John Dunn

From ‘formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’

Saturday, 30 September 2023 at 17:29

From ‘formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’

My transcendent consciousness is one, unique and specific, the result of a process of ascent.

Never has it anything to do with 'oneness' in the sense of a collective entity, or homogeneous totality of levelled differences.

I reject the ideal of unity understood as immanence of the ‘One Life’ in every being. This is Spinozism and Kabbalism.

Followers of the universalising ideal of oneness serve as the ‘spiritual’ arm of globalism and its Janus faces, financial and Marxist.*

They are the fallen angels, the children of Satan.

Oneness was the realm of Ananke before the Beginning, being the point of departure and not the arrival in the ascent of my consciousness.

Oneness is the ‘undifferentiated substrate’, the forest out of which I carve out my own clearing of ‘formed individuality’; it is not a final state of perfection in which distinct individuals dissolve themselves, losing their identity in a pantheistic fusion with the Whole.

My ascent to transcendence proceed from ‘formless universality’ to ‘formed individuality’, not the other way around.

*In my book Child of Encounter, I condemn the whole of the accepted western philosophico-literary canon as being malignly influenced by Lurianic Kabbalah and Spinozism into promoting pathways to undifferentiated Oneness.

© John Dunn.

The Salt Way

Friday, 29 September 2023 at 21:20

Roel Gate crossroads, a landmark on the ancient Salt Way

My next YouTube video will be one in which I motorcycle along one of the most historic and well-known salt ways in England.

I pick up the route near Winchcombe, which in full led from Droitwich Spain Worcestershire to Lechlade in Gloucestershire. The route has been in existence since the Iron Age.

As ever, this is a sketched out basis of commentary to the video, which will slowly come together over the next couple of weeks. Please accept that this first rough draft is written for the spoken word, with all the textual liberties that this entails. This material takes a little pulling together, hence I might as well use the text here just to keep the home page fresh for Google searchers. Please bear with me.

The Salt Way

I join the old salt way at Salter’s Lane, near Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire.

I immediately climb Salter’s Hill.

No doubt nearby Hailes Abbey, dating from 1246, purchased some of the salt passing close by. The monks were fortunate enough to possess a vial of the holy blood of Christ, certified as genuine by Pope Urban IV. The abbey thrived as a result of pilgrimages to the holy relic.

I can’t see the abbey ruins from the lane, but there is Hailes Church, dating from 1135, making it more than a hundred years older than the abbey.

There are left and right turns to follow along this ridgeway known as Sudely Hill.

I’m following the road to Winchcombe briefly, before the Salt Way branches off.

The Salt Way delineated the outer boundary of Sudely Park as shown on the map by “Outer Park Wall”, and there is the real thing on the right.

There are remains of a Roman Villa to the right of the wall. Did they partake of the salt which passed along this ancient route in the Romano-British era?

This crossroads is called Roel Gate.

Roel refers to a lost village, which shrank to remain as Roel Farm, just up the road to my left.

This part of the route is quite direct, crossing the road leading to Brockhampton.

Here the route meets the A346 heading for Andoversford, only for a short spell however. A quick turn left soon has me back on the Saltway as it was before the turnpikers disturbed it.

The trees on my left are called Salperton Covert, and behind them lies Salperton village.

Any place name with s-a-l in it, sal, is almost certain to be linked to salt. And here we have a village name which means farmstead of the salters.

It is possibly a place where fresh pack animals, and men, took over the journey from here. Salt may have been distributed locally from here. Whatever happened, it was connected to the salt on the Salt Way.

The route disturbed by the turnpike once more, I join the A40 for a short while.

There’s the Puesdown Inn, an old coaching inn which served travellers on the turnpike. It closed last year and is now being converted into residential use.

Back on the ancient route of the Salt Way with a fork to the right, which is actually the old A40, which ran right through the middle of nearby Northleach before the bypass was opened in 1984.

The Salt Way follows a further fork to the right, and it is at this road junction that an ancient landmark can be found.
Let’s park up and take a look.

It has been marked on the map for centuries as the “Hangman’s Stone”

Is this the remains of a burial chamber from a longbarrow ? Is it a fallen former standing stone? Is it a more recent boundary stone? Is it the remnants of a hangmans gibbet?

The name attached to an ancient stone might well be the result of ancient folklore.

On the other hand, the Cotswolds were famous for wool. Sheep stealing was prevalent, and the penalty for getting caught was death, until 1832. Sheep stealers might well have been pushed off this stone with a noose around their neck attached to a nearby tree, or wooden gallows.

Until the coming of the turnpikes, the Salt Way would have been one of the few recognisable tracks in the area, where people could travel to ensure this rough justice was carried out, and where passers-by might be deterred from the same crime by seeing a rotting corpse left swinging over the stone for weeks after the hanging.

The other recognisable route in the area is the Roman Fosse Way, which is a few miles down the hill from the Hangman’s Stone.

And here is where the two roads cross, making this crossroads another significant landmark in the area.

So much so that it was at these crossroads that the assembly of the Bradley Hundred was held half-yearly. The Hundred was an administrative division of the county,

The Bradley Hundred had varying degrees of power at a local level in the feudal system, being responsible for administering the law and keeping the peace. The proximity of the Hangman’s Stone might not have been a coincidence.

Neither was the proximity of the Salt Way, a well-known route for thousands of years which, along with the Fosse Way, would have helped navigation and facilitated attendance at the half-yearly assembly.

Beyond Fosse Way

Half a mile beyond Fosse Way is Salt Barn.

Half a mile further on is the site of the Crickly Barrow, or prehistoric burial mound, sadly now plugged out of existence.

But this barrow marked the meeting place of six lanes, making it another landmark of some significance along the Salt Way route.

Another half mile or so and we come to Salt Way Farm.

Just beyond is where the Salt Way continues through the Cotswold countryside as a bridleway. I can’t follow it on the bike; one day I must walk this section, or cycle it.

But for now I’ll have to leave the Salt Way to pick it up further south.

After re-emerging at the other side of Bibury, the Salt Way continues once more as a surfaced lane on the way to Coln St Aldwyns.

The route avoids the crossings of the River Coln by turning left in the village centre to head east for a while to Hatherop.

Historically,the Salt Way hugged the river more closely to pass south of Hatherop, but this more direct route was closed in 1848 because of the steep gradients. The fact that after 1848 the local lord of the manor was free to extend his parkland over the ground where the old route lay may too have had not a little something to do with redirecting the Salt Way further north through the village. By this time too of course, the Salt Way was just another road, albeit with an auspicious history and name, and salt would have been distributed by train.

After Hatherop, the Salt Way continues southeastwards past Barrow Elm, the meeting-place of the Brightwells Barrow Hundred at the meeting of the Salt Way with roads from Fairford and Cirencester.

The barrow is late Neolithic to Bronze Age, dating from the period 2400-1500 BC.

Again,the Salt way, being a prominent road in the area, intersecting with two other roads, was attractive as a meeting place for reasons of navigation and relative ease of travel. Geographically, the barrow was bang in the centre of the area under the jurisdiction of the hundred.

The four miles or so from here to Lechlade are gentle, with few obstacles. A couple of brooks visible on the OS map suggest that there might have been shallow fords to negotiate in wet months, and the name of Stanford (Stoney ford) Hall supports this suggestion.

And so into Lechlade, through the town to the crossing of the Thames at the Ha’penny Bridge, the very name giving away the toll levied upon users.

Lechlade: Lech is the River Leach which pours into the Thames, and Lade means load. The place where the Leach meets the Thames and loading happens.

Well salt was certainly loaded on to boats here, and there could only be one destination for the precious resource - London. Lechlade is at the highest navigable point on the Thames. The Crown was entitled to fifty percent of the output of salt from Drotwich.

The wharf where the salt was once loaded can still be seen next to Ha’penny Bridge.

© John Dunn.

Thus Eros spake to The They

Thursday, 28 September 2023 at 21:56

Oh no, it's them again

The Logos is Being

Freedom from The They is what will allow you to receive Being and, in turn, what will allow Being to give itself to you. In this mutual exchange you can be, at once, the arbiter of both Being and freedom.

Thus Eros spake to The They

You think spontaneity is the definition of freedom, freedom to do what you like when you like. But what is spontaneity?

If you live your life in the apparently ready-made world of thoughts about things reflected back to you as though they were pre-existing, when in truth they originated as the Logos, but were cast aside as fallen angels, then you can never be spontaneous and free.

You can only be reactive to the things you think exist around you.

Why? Because you are living in the world of the second hand, the presupposed, a world of idols. You are in thrall to idol worship and its priesthood.

But everything is spontaneous, everything is always first hand, if it originates unimpeded from the Logos, from Love.

The Logos, Love, is the Originatory Principle of everything, it is the perpetual Beginning.

Eros, you entered my life and now I am aware…

My thinking is transcendent. My thinking is the perpetual Beginning.

When I am thinking, what is thinking if is not to be distinguished from the Logos? It is the Logos.

In the Beginning is the Logos.

The Beginning is the process of my thinking.

The Beginning is reality, the multiplicity of all held in me; and my Beginning is perpetual.

© John Dunn.

Eros addresses The They

Wednesday, 27 September 2023 at 19:32

Who is The They? This is what Heidegger had to think about it:

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The they, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Da-sein, is the nobody to whom every Da-sein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another.

Eros addresses The They

You live in the second hand world.

You live in a playground in which you think you can play as you like. Ha! a playground, exactly that! An illusion from which rises the nauseating refrain “We just want to be happy”. You think it’s here that you can be fulfilled as an individual, left in a room vacated by the father, but under the supervision of an overseer who makes all sorts of promises in return for good behaviour.

I hear you Eros

I asked myself - wouldn’t I rather live in Love, in truth, in passion, in mutual indwelling?

Which is freedom? Which is real?

I know that the chaos of the playground is Ananke's realm? Without the violation by the Logos, by Love, I might have lived for ever under the most insidious form of deception, namely imprisonment lived as freedom.

© John Dunn.

History gathered up eternally in my mind

Tuesday, 26 September 2023 at 21:36

Sovereignty of your thinking

Listen, Eros speaks...

Declare the sovereignty of your thinking, to the extent that it moves according to the synthetic power of the Originatory Principle, the Logos.

History gathered up eternally in my mind

Eros, I hear your words and act upon them.

I am not the Logos without being the whole of the “I think”; and what “I think” is always one in so far as it is the Logos.

This distinguishes me from the Children of Satan and the dumb fools of Beulah, to whom multiplicity always belongs to the content of the consciousness abstractly considered and external to being.

In reality the multiplicity is always reconciled in the unity of my thinking.

True history is not that which is unfolded in time but that which is gathered up eternally in my mind.

I reject no single finite thing, for each finite thing is the reality of the Logos, Truth, Love.

The cosmos is the eternal theogony of my inner being.

© John Dunn.

The redemption of the multiplicity

Monday, 25 September 2023 at 20:09

Your imperative is now to reconnect what in nature and history appears divided and numerous to its transcendent source. The redemption of the multiplicity can truly be the transcendence of your thinking. The choice is yours. (Eros explains the nature of his mutual indwelling with man.)

The redemption of the multiplicity

I hear your words of wisdom, Eros.

The distinctions alive in the living process of my thinking mind are no longer reducible to number.

This is the polar opposite of Spinoza’s infinite of the imagination, a series without beginning or end, extensible in every direction and so forever falling short of completion.

In Spinozist thinking (the dominant mode of thought of our day) reality becomes an ought-to-be, and the reality of the "I" has its true reality outside itself, a potential infinite, in forms of consciousness cut off from self-consciousness.

Instead of this, distinctions for me are always an actual infinite, the immanence of the universal in the particular, the all in my thinking, all in all.

© John Dunn.

My mind is the unity of natural and historical reality

Sunday, 24 September 2023 at 20:11

My mind is the unity of natural and historical reality (thus spake Eros)
My mind is the one as the self-consciousness of which I am aware.

My mind is the diversity of all things as the reality of my one consciousness.

My mind is the unity of natural and historical reality
and my knowledge of it.
I hear you now Eros.

In empirical knowledge all distinctions of the real are dead and fossilised and reduced to abstract types, mere idols, which are then indicvidually ‘worshipped’ as true distinctions.

Differing utterly, I regard all distinctions as alive in the living process of my thinking mind.

© John Dunn.