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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.
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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.
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Thus spake Love
Monday, 4 August 2025 at 20:21
Thus spake Love
Eros went down the mountain alone.
An awakened one is Eros:what will you do in the land of the sleepers?
Could it be possible! They have not yet heard of it, that God is dead!
Teach them Eros! Tell them where you’ve been.
Hear me, you deluded innocent fools of Beulah
I climbed the heights to look down upon the Synagogue of Satan. You think you see the Creator, but you are mistaken. What you see instead is the demiurgic Díkaios, the self-deluded and anxious shaper of pre-existent matter; and you follow his ways.
When you worship Díkaios you worship Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, the over-bearing father, the failed architect, the ‘Accuser of the World'. You have been infected by the children of Díkaios into Devil Worship.
Know this: “Man must and will have some religion; if he has not the religion of Jesus, he will have the religion of Satan, and will erect the Synagogue of Satan.” William Blake knew.
Hear me, you deluded innocent fools of Beulah
You can break the rules.
Just as I, Eros, the primordial god of Creation and Life, the symbol of the divine likeness of man, broke out of the Cosmic Egg to disrupt the goddess Ananke’s equilibrium of Chaos, man too can break the rules. Man can break out of the straitjacket of closed systems be they religious, economic, Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalistic, Marxist and more.
To accept a system as closed, to accept freedom as necessity, is to withdraw into nature, to return to Mother Nature, to Ananke and an amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being. Closed systems are the path to entropic death. The systems we compose for ourselves can neither be closed at their beginning nor at their end. Each breakout from a closed system is an echo of my escape, be this a break with the womb, innocence, or animal nature. Each of these and more is a cosmic egg to be smashed. Each break is both an act of violation and creativity, ultimately prompted by Love. Each is an act of violation, ending the interminable cycle, giving rise to birth and new life. Each response to Love is a death and resurrection of man in the image of God.
Tothe ones living a fully human life of love and creativity are opposed those who lead a sub-human existence without love, who will never make the break from Mother Earth. These are the ones who worship the One, and who promote the closed systems.
This is the divide of all ages that is masked deliberately by the politics of Right and Left, which are two sides of the same coin. The real and only meaningful opposition is between those whose banners bear the symbols of love and creativity and those devoid of love, life and humanity who would have us return to the One, the amorphous state of pre-Eros, pre-Love and pre-Being.
Choose Love and fly your banners high.
© John Dunn.
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The Logos coterminous with the I
Saturday, 2 August 2025 at 20:59
The Logos coterminous with the I
The question is not whether God (as the Logos) exists or not; but rather how (in what manner or mode) He exists. I know there is a god. What I do not know is what form that god takes. 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 external 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.
‘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, i.e. subjection to abstractions.
Living thinking is the violation of Ananke.
© John Dunn.
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Steiner’s point
Thursday, 31 July 2025 at 21:37
Rudolf Steiner
Steiner’s point
Nevertheless, Steiner’s point, expressed in The Philosophy of Freedom, is that everything is knowable. He did, of course, dismiss the passive looker-on of Lockean naive realism. But much more importantly, Steiner offered as his major breakthrough a means of getting beyond the Spinozist residue in Kant’s philosophy, without resorting to a simple upending of Spinoza,substituting one unquestioned presupposition for another, the absolute Substance for the absolute I. Steiner went beyond Kant, in that he went beyond the unknowable external agent, the thing-in-itself, but also beyond Fichte and the Romantics; not creating reality, but rather intuiting the emergence of reality.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Steiner and Jung
Sunday, 27 July 2025 at 22:13
Carl Jung
Steiner and Jung
Contrary to the Coleridgean third level state of existence, where the creative imagination creates something out of nothing, Steiner tapped into a cosmic thought pool that already exists. Steiner’s point was that the cosmic pool of thoughts needs the free individual I as its means of expression. Free in Steiner's sense does not mean that I can think what I like, or create what I like. To him such a view would be no more than a libertarian fantasy. To be free in Steiner’s sense means that my actions are not guided by necessity, i.e. by the limitations of the perceptible world, culture, the state, matter, instincts, nature etc. Instead, I call directly upon the spirit world, or the cosmic fulness of reality. The intuitive ability to draw upon the cosmic pool of thoughts is a capability of the free individual I, which means that a process of individuation must have occurred first, which brings his work fruitfully into a relationship with Jung’s.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Cosmic mediator
Friday, 25 July 2025 at 22:05
Rudolf Steiner
Cosmic mediator
In Steiner’s cosmology, human consciousness is the place where observation(of the percept) and thinking meet. Human consciousness is the mediator, the only mediator in the cosmos, between observation and thinking, between percept and concept. Human consciousness is thus the location of truth, or the Logos. This is the eureka moment in Steiner’s philosophy, because it gives a direct answer to the Grail question with which I opened this pilgrimage - ‘who am I?’ Rather than being the creator of the Universe, à la Gentile, I am the mediator through which the fulness of reality is realised. Only in human consciousness is the cosmic fulness of reality realised.
Being the cosmic mediator means that our mental capacity is not to produce thoughts from nothing, creatively so to speak, but rather to channel the thought content of the cosmos. Being universal, the cosmic thought pool drawn upon by the mediating ‘I’ is single and eternal. Having established this critical point, the awe-inspiring step that Steiner takes, and invites us to follow, is to draw intuitively upon the cosmic pool of thoughts without first referring to an externally given percept.It is in this pure intuition, pure conceptual thinking, that freedom isto be found.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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