John Dunn

Caresses aka The Caress (1896), the most famous painting by Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff

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 if it 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.