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Roll call of Spinozists
Monday, 13 October 2025 at 21:08
Roll call of Spinozists
Our socio-economic and socio-cultural environment is steeped in kabbalism, Freemasonry and Spinozism, making it almost impossible to escape, achieve freedom and full humanness. The process of individuation, the Absolute I, the arrival at the ‘I am I’, call it what you will, do not oppose assimilative Tikkun, they comply with it, they are it. Opposition to assimilative Tikkun is not individuation, the Absolute I or the I am I. To believe such a thing is to fall into the Spinozist trap. The whole alchemical way is a lie and its adherents, consciously or not, are the participants on one side of an unspoken global war that is routing a feeble and dehumanised opposition.
Looked at this way, the roll call of Spinozists, not surprisingly, sweeps up the whole socio-cultural, literary and philosophical canon of the West. The canon of ‘rebels’ duped by Luria’s rehashed kabbalism is long but, in my new enlightened context, a few of its members come randomly to mind: Jung, Nietzsche, Hegel, Locke, Berkeley, Baudelaire, Blake, Steiner, Marx and Engels, Heidegger and more, my own hitherto heroes and villains alike and yes, even Fichte, Coleridge and Gentile. T.S. Eliot himself summed up the Spinozist mindset of a journey of individuation, return and re-assimilation with the words:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all out exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(Little Gidding)
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Prometheus self-chaining
Sunday, 12 October 2025 at 21:48
Prometheus brought fire, not chains. (Heinrich Fueger, 1817)
Prometheus self-chaining
In the Grail quest and all the apparent life journeys, there is always an obsession with ‘return’ and, in particular, a return to wholeness, whereas this is the very opposite of what it means to be human. To be human is to be a disrupter, an over-turner of equilibria. The human mind does not abide by the laws of nature - Dante recognised that much. This is the very mystery of mind.
With Steiner, I had finally read myself into a black hole. I realised that the road, in my case the very long road, to individuation was nothing other than Spinozist. Paradoxically, individuation is the ultimate goal of Spinozism. It is the fulfilment of Tikkun. Individuation on the one hand, and re- assimilation into the original Substance on the other hand, appear to be contradictory standpoints, but they are not. They are one and the same thing. It is as though Prometheus kept re-chaining himself to the rock.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Oppose the mind-forged manacles
Saturday, 11 October 2025 at 21:26
Giovanni Gentile
Oppose the mind-forged manacles
The Creation was not the one-off event which kicked off time. Such nonsense is the scientific language of the Big Bang, a conjuring trick based on the ‘rabbit in the hat’ deception that something now exists that did not exist before. Creation is Logos ‘is now and ever shall be’. And Gentile knew at least that creation is now in thinking. We ask ‘what is the meaning of life?’ as though the answer were held outside of us, in the mind of a priest or guru, when all the time we are the meaning. We draw upon the cosmic pool of thoughts as Steiner said, but that cosmic pool was not a one-off creation event in some infinitely distant past to which only a clairvoyant can reach back. Rather, the cosmos is ‘now and ever shall be’, in thinking. ‘Who am I?’ It seems that I am not determined by the world, but am rather a determiner of the world and even the cosmos. God is in me. I am deified in some way. Elevated to one of the Trinity - there from the beginning. Here is the cosmological individualism with which to oppose the mind-forged manacles of Lurianic Tikkun and Spinozist determinism.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Meaning not in purpose
Tuesday, 7 October 2025 at 20:51
Rudolf Steiner
Meaning not in purpose
In giving man a fulcrum status to the future of the cosmos Steiner is conflating, or confusing, purpose with meaning. In being granted this necessary purpose, man becomes an adjunct to cosmic evolution, a mere ‘apparatus’. Steiner is in danger of returning man to the passivity of serving Spinozistic ends.
Given the times in which he lived, it is hardly surprising that Steiner was smitten with the notion of evolutionary progress. Even if he had rejected Darwin in favour of the morphogenetic principles of Goethe, progress across time was central to Steiner’s cosmography. The ‘elevation’ of man to an instrument of evolutionary progress is purposive. It might nudge us towards an answer to the question - ‘who am I?’, but if we are to discover meaning, it will not be in purpose.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Steiner operated from the spirit world down
Saturday, 4 October 2025 at 21:38
Rudolf Steiner
Steiner operated from the spirit world down
Steinersought to counter the diminishment of man in the necessitarianism inherent to his philosophy by boosting the cosmic proportions of man’s significance. He argued that man must exist, for without him there wouldbe no further evolution. There are portents here of what was to appear later in the work of Vladimir Vernadsky i.e. the evolutionary emergence of man’s mind in the Noosphere as an intervening and guiding force of new evolution. Whilst Vernadsky’s schema worked from the biosphere upwards so to speak, Steiner operated from the spirit world down, but they coincided on the point that man was an active participant in the evolutionary progress.
From Child of Encounter
© 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.
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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.
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