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.