Some of the recent work I’ve done on the Gnostic Mass—particularly this piece and this piece—assumes the idea of contemplation. Contemplation itself assumes an additional idea: depth.
Any situation you find yourself in contains almost incomprehensible amounts of information. Your nervous system can’t represent all of it, even on an unconscious level. It has to constantly reduce complexity, and it does that by discarding almost all the information it receives and assimilating the rest to patterns.
You don’t experience a blooming, buzzing confusion of sense data. You experience objects. Objects are patterns. You’re not experiencing any object all at once. You’re experiencing them by means of faces. For example, if I look at a drum, I’m not seeing all of the drum all at once. I’m seeing the drum by means of the side of it facing me. That’s what I mean by face.
The faces and hence objects you notice are a function of where you’re positioned relevant to objects in your environment, but they’re also a function of what your nervous system finds salient or relevant in some way. For example, you’re not aware of every object in the room with you right now. You’re focused on what seems most relevant, and what seems most relevant is not just a matter of personal choice. A lot of that is happening on an unconscious level.
But there’s always that sense that there is more to the experience than what we’re experiencing right at that moment. That something about reality is being revealed carries with it the implication that other parts are concealed, either because they’re not reducible to the faces of things we’re seeing right at that moment, or because even the experience we’re having is so vast that large amounts of it are being dropped or discarded.
That sense of “moreness” to things, that sense that reality transcends what we’re grasping at any moment, is what I mean by depth. Depth is what makes an experience feel real.
If depth breaks down—if the way things manifest, abide, break apart, and fall back away doesn’t cohere according to the normal patterns—it will start to feel like you’re dreaming. In fact that happens all the time when we’re dreaming, in which case we either wake up or start having a lucid dream.
There’s external depth, which is the depth of objects or nature generally, and there’s internal depth, which is the same sense of “moreness” you get when you introspect. What we call “self” at any moment can be viewed as an epiphenomenon of the interaction of those two depths. We find ourselves propelled by the interior depth and compelled by the exterior depth.
Sacredness is the acknowledgement of our absolute dependence upon depth. Religiosity is the conscious celebration of it.
Words pick out objects. (Language is highly complex and does lots of things besides this.)
Symbols are objects you look through into the depth. They’re objects of contemplation. So you don’t just look at them. Looking at them affords the ability to look through into depth, to establish an embodied relationship with the deep process of self-organization that gives rise to manifestation and passing away.
So one of the arguments I made in my recent article on the Gnostic Mass was that Baphomet is a symbol or an object of contemplation. What does Baphomet mean exactly? You can’t say. It’s not a word with a definition that will exhaust its meaning. It is a symbol that creates an embodied relation between the inexhaustible interior depths of ourselves and the inexhaustible depths without.
Intercourse is a symbol in the Gnostic Mass. Yes, it’s a symbol of the Great Work. But “Great Work” is just another phrase. “It’s the uniting of subject and object.” Those are more words.
Even to accomplish union of subject and object as in samadhi is itself another experience you’re looking through. When you attain samadhi, you don’t see the words GAME OVER flash in front of you. Samadhi is a profound, subtle experience, but it is on a certain level just another experience.
It’s not so much the experiences themselves that are important. It’s the “moreness” or depth that the experiences can only ever adumbrate which constitutes the sacredness which is celebrated in the religion.
That’s the deeper meaning of “the occult”. Occultism isn’t simply drawing figures in chalk on the ground in a room filled with incense smoke. It’s the work of occultation which in a sacred context is also revelation. It’s about creating an embodied relationship with what is real so we stand in the nexus where depth is simultaneously revealed and concealed.