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Life lifted to a higher plane
Friday, 28 November 2025 at 21:52
Life lifted to a higher plane
Originally drafted as Letter to Sara Hutchinson, Dejection: An Ode was later grouped with the Asra poems that were dedicated to Sara. Ostensibly about unrequited love and loss - it announces too the philosophical changes in Coleridge:
It were a vain endeavour,
Though I should gaze for ever
On that green light that lingers in the west:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
Gone would be a dependence on ‘outward forms’ and his own sense perception of them as the source of inspiration. Empiricism was the ‘vain endeavour’ from which nothing is gained, however long he might ‘gaze’. Love turned him inward, away from passive responses to ‘outward forms’, to the source of all that is vital, the active shaping of an objective world by the God-like ‘I’. And to emphasise that inner vitality he has ‘passion and the life’ literally gushing from the ‘fountains’ of the subjective self. Link passion to the crucifixion of Jesus and Coleridge has death to the world and new life lifted to a higher plane.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Coleridge’s encounters with German idealism and Sara Hutchinson
Thursday, 20 November 2025 at 21:42
Coleridge’s encounters with German idealism and Sara Hutchinson
The encounter which swept away the last vestiges of Spinozism from Coleridge’s worldview was his extramarital encounter with Sara Hutchinson, or Asra as he refashioned her name. Coleridge’s encounters with German idealism and Sara Hutchinson came in quick succession, the first in 1798, the second in 1799. It was the combination of philosophical idealism and extra-marital love that was incendiary, not the former in isolation, which Coleridge ultimately deemed to be inadequate because of its Spinozist polarity. Fichte came close, with his invitation to imagine the first encounter of two human beings, the summoning to a mutuality of experience, a ‘reciprocal interaction’. However, the result of encounter for Fichte was synthesis, a reduction of two to one, rather than the feminine principle of reflection, resulting in not one, or even two, but the three of fecund creativity.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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Trinity
Monday, 17 November 2025 at 21:34
Trinity
Two separate substances and one sole essence = three. Know this and know why the God of love is revealed to human consciousness as the eternal Trinity - the Loving One who loves, the Loved One who loves, and their Love who loves them: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Consciousness is not lost. To be conscious is to be human. Encounter awakens consciousness and humanises. This is where the magic resides. Human consciousness is magic. Mind is magic in the sense that our consciousness as fully human beings cannot be subject to rational explanation.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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...fire meets with FIRE
Thursday, 13 November 2025 at 21:32
Valentin Tomberg
...fire meets with FIRE
The seeker of truth in being will lose himself in a state of depersonalisation. Coleridge and Buber, amongst others, have made this their central criticism of Spinoza. Tomberg argued that the same criticism could be made of the Bhagavan, the Buddha, the masters of yogaand the ancient philosophers who really lived out their philosophy, above all the Stoics. It is this depersonalisation which is the goal of Tikkun in the Lurianic Kabbalah, the reabsorption into the One, Ein Sof.It is the death of the self in Spinoza’s secularised Judaism, the dehumanising result of Spinozism rejected by Buber. It is epitomised by the amoral realm of money which is the basis of the Spinozist ‘Republickof Merchants’.
In contrast the seeker of truth in love is given new life, as anyone who has been in love knows. All the old certainties are shattered. There is turmoil and pain to be sure, but there is expanded vision too. Nothing is seen in the same way ever again by anyone who has stepped into the wall of fire. Tomberg knew this. Union with the Divine is not the absorption of being by Divine Being, far from it:
...fire meets with FIRE, Then nothing is extinguished in the human personality but, on the contrary, everything is set ablaze. This is the experience of ‘legitimate two foldness’ or the union of two separate substances in one sole essence.
From Child of Encounter
© John Dunn.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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