John Dunn

Illustration for John Milton's Paradise Lost by Gustave Doré (1866). The spiritual descent of Lucifer into Satan

Beginning, always 2

Before and after the beginning there is nothing.

The beginning is a constant, now, in active thinking; it is life.

All outside active thinking is nothing; it is death.

What is outside of active thinking? A reflected world, where the products ofactive thinking are reflected back as entities in their own right, with existences in their own right, divorced from the Logos; it is a world where the abstract takes on the appearances of the concrete, where living thinking is objectified as dead matter.

Satan fell to the outside and occupied the objective. To fall into abstraction is to fall to nothing, and nothing is death.

Before the beginning there was nothing and 0 = 1.

To fall outside is to fall into the One, the indiscriminate Oneness, the realm of the Devil and the Devil’s children

Satan tempted Adam through Eve into knowledge, i.e. knowledge of the objective world, into which both were condemned.

They were condemned to a ‘gnomic will,’ which is the ‘choosing will’ that originates in thought reflected back as material ‘reality’, that believes it can pick and choose its way through the seemingly ready-made material options laid out before it.

Adam and Eve objectivised each other and were ashamed of what they wanted, but it never stopped them wanting.

The sons of Adam are born into a fallen state, i.e. the reflected and objectivised world.

Satan tempted Christ to come over to the objectivised world, where power might be exerted over a temporal realm. The rejection of Satan is the rejection of death and an acceptance of the beginning, always.

© John Dunn.