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Love and creativity
Man can break the rules.
Just as Eros, the primordial god of Creation and Life and Orphic 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 etc.
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 the Orphic myth of Eros, be this a break with:
. the womb
. innocence, or
. animal nature (Earth Mother)
Each of these and more is a cosmic egg to be smashed.
Each break is both an act violation and creativity, ultimately prompted by Love.
Each is an act of violation, ending the cycle, pentrating the egg, giving rise to birth and new life.
Each response to Love is a death and resurrection of man in the image of God.
To the ones living a fully human life of love and creativity are opposed those who lead a sub-human existence without love, who never make the break from Mother Earth and Animal Nature. These are the ones who worship the One, who promote the closed system, be it Dawinist, Spinozist, kabbalistic, Marxist etc.
This is the divide of all ages that is masked 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’.
© John Dunn.
Imagining Urizen
In my previous blog, I wrote of ‘a fully human life of love and creativity’. By implication I meant that an innocent life devoid of love and creativity was less than human.
These thoughts drew me to return to William Blake, a figure whose works have nagged at me on and off throughout my awoken life. The creative imagination was central to Blake's conception of God and what it means to be human.
I think of William Blake, to whom the imagination itself was God.
Blake did not see the Creator as an entity apart, an all-knowing God which controlled the affairs of man from across a divide. Such a distanced entity Blake described rather as Urizen, the demiurge, a 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.
By implication, this made of the Bible's Jehovah a Satan, the puppeteer pulling the strings of mankind, an over-bearing father, a failed architect, and the 'Accuser of the World' who unfairly condemned Adam and Eve when he was the one at fault.
Christian religionism for Blake had carried over the worshipping of the demiurge from the followers of Jehovah, which made it, essentially, Devil Worship.
To Blake, God was the Human Imagination. Instead of being saved by Christ, man would be saved through the salvation of his own imagination; he was his own Christ.
For now, I will place Blake amongst those ‘whose banners carry the symbols of love and creativity’.
© John Dunn.
Truth: the one and the many
Truth is not something external to us to be won by following a given tradition.
Such an external ‘truth’ is the demiurge, the Urizen of Blake.
Truth is something that we create and it is this creation that dignifies us.
It is a condition that the common man partakes of unaware, constantly degrading it in the series of trifles of which his existence is woven, which, in turn, condemn him to his own unfreedom.
Rising above the condition of the common man means overcoming the interminable series of esoteric mirages to realise that initiation has only one source, the Christ. This Christ is certainly not the mystical or gnostic Christor that of religion, which is really the demiurge, the given mirage of ‘truth’ that is external to us, but rather the cosmic Christ, the metaphysical principle of absolute individuality and freedom.
How can the one source be, at the same time, principle of absolute individuality? Surely being in thrall to the one means the opposite of individuality and freedom.
The answer lies in the statement above, i.e. that truth is something that we create. Truth never confronts us as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’.
The one source therefore is something personal to the individual, existing in a state of mutual dependence with the individual.
I will leave you to ponder the words of Silesius, which are very much related to this point.
“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”
© John Dunn.
Truth: inside out
Central to the previous ‘Thought blog’ was the statement:
...truth is something that we create. Truth never confronts us as external, other than as a bogus ‘truth’.
Let us call this truth the Logos, which better reflects its status as the ultimate truth and foundation of all. Logos of course is also known variously as the Word, God, Christ, as well as the Truth.
To continue then, the Logos as something we create is akin to the words of William Blake, i.e. that ‘imagination is God’.
I am called upon at this point to pause and consider a question related to the proposition that ‘the Logos is something we create’.
In the above proposition, is not the ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway?
We are in a damned if we are, or damned if we’re not scenario, because if the ‘I’ does not precede the Logos, the Logos exists without the ‘I’.
In either case the ‘I’ as active creator is lost.
Blake’s imagination, under the above logic, turns out not to be God.
The Logos stands external to the individual.
Can the following statement by Silesius be redeemed in any way?
“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”.
© John Dunn.
Endeavour is all
Spiritual endeavour must only exist to turn us towards a higher reality.
Once the endeavour becomes an accepted body of knowledge it eliminates the higher reality that is sought, i.e it eliminates the Logos.
Consider the words of Silesius:
I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.
These words seem to support the view that the endeavour is all, i.e. it is within the human endeavour that God, i.e. the Logos lives. It might be said that the endeavour is the Logos. More than this, the words of Silesius stress the individuality of the endeavour, i.e. that the Logos is something that I create.
The active nature of the endeavour deals with the question of chronology posed earlier (in Thought blog Truth: inside out):
I am called upon at this point to pause and consider a question related to the proposition that ‘the Logos is something we create’.
In the above proposition, is not the ‘I’ prior to the Logos? Does this not make the presupposed ‘I’ an abstraction, and can anything precede the Logos anyway?
We are in a damned if we are, or damned if we’re not scenario, because if the ‘I’ does not precede the Logos, the Logos exists without the ‘I’.
In either case the ‘I’ as active creator is lost.
In response to the proposition that the 'I' is lost, we can say that Truth, i.e. the Logos, is not something fully rounded and finished forever, Truth is an active endeavour or, to put it another way, the Logos, or God, is actively created. This surely helps us to appreciate the words of Silesius, because, by implication, when the activity stops,‘were I brought to naught’, then God ‘would of necessity have to give up the ghost’. Rather than lost, the 'I' in this explication becomes critical to the existence of the Logos. Here God and the 'I' live together or die together.
© John Dunn.
Unattainable transcendence
The divine intention of the Logos for the thinking subject, i.e. the latter’s potential, has its potential moment in the original connectivity with the Logos. However, this moment is not the thinking subject’s reality, who loses this moment. The thinking subject thus loses the possibility of an essential reality, since it believes that thought relates to objects or phenomena outside itself, and not to its own shaping power. Thought fails to see within itself the relation with the Logos that is immediate to it. It transfers this relation outside of itself.
Do we not do the same to the Logos, i.e. to the oginatory principle itself?
The indispensable condition of understanding the Logos is that object be not detached from the subject and posited in itself, independent, in its unattainable transcendence.
As transcendent object it can only be effectively posited as object already thought and thereby it is shownto be immanent in the thinking, but considered abstractly in a way which separates it from the thinking itself. And then it is obvious thatwhat we find within the object is what we have put there.
So it is the separation of the Logos from the thinking subject that results in the objectivising, what I have described elsewhere as idolatry.
What we know commonly as the Logos and ourselves as the thinking subject consist of what we have put there.
The Logos and the thinking subject, i.e. me, are being thought of abstractly; and an abstract concept has no reality.
So where is the concrete reality?
It can only be in active thought.
But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.
What is thought before the fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?
Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?
I am brought back to a favourite quotation of mine made by Johann Angelus Silesius, 17th century priest and religious poet.
“I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”
© John Dunn.
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