John Dunn

Spiritualisation of the world

Thursday, 31 August 2023 at 21:57

Shoot down the albatross of false reality

Painting by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis 1906

Spiritualisation of the world

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.

(This spiritualisation of the world is reflected in the political action posited in the Thought Piece, 'Endeavour is all', especially the section headed 'The transgressor is Saviour '.)

© John Dunn.

Now all is different, now I am all

Wednesday, 30 August 2023 at 21:46

It was a life that I truly did not live. I perceived only its sensory manifestations. By deceiving myself into believing that I lived, I did in fact die. My death in spite of my apparent existence began with the dying of thought into reflectivity and into abstractness. These give me the image of life, but not life itself. (Thus Eros spake unto the multitude)

Now all is different, now I am all

My mind is all.

It is impossible to conceive the process of thinking without me because thinking is me.

My thinking is not mere activity but activity which is self-sufficient, and is me as a person.

I realise myself as an object of knowledge.

When I conceive myself as the subject, then myself the object is also conceived. Each is real since my thinking is real, but...

...nothing is real outside my thinking, there is no being outside my thinking, only the abstract realm of darkness from which the children of Satan haunt the lives of the damned, i.e. those who have an image of life, but not life itself.

© John Dunn.

That which I affirm confronts me in the affirmation

Tuesday, 29 August 2023 at 15:39

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the sea of fog, 1817

Having escaped reflectivity, my thinking is light, or life, or love, still imperceptible to those who are satisfied that reflection is being. I can live within this reflection no longer. But this rising up of thinking as light, or life, or the light of life, had first to be provoked by encounter, by Love. Thus Eros spake

That which I affirm confronts me in the affirmation

Alone my mind, and all that is, is real

I am inconceivable as something anterior to and separate from the consciousness in which I am the object.

I know myself as both subject and object.

This is me.

It is my spiritual reality.

It is the identity of myself with myself.

I duplicate myself as self and other, and find myself in the other.

To be self without the other would mean not even to be myself, because I only am in so far as the other is.

Nor would the other be would it not itself be other, because the other is only conceivable as identical with me as the subject.

In affirming reality, that which I affirm confronts me in the affirmation.

© John Dunn.

Eros addresses the children of Satan

Monday, 28 August 2023 at 20:27

The ultimate purpose of my thought’s transcendence, gathering up the cosmos in its everyday immanence, is to transform evil into good, to dissolve the darkness of Ananke’s realm and let the light of the Logos shine through. After all, it is the power of love, which can be recognised as the incarnating of thought’s transcendence, as the Logos incarnating. Thus Eros spake.

Eros stands above the darkness, as the vivifying sun begins its daily journey, and addresses the children of Satan

Eros proclaims:

You are the root of all evil.

You conceive the world as other than yourself who conceive it, and the necessity of that concept is a pure logical necessity because it is abstract. You observe the world and its moral necessities as though it did not concern you. You proclaim your unhuman mantra - 'freedom is the recognition of necessity'.

But I conceive the world (as you should and at bottom perhaps always do conceive it) as my own reality, there being no other, a self-possessed reality. Unlike you, I cannot suppose the world outside the necessity of my concept as though moral law did not concern me.

The rationality of my concept appears to me as my own law, as duty. What else indeed is duty but the unity of the law of my own doing with the law of the universe?

And what else is your immorality, with eyes only for your own interest, if it be not the separation you make between yourself and the world, between its law and your law?

The formation of the moral consciousness, must mean also deepening of the spiritual meaning of life, a greater realising ofreality as self-conceived.

You inhabit the dark recesses of my psyche, the darkness that will soon be extinguished by the vivifying sun.

© John Dunn.

T. E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw

Sunday, 27 August 2023 at 21:56

T. E. Lawrence to Charlotte Shaw

I'm taking an interest in T. E. Lawrence at the moment for a variety of reasons, not the least his motorcycling exploits. Here in a letter he describes the likely outcome of a ride on his latest Brough Superior.

Correspondence with Bernard and Charlotte Shaw 1922-1926 (Woodgreen Common, Castle Hill Press)

Lawrence was in Edinburgh in August 1926 visiting Bartholemew's, the famous map-makers, who were producing a map for his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.



Tomorrow morning I will see them and tomorrow afternoon I will be in Cranwell. It takes 7 1/2 hours, on Boanerges,* going respectably. The respectability is mine. Boanerges would go madly, if I would. Alas, surely I grow old. Again and again, this morning, when we came to a piece of road which invited ninety, I patted his tank and murmured “Seventy only, old thing”, and kept to it. The excuse I gave myself was that Edinburgh was a long way and that there must be no open throttle ona long journey. Indeed that was once my maxim: but today I kept the maxim without being vexed thereby: and that is significant. Or is it only that I have ridden too many hundreds of miles this last week?

*Lawrence called his first motorcycle “Boanerges,” a name given to the apostles John and James by Jesus. It means: Son of Thunder.

© John Dunn.

Mighty son of thunder

Saturday, 26 August 2023 at 21:52

Mighty son of thunder 



I'm getting nearer to producing a podcast and/or YouTube publication. There is much editing to be done I fear, but when finished I will announce the publication date here.

The chapter entitled ‘The Road’ in T. E. Lawrence’s book The Mint (published posthumously in 1955), is famous amongst motorcyclists.



Lawrence evokes brilliantly the thrill of riding along a fast, straight road, until he eases his Brough Superior down a hill and into Lincoln. Arriving at Lincoln Cathedral, he stables the ‘steel magnificence of strength and speed at his west door’, and describes having a ‘cup of real chocolate and a muffin at the teashop’.



Lawrence wrote that it was a journey he undertook ‘nightly’.



Nightly I’d run up from the hangar, upon the last stroke of work, spurring my tired feet to be nimble. The very movement refreshed them, after the day-long restraint of service. In five minutes my bed would be down, ready for the night: in four more I was in breeches and puttees, pulling on my gauntlets as I walked over to my bike, which lived in a garage-hut, opposite. Its tyres never wanted air, its engine had a habit of starting at second kick: a good habit, for only by frantic plunges upon the starting pedal could my puny weight force the engine over the seven atmospheres of its compression.



This escape from ‘the day-long restraint of service’ was from his posting as Aircraftman T. E. Shaw at the RAF Cadet College in Cranwell, Lincolnshire, between 1925 and 1926. Famously seeking to escape the alter ego of Lawrence of Arabia, he had enlisted under an assumed name.



Lawrence bought a new Brough Superior motorcycle to celebrate his return to the RAF and it is this 1925 SS 100 that appears as the mighty Boanerges in Lawrence’s thrilling evocation of the flat-out ride in The Mint. “Boanerges,” a name given to the apostles John and James by Jesus. It means: Son of Thunder.

The stretch of road where he claimed to have raced – and beaten – a Bristol Fighter was the A15 between Sleaford and Lincoln.

Lawrence wrote…



Another bend: and I have the honour of one of England’s straightest and fastest roads. The burble of my exhaust unwound like a long cord behind me. Soon my speed snapped it, and I heard only the cry of the wind which my battering head split and fended aside. The cry rose with my speed to a shriek: while the air’s coldness streamed like two jets of iced water into my dissolving eyes. I screwed them to slits, and focused my sight two hundred yards ahead of me on the empty mosaic of the tar’s gravelled undulations.



I followed Lawrence’s A15 route from Cranwell to Lincoln on my own motorcycle and, yes indeed, after a short sequence of sweeping bends, the road does straighten out for mile after mile, to reach a crescendo of straight line speed potential where it passes RAF Waddington, which was but a tiny aerodrome in Lawrence’s day.

Lawrence wrote…



Once we so fled across the evening light, with the yellow sun on my left, when a huge shadow roared just overhead. A Bristol Fighter, from Whitewash Villas, our neighbour aerodrome, was banking sharply round. I checked speed an instant to wave: and the slip-stream of my impetus snapped my arm and elbow astern, like a raised flail. The pilot pointed down the road towards Lincoln. I sat hard in the saddle, folded back my ears and went away after him, like a dog after a hare.

Open went my throttle again. Boa crept level, fifty feet below: held them: sailed ahead into the clean and lonely country. An approaching car pulled nearly into its ditch at the sight of our race. The Bif was zooming among the trees and telegraph poles, with my scurrying spot only eighty yards ahead. I gained though, gained steadily: was perhaps five miles an hour the faster. Down went my left hand to give the engine two extra dollops of oil, for fear that something was running hot: but an overhead Jap twin, super-tuned like this one, would carry on to the moon and back, unfaltering.


We drew near the settlement. A long mile before the first houses I closed down and coasted to the cross-roads by the hospital. Bif caught up, banked, climbed and turned for home, waving to me as long as he was in sight. Fourteen miles from camp, we are, here: and fifteen minutes since I left Tug and Dusty at the hut door.

I let in the clutch again, and eased Boanerges down the hill along the tram-lines through the dirty streets and up-hill to the aloof cathedral…

The JAP engine eulogised by Lawrence was the product of John Alfred Prestwich J-A-P, and fitted into the Brough due to its power and reliability. The only thing my Japanese motorcycle has in common with Lawrence’s mighty Brough Superior is the horse power, around fifty. But his was a great thumping 1000cc long stroke low revving V twin, with nothing in the way of silencing, it must have truly roared, whilst mine is a precision eight valved twin, sewing machine smooth, half the CCs, short stroked, water cooled, high revving and muffled into quietness.

And things too have changed on the road in the speed department. The sheer amount of traffic (mid-afternoon on a sunny August day), combined with speeding traps, made any hope of replicating Lawrence’s epic ride nothing more than a flight of fancy. Perhaps 'nightly' offers a better chance. Perhaps I'll try a late-evening ride one day.

Nevertheless, it was good at least to have motorcycled along the exact road of which Lawrence and his thundering Boanerges made a legend.



© John Dunn.

Evil is the non-being that I must and will determine to be

Thursday, 24 August 2023 at 21:50