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To North Leigh Roman Villa
Tuesday, 30 August 2022 at 22:23
This is preparatory text for my next YouTube video, which covers a motorcycle excursion to the site of a Cotswold Roman villa. (Please bear in mind that this draft is building towards a commentary in the spoken word. Also, it is half complete, but its inclusion here helps keep the home page fresh, as well as giving a foretaste of things to come.)
To North Leigh Roman Villa
I’m starting off from the gateway to Wilcote Manor, in the hamlet of Wilcote, just south of Charlbury in the Oxfordshire Cotswolds.
The route of the Roman road known as Akeman Street passes by just a couple of hundred yards north of here, and a Roman villa at Shakenoak Farm was excavated just to the north of that in the 1960s.
But that’s not the Roman villa I’m riding out to see today. The one I’m interested in is near a village called North Leigh, and that’s where I’m heading now.
Here I’m dropping down to the valley of the River Evenlode.
Whilst not actually crossing the river, I’m now riding along a tree lined slope along a bend in the River Evenlode.
Having climbed up out of the valley, I’m looking for a parking area on the right where I can leave the bike, before I take a walk to look at the Roman Villa site.
Here’s the parking area, just east of North Leigh, at a place called, appropriately enough, East End.
This is marked as a footpath on the map, but clearly it is also a farm track. I could have ridden down here without upsetting anyone. Oh well,exercise and fresh air is good for body and soul, and so they are on this glorious early summer’s day.
I now have the valley of the River Evenlode down to my right. It winds and bends all over the place around here, as it carves its way through the oolitic limestone of the Cotswolds, here in this part of Oxfordshire, between Witney and Woodstock.
I can see the Roman Villa now, down there in the valley bottom, sheltered, with a plentiful supply of water.
© John Dunn
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Love perpetual
Monday, 29 August 2022 at 22:17
Cosmic metaphor
Do not be fooled. When I exclaim in terms of the First Creation in the re-issued blog below, do not think of the first day, the first week, or any such naive concept of the big bang, as the one and only beginning, for to do so would be to take stories of the creation literally.
Instead read the cosmic creation story as a metaphor for man’s personal creation story. In the Beginning is man’s awakening, his life after death.
Neither is man’s personal creation story a one-off event, it is rather perpetual. Creation is constant, or it is nothing. Here lies the core message of the blog re-posted below, as it is also the core meaning the Simone Weil quotation.
Dr John Dunn 2022
Love perpetual
The human being conditioned by corporeality, as human-animal, has no value higher than any other aspect of nature. A sub-human existence is bound up with nature, one with it, immersed in it and subject to its determinations; subject to Ananke, i.e. subject to nothing, being worth nought.
Only when the practice of living thought is achieved will man move beyond the animal, i.e. thinking that is suitable to the beyond-human dimension, or to the Logos of the Creation, to achieve independence from the reflected thought of animal corporeality, during life. It involves the awakening of the soul through the interjection of Love, the perpetual continuation of the first Creation.
The above piece was prompted by a re-reading of the blog Secret of the solar sacrarium, now transferred to Scaligero in 'Thought pieces'.
Dr John Dunn 2022.
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Love perpetual
Sunday, 28 August 2022 at 21:20
Mind’s pre-occupation with an apparent external material ‘reality’
Continuing from the previous blog (see Imposing Good in Blog), the theme of awakening to Love applies once more.
Below we have the theme of fallen thought, i.e. the mind’s pre-occupation with an apparent external material ‘reality’, as though the latter had its own internal and thus projected existence.
Fallen thought is the state before the Beginning, an interminable equilibrium, an undifferentiated Oneness, in short Ananke’s realm prior to the penetration of Love.
For what is Love but the Logos in the blog below, and Love is God.
Dr John Dunn 2022
All thought is fallen thought
All thought is fallen thought, or reflected thought, i.e. originatory shaping thought reflected back as though it originated in an external material reality, i.e. one which makes its seemingly pre-existent presence felt through the senses.
To overcome fallen thought is to engage with the uncorrupted originatory source of thought, the Logos,which reveals itself in the moment of creative perpetuity.
Fallen or not, the above thought was prompted by a blogged reading of Massimo Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries. The part in question has been transferred to the growing compilation of such readings entitled Scaligero in ‘Thought pieces’.
© John Dunn
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Encounter*
Saturday, 27 August 2022 at 21:39
Caresses aka The Caress (1896), the most famous painting by Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff
Awakening to Love
In the Beginning was the Awakening.
This is the awakening of the individual, for which the cosmic Beginning is the metaphor.
What is before the Beginning?
For the individual it is chaos and oneness; it is pre-being; it is nothing; it is death.
For the cosmos… it is the same.
For the individual it is an opening to the Logos within.
For the cosmos… it is the same.
For both, it is an awakening to the Originatory Principle; an awakening to Love.
There lies the mystery of the encounter which, as the Originatory Principle of all, will not be explained.
Dr John Dunn 2022
Encounter*
In her the originatory principle was present; it was immanent in her state of consciousness.
In the presence of the living idea, I ceased to think. Thought served me only as a pure vehicle or a movement of the life of the ‘I’ that perceived her. I encountered a living being, that is, an intelligence endowed with the power to act according to an extra-human order, even ifit was active within the earthly sphere and within an animal being. I met an angel, an emissary of Love.
*The mind is not forced to believe in the existence of anything (subjectivism, absolute idealism, solipsism, scepticism: c.f. the Upanishads, the Taoists and Plato, who, all of them, adopt this philosophical attitude by way of purification). That is why the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. (Simone Weil)
Apart from Weil, the above was inspired by my reading of Massimo Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries, the most recent reading of which I have now transferred to Scaligero in the ‘Thought pieces’.
© John Dunn.
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Encounter*
Saturday, 27 August 2022 at 21:28
Mind’s pre-occupation with an apparent external material ‘reality’
Continuing from the previous blog (see Imposing Good in Blog), the theme of awakening to Love applies once more.
Below we have the theme of fallen thought, i.e. the mind’s pre-occupation with an apparent external material ‘reality’, as though the latter had its own internal and thus projected existence.
Fallen thought is the state before the Beginning, an interminable equilibrium, an undifferentiated Oneness, in short Ananke’s realm prior to the penetration of Love.
For what is Love but the Logos in the blog below, and Love is God.
Dr John Dunn 2022
All thought is fallen thought
All thought is fallen thought, or reflected thought, i.e. originatory shaping thought reflected back as though it originated in an external material reality, i.e. one which makes its seemingly pre-existent presence felt through the senses.
To overcome fallen thought is to engage with the uncorrupted originatory source of thought, the Logos,which reveals itself in the moment of creative perpetuity.
Fallen or not, the above thought was prompted by a blogged reading of Massimo Scaligero’s The Logos and the New Mysteries. The part in question has been transferred to the growing compilation of such readings entitled Scaligero in ‘Thought pieces’.
© John Dunn
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Motorcycle excursion to Belas Knap, the Stone Age monument in the Cotswolds, near Charlton Abbots
Friday, 26 August 2022 at 21:40
Published this evening
Thursday 25th August
On YouTube
Motorcycle excursion to Belas Knap, the Stone Age monument in the Cotswolds, near Charlton Abbots
Click here to view
The was videoed in early Summer, after a light shower of Summer rain, when the fields and woodland were painted in a fresh and vibrant green (impossible to capture on GoPro and Iphone!).
The short ride on my Royal Enfield through Charlton Abbots was memorable, and I will be back one day to take a walk around.
I stopped during the videoing to take a break at a gate to a bridleway, deep in the hedge off the road. This gave me heart-warming views over the valley of the Beesmoor Brook below.
Continuingvalong a delightful lane, I reached the woodland at which the climb to Belas Knap would commence. Having parked my motorcycle, I walked up the hill, along a holloway in the trees, over open fields, to the top of thevescarpment where the Stone Age monument of Belas Knap has stirred the souls of visitors for thousands of years.
I hope your soul is stirred a little too.
© John Dunn.
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New YouTube video
Thursday, 25 August 2022 at 21:10
New YouTube video
To be published on Thursday, 25th August, at 8.00pm.
Motorcycle excursion to Belas Knap in the Cotswold Hills, near Charlton Abbots.
I hope you’ll join me as I ride along pretty Cotswold lanes to an historic landmark dating back to 3000 BC.
“The Manor House, a few cottages and a tiny church are all you will find in Charlton Abbots, but it's the extraordinarily beautiful surroundings that make it so special, and its history of course.”
“But there is another landmark nearby, established over 4000 years before the monks were here, and it’s that that I am now riding over to see.”
“The beauty of a light motorcycle… and by that I mean one under 30 stone in weight… is that you can pull off road at a suitable spot, and know that you at least have a fighting chance of pushing it back on the road again.”
“That was a steepish climb in my riding gear… just a little warm…. anyway I’m here at the top of the hill.
Wow… there it is”
“There’s the Belas Knapp Long Barrow, built back in the stone age, 180 feet long, about 60 feet wide and 14 feet high.… a great pile of earth earth dug up and shaped with stone tools and picks made from deer antlers.”
“If you’ve enjoyed the ride, please give me a like, subscribe… perhaps even share. I’ll then let you know when I’m next out and about. I’d welcome your company.”
© John Dunn.
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