John Dunn

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Thursday, 18 September 2025 at 20:55

Flowers to Carpet-baggers

Cycling up the rise to Kelmarsh, through a chorus of birdsong, after a shower of warm summer rain, passing the church at the summit to my right.

Crossing the main road, I passed estate cottages to my left.

A plaque recorded a project at the height of World War Two to rehouse people rendered homeless by a domestic fire which got out of control during a strong wind.

THESE 10 COTTAGES
WERE REBUILT IN 1948
BY COL. C. G. LANCASTER MP
ON THE SITE OF 13 ELIZABETHAN
COTTAGES DESTROYED BY FIRE ON
4TH MAY 1943.

There are undulations and ground workings in the fields at the top of the rise after Kelmarsh. Unmentioned on the OS map, was there quarrying for stone in the past, perhaps providing building materials for Kelmarsh Hall, the church, and estate workers’ cottages?

Or were they something to do with the tunnelling work for the now disused railway up ahead.

An avenue of trees leaves those earth workings and follows the contours round to an area of woodland called the New Cover. Spelt covert, but pronounced cover, this is a patch of woodland created and managed to provide cover for foxes. For here I’m at the heart of what was once prime fox hunting country.

The farmhouse called Top Lodge stands above the line of the tunnel on high ground, I guess upon an outlier of Oolitic limestone. There’s an air shaft across the lane from Top Lodge, confirming the presence of the tunnel below.

There was a not too distant hum from the A14 away to my right, the sound level exacerbated by a brisk south wind, a warm wind keeping temperatures high.

A water tower noted on the OS map was totally shrouded by dark, dense, ivy-covered trees. It stands opposite the entrance to Wheatfield Lodge Farm, beside which the OS map also notes a “disused camp”. I presumed at the time that this must have referred to an army camp, but why here?

Turning right at Harrington, I headed south, crossing the A14. Immediately on my right a sign reads “Aviation Museum”. As I press on I’m struck by the plateau of flat land opening up to my left, strangely detached from the gently undulating land that I had cycled until then. Connecting with the Aviation Museum not long passed by, I asked myself, was there an airfield here once? I saw no evidence to confirm my suspicion.

Passing on to other thoughts, I forked left at Foxhall, intending to cycle on to the village of Old. Near Kites Hall Farm, my lane passed through fields planted with purple-blue Phacelea and Sunflowers. I paused at a gate, surrounded by flowers and breathing in the perfumed air. How wonderful.

After pausing at Old, a village name derived from the (w)old on which it was located, and talking for ages to another cyclist who pulled up beside me at the green for a chat, I cycled on through Lamppost and Draughton , before heading back to Foxhall and Harrington. Once more the flat plateau stretched out before me, and shortly before Foxhall, I came upon the roadside memorial.

My earlier suspicion was confirmed. The peaceful lanes and countryside I had cycled through once resounded to the noise of aircraft taking off from a giant airfield, constructed during the Second World War. Home to the US Airforce group known as the “Carpetbaggers”, clandestine airdrops and bombing missions left from here en route to Germany and other targets on the continent. The memorial commemorated the two hundred airmen who gave their lives flying from this very spot.

One war was over, and another took hold. The airfield now under crops, trees and fields of flowers held Britain’s first nuclear weapons of the Cold War. Should the worse have befallen the world, Thor missiles would have been launched from near where I was standing.

The Thor missiles were removed in 1963, and the buildings, runways and most of the roads and taxiways were demolished in 1965. The resultant hardcore formed the base of many other roads and buildings then under construction elsewhere at the time. The airfield once again returned to agriculture, and now the peaceful turning of my wheels.

© John Dunn.

In the Beginning

Wednesday, 17 September 2025 at 21:44

Rudolf Steiner

In the Beginning

Another way of saying that the free Steinerian individual is intuiting the thought pool, or Logos, is to say that the individual is thought incarnated, or even reincarnated. Has the exemplar of such a free individual ever walked the earth? ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.’ (John 1:1-4). It is universally accepted that ‘Word’ in these opening lines from John’s Gospel is coterminous with ‘Logos’, and that the ‘Word’ or ‘Logos’ is a reference by John to the Jesus of the gospels.

It was on the point of Logos that Gentile was beginning to penetrate through to the truth, but fell short. Steiner seemed to offer me a way forward. By being the cosmic mediator, man is the manifestation of cosmic fulness, i.e. the Logos incarnate, that which was in the beginning. But more than being merely a cosmic mediator, I am, to use Steiner’s own words, ‘the unified world of ideas which reveals itself through this organism’.

Is this not enough? To be a cosmic mediator? Is this not finally the answer to the great Grail question. I could never have dreamt of such a response when I first asked the question. And yet - the question remains- does something emerge from intuition that was not there before? Is man free to create?

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Matter originates in spirit

Monday, 15 September 2025 at 20:42

Rudolf Steiener

Matter originates in spirit

It was by arguing that the individual must develop the capacity to gain access to the ‘unified world of ideas’, this cosmic pool of thoughts, a realm of pure spirit, detached from objects perceived through the senses, that Steiner rationalised himself into esotericism. He gave us permission to consider the occult as a means of answering the Grail question - ‘who am I?’ He also permitted us to make a cosmic reversal - to upturn Spinoza and Marx - by establishing the working principle that matter originates in spirit.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Something that resides deep within us

Saturday, 30 August 2025 at 21:34

Rudolf Steiner

Something that resides deep within us

Letus at this point consider this ‘reality’. Steiner was not referring to the everyday reality of the things around us to which we respond with instinct and feeling. If the conceptions we formulate are merely responses to these things, then we are most certainly not individuated and not free. The free individual me, according to Steiner, is not the body that I occupy. Non-material ideas, he would argue, cannot simply emerge from matter as though secreted from a thought gland in the head and brain:

Theindividual element in me is not my organism with its instincts and feelings, but rather the unified world of ideas which reveals itself through this organism.

Itis the intuitive capacity that enables the ‘unified world of ideas’ to emerge. Steiner is vague about where this capacity comes from, arguing that it is something that resides deep within us. Nevertheless, it is the essential component of freedom.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The I and the Logos conjoin

Friday, 29 August 2025 at 22:13

The I and the Logos conjoin

God is first and foremost a mystery, the ultimate mystery. It is in this sense of mystery that I can say that God is Love and the Beginning. I wrestle with the idea that God, being coterminous with the Logos, is also coterminous with the I. This is not the animal I, the sub-human I, it is rather the fully human I, one that has had an encounter with Love.Is such an I the Logos incarnate, or is it the I incarnate as the Logos? And is this theism or atheism?

The cosmic creation story is the metaphor for the individual’s story; the common denominator between the two being Love. The Creation is our purpose, which is to recover the content of ‘living thinking’ at its inception, before it is instantly degraded into ‘fallen thought’, which is thought reflected back to us as though it represented an external reality with an existence inherent to it. To live through the eyes of reflected thought is to live before the Beginning, to live before the Creation, to be beholden to Ananke and to worship a demiurgic Díkaios, it is to exist before Love.

Love,the Creation, the Beginning, are representations of ‘living thinking, which is the transformative and shaping force of the Logos. In living thinking’, the self is asserted over the thought of ‘the they’, which is nullified. The corollary of this is that in normal everyday accepted modes of thought the I is absent, which means that our thoughts are not our own. To live in thoughts that are not one’s own is to live in the realm of Ananke, before the Beginning, before Love; it is to worship the god of the this world, the demiurgic Díkaios who is the architect of reflected reality; it is to worship Satan.

Living thinking, however, is the action of an I very much in possession of its own thinking. The I and the Logos conjoin as the Creation, the Beginning, as Love. This conjunction matters, because a separation between the I and the Logos opens the way to idol worship.

Living thinking is the constant violation of Ananke.

© John Dunn.

In this lies the mystery

Friday, 8 August 2025 at 21:50

In this lies the mystery

In unbounded nothingness all is one, all is subsumed in one. What is all? All is one. There is only one and 1 = 0. How do we get from no-thing to some-thing? How do we get from something to someone?

Before the Beginning there was nothing and 0 = 1, the unbounded One. With the Beginning the infinite space of nothing was bounded. For the One has no past but is created in the eternity of the present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future. There is only Beginning, perpetual Beginning. The Beginning is a constant, now, in living thinking or it is nothing. This constant would be better described as the perpetual Beginning of living thinking. That which lies outside of living thinking is a dead abstraction, i.e. nothing.

A Bible literalist might ask: why did the Beginning happen when it did, some 6000 years ago? A Big Bang scientist might ask: why did the beginning happen x billion years ago? These questions ask about abstractions, i.e. nothing, because the Beginning is not fixed at any one discoverable time. The Beginning is now in living thinking, or it is nothing, an abstraction. The coming into being that is normally conceived of as a one-off event actually never ceases. There is no ‘was’. The violation of Ananke is now, in living thinking.

In this lies the mystery of the anti-entropic intervention that takes us from nothing to being, from death to life. The mystery is Love; that which will have no presupposition or explanation. For life is the way of God, and God is Love.

The one nothing before the Beginning was the stasis of entropy. To return to this state, the realm of Ananke, will ever be the directional goal of entropy. For entropy is the destruction of being, the end of life, death.

Where life is the way of Love, death is the way of Satan.

© John Dunn.

What came before the Beginning?



Thursday, 7 August 2025 at 21:09

Prologue

What came before the Beginning?



Well, there must have been nothing, surely. We all know what nothing is - zero, a word derived from the Hindi “Śūnyatā”,meaning nothingness. Invented as a mathematical concept, it was first given a symbol 0 in the seventh century. Mathematics could not have advanced beyond the tally stick without 0. Everything digital today depends on zero. It is essential to the binary language of computation. The digital age would not have been possible without 0.

But zero is nothing more than a mathematical convenience. It has, by its very nature, no real existence.We all accept what nothing is, but only if it is a qualified nothing.

There is nothing …in this box
There is nothing …in this room
There is nothing …between you and me
I searched for gold and found nothing.

In these instances, nothing is delimited by a qualification. We know there is oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the box, but the qualification denotes the nothingness to be agreed upon. We know that the prospector might have dug up a pile of sand and dirt in the search for gold, but we know what nothing means because of the qualification. Nothing is actually nothing plus qualifier.

Can there be nothing without qualification? Can there be unbounded nothingness, or infinite nothingness? Let us suppose the answer is yes, there can be unbounded nothingness. However, would not that state, that everlasting equilibrium, be a single nothingness, an all-embracing oneness? We have the paradox of one equaling nothing. You might say that before the Beginning there was not nothing, but rather there was one.

All origin stories need a mythology, because there is no other way of explaining the inexplicable reality. The origin of being needs an intervention into the state of non-being. It is in the intervention that the mystery lies, because it will not be explained. That which will notbe explained needs myth in order that we may at least grasp at the principle of being’s origin by some means. The critical turn comes when it is realised that the cosmic origin story serves to explicate the personal origin story. Once the transition is made, truth is no longer distant and abstract, but immanent and real.

How shall the infinite oneness of nothing before the Beginning be expressed, this unchanging equilibrium that lasted from for ever, until the mystery of the intervention? It will be personified as Ananke, goddess of inevitability, necessity, fate and destiny. The everlasting oneness was Ananke’s realm where she lay contentedly in her undisturbed repose, like the veiled Isis of Sais.



"I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no one has ever lifted my garment.”



Ananke rests alone, untouched, unpenetrated, undefiled. Her’s the state of undifferentiated oneness and equilibrium, her’s the endless repeating cycle, her’s the infinite cosmos, the unbounded One.

© John Dunn.