“God does not exist. The Ego must create him by making itself divine.” (Julius Evola)

John Dunn ©