John Dunn

The God of whom John says…

Thursday, 6 November 2025 at 21:28

The God of whom John says…

Like Spinoza, Fichte and Gentile, we can choose monism and argue that there is only one sole being. Or we can choose dualism and see that there are two principles in the world: good and evil, spirit and matter. After all, did not Zarathustra, Prometheus and Jesus of Nazareth epitomise the good confronted by evil? And in the same way that Buber called this dualistic mode the ‘encounter’, (the mode of I–Thou), insisting that it is best described as love, Tomberg also argued that:

Two... is the number of love or the fundamental condition of love which it necessarily presupposes and postulates... because love is inconceivable without the Lover and the Loved, without ME and YOU, without One and the Other.

If God were only One, be that an infinitely distant Jehovah, or the solipsistic ‘I am I’ of the idealist philosophers, or Spinoza’s Substance, he would not be the God of whom John says:

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

End of the creative imagination

Sunday, 2 November 2025 at 21:04

Carl Jung

End of the creative imagination

…These apparent seekers of the mysteries, these writers, poets, philosophers and mystics, who apparently stood aloof from the day-to-day mundane world of rationality and reason, in the end sought to kill the mystery and believed that in all their self-seeking that they had actually closed the door on it.

In the recovery of a lost Totality, of the Total-Man, of the Absolute Self, of the Selbst of Nietzsche, of the Unus Mundus of Jung, they had turned the creator into a discoverer and, if the creative imagination is the defining element of humanness, then they were dehumanisers. Jung’s concept of Synchronicity was founded upon a belief that both the observer and connected phenomenon ultimately stem from the same source, the Unus Mundus, which means One World. Jung was the Spinozist par excellence.

Jung and others fell and worshipped before the power of One; to aspire for us all to become as One; to bring about One world; to proffer a perennial ‘truth’ common to all religions. This is Tikkun, the return to the One. This is the end-game of Spinozism in which freedom is the recognition of this necessity. And the price of this necessary freedom? Answer - the end of the creative imagination, death of the self and the end of humanity.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Roll call of Spinozists

Monday, 27 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.