John Dunn

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gentile and Steiner

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 at 23:30

Rudolf Steiner

Gentile and Steiner

Where Gentile and Steiner did unite is by finding the fulness of reality in the act of thinking. Where they united still further is on the location of the Logos in thinking. Remember we concluded that in Gentile’s philosophy, the very self, along with all other presuppositions, was lost to thinking. By a different route, the Steinerian self too was lost to thinking. The key difference is that Steiner never made man the thinker in the first place.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

The individual subjects himself to himself

Friday, 18 July 2025 at 22:52

Rudolf Steiner

The individual subjects himself to himself

The critical point for Steiner is that the reality of the percepts is not exhausted in the perceiving of them. The act of perceiving a percept can only ever result in a partial view. The fullness of reality about anything perceived can only come from thinking about it. Whereas the perceiving is only ever partial, the thinking is always universal. (For example, separate individuals will perceive an actual triangle in different ways, from different viewpoints, but in thinking will always agree on the characteristics of a triangle, i.e. it is the thinking thatis universal, not the individual perception.)

For Gentile, who had pushed idealist philosophy to the extreme by equating reality with thinking, a world of percepts could only ever be understood as the Kantian residue of unacceptable presuppositions. It was on this basis that he critiqued Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom as not really leaving the individual free at all. According to Steiner however, that which was once considered to be unknowable i.e. the Kantian noumena, is made known, and it is the universality of thinking that makes this possible. This was exactly the point that Gentile rejected in his review of Steiner’s book. He was uneasy about the individual being subject to the universal. How can this be freedom? He missed Steiner’s point that if the unthinking and habitual ego is subjected by the thinking or spiritual ego, then the individual subjects himself to himself. ‘That man alone is free’, wrote Steiner, ‘who in every moment of his life is able to obey only himself’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.