John Dunn

Individuation is a false Grail

Monday, 30 September 2024 at 21:35

Individuation is a false Grail

So we have moved from the Absolute I to the Absolute Relation - a considerable step. What is relation? It is the integration of active and passive elements. I relate to you and you relate to me. I reach out to you and you reach out to me. In the verbs of these sentences there is action by one and a passive receipt of action by the other. Active and passive elements mirror each other. Encounter provides the key to reopening the door of mystery.

‘Who am I?’ I still do not know. I do know that the stage of individuation is a false Grail. It is not here that the mystery lies. However, to ask the Grail question does mark an awakening of consciousness, a coming to purity of heart worthy of the Grail quest. But what of this consciousness, or conscience as Coleridge preferred to develop the issue? The death of the self in Tikkun is not the extinction of being, but rather of consciousness, whether the assimilation is into the Spinozan Substance, Jung’s Unus Mundusor the Absolute I. And whereas both animals and humans share the status of being, it is consciousness that lifts the human above the animal.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Divine encounter

Saturday, 28 September 2024 at 21:38

Martin Buber

Divine encounter

However,Buber argued that there is also another mode available to us, one which we must necessarily make use of in order to be truly human. In offering this mode, Buber travelled down a lost and overgrown pathway traversed more than a century earlier by Coleridge. In this mode, which Buber called ‘encounter’ (the mode of I–Thou), we enter into a relationship with the object encountered, we participate in something with that object and both the I and the Thou are transformed by the relation between them. Buber insisted that the phenomena of encounter is best described as love.

All encounters, he begins by telling us, are fleeting; it is only a matter of time before any Thou dissolves into an It again and as soon as we begin to reflect on the Thou it becomes an It. Love, then, is a constant oscillation between encounter and experience and it does not wholly fulfil our yearning for relation. In every human encounter that we undergo, we feel that there could be something more, something more lasting and more fulfilling. This ‘more’ is encounter with God or absolute relation.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Power of One

Friday, 27 September 2024 at 21:56

Carl Gustav Jung was one with them

Power of One

Jung and others fell and worshipped before the power of One; to aspire for us all to become as One; to bring about One world; to proffer a perennial ‘truth’ common to all religions. This is Tikkun, the return to the One. This is the end-game of Spinozism in which freedom is the recognition of this necessity. And the price of this necessary freedom? Answer - the end of the creative imagination, death of the self and the end of humanity.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Creator into a discoverer

Thursday, 26 September 2024 at 21:34

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, on the canon

Creator into a discoverer

These apparent seekers of the mysteries, these writers, poets, philosophers and mystics, who apparently stood aloof from the day-to-day mundane world of rationality and reason, in the end sought to kill the mystery and believed that in all their self-seeking that they had actually closed the door on it.

In the recovery of a lost Totality, of the Total-Man, of the Absolute Self, of the Selbst of Nietzsche, of the Unus Mundusof Jung, they had turned the creator into a discoverer and, if the creative imagination is the defining element of humanness, then they were dehumanisers. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity was founded upon a belief that both the observer and connected phenomenon ultimately stem from the same source, the Unus Mundus, which means One World. Jung was the Spinozist par excellence.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The whole canon swept

Tuesday, 24 September 2024 at 21:52

Yes - even Jung

The whole canon swept

The roll call of Spinozists, not surprisingly, sweeps up the whole socio-cultural, literary and philosophical canon of the West. The canon of ‘rebels’ duped by Luria’s rehashed kabbalism is long but, in my new enlightened context, a few of its members come randomly to mind: Jung, Nietzsche, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley, Baudelaire, Blake, Steiner, Marx and Engels, Heidegger and more, my own hitherto heroes and villains alike and yes, even Fichte, Coleridge and Gentile.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Alchemical lie

Monday, 23 September 2024 at 20:23

Spinoza at the root of the problem

Alchemical lie

Our socio-economic and socio-cultural environment is steeped in kabbalism, Freemasonry and Spinozism, making it almost impossible to escape, achieve freedom and full humanness. The process of individuation, the Absolute I, the arrival at the ‘I am I’, call it what you will, do not oppose assimilative Tikkun, they comply with it, they are it. Opposition to assimilative Tikkun is not individuation, the Absolute I or the I am I. To believe such a thing is to fall into the Spinozist trap. The whole alchemical way is a lie and its adherents, consciously or not, arethe participants on one side of an unspoken global war that is routing a feeble and dehumanised opposition.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Prometheus enchained

Sunday, 22 September 2024 at 22:03

Nicolas-Sébastien Adam's Baroque marble sculpture Prometheus Chained

Prometheus enchained

In the Grail quest and all the apparent life journeys, there is always an obsession with ‘return’ and, in particular, a return to wholeness, whereas this is the very opposite of what it means to be human. To be human is to be a disrupter, an over-turner of equilibria. The human mind does not abide by the laws of nature - Dante recognised that much. This is the very mystery of mind.

With Steiner, I had finally read myself into a black hole. I realised that the road, in my case the very long road, to individuation was nothing other than Spinozist. Paradoxically, individuation is the ultimate goal of Spinozism. It is the fulfilment of Tikkun. Individuation on the one hand, and re- assimilation into the original Substance on the other hand, appear to be contradictory standpoints, but they are not. They are one and the same thing. It is as though Prometheus kept re-chaining himself to the rock.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.