The Dimension of Depth
When one considers the realm of philosophy or theology, what one encounters is, with a few exceptions, more or less clear. Philosophers and theologians approach their disciplines with a scientific attitude, seeking to elucidate, define, and clarify, rather than bewilder or confuse.
But when one approaches the domain of the esoteric or occult, one will inevitably encounter a forest of symbols—images, words, and archetypal stories—that suggest rather than clarify. In some sense, it is like entering a dream world where everything has an atmospheric potency, but where things nonetheless exist in a penumbra of vague and hazy outlines. The limpid clarity of other metaphysical disciplines seems to fade as one wanders in a world that is at once murkier and more charged with feeling.
This haziness is of course what drives many away from the realm of the esoteric, and indeed why it remains occult—that is hidden from the purview of the ordinary. Many prefer the limpid clarity of definitions and concepts, and thus reject the symbolic as unnecessary obfuscation.
That raises the question: Why should one bother with the esoteric at all? Is not the scientific approach to metaphysics more practical and effective? Why not simply think in clearly defined concepts, doing away with the symbolic and archetypal? Those questions are what I would like to briefly attempt to answer.
Dreams and Symbols
It is not unusual to awake from a dream that is a bewildering tangle of seemingly unrelated images that to waking consciousness make no coherent sense. And yet this very same dream can convey a feeling that is raw and vivid in its intensity.
One can dream of one’s teeth crumbling, for example, and wake with a feeling of cringing anxiety. Or one can dream of being chased by a faceless enemy and jerk awake with a racing heart and a feeling of unmitigated terror. Or one can dream of falling in love with a stranger and awake with a nameless longing. And so on.
Many other examples could be given, but the point is that the symbolic world of dreams is an encounter with ideas conveyed in their full potency. The symbols in dreams are not meant to convey concepts, but unmediated experiences. An encounter with a symbol in a dream is an encounter with the noumenon of an idea—the thing-in-itself. It is an experience of intimate encounter with something alive, something crackling with intensity and charged with meaning. And this can often be terrifying and disconcerting.
The same is not true of waking consciousness, however. The more clear and conceptual an idea becomes, the more abstract it grows, the more distant we are from it. Concepts in this sense feel entirely safe, wrapped as they are in the insulation of lifeless definitions. Rational day consciousness reduces, tames, and neuters ideas so they can be inspected safely. “We murder to dissect,” as the poet says.
The Dimension of Depth
The realm of the esoteric, properly understood, is the dimension of depth. It is to analytical, rational consciousness what dreaming is to waking consciousness. The realm of the esoteric is the realm of ideas in all their living intensity, which can only be fully encountered not in concepts, but in living symbols.
To be an esotericist, then, is to leave the realm of waking consciousness and plunge into the realm of phenomenological experience where ideas are encountered as living beings. It is to leave behind the ossified safety of dead and statuesque concepts and walk in the dark forest where ideas prowl in all their unmediated intensity.
And as I have said, this experience can be bewildering and a bit terrifying. Encountering a thing in itself always is, as the prophets of the ancient world knew too well. When the veil of waking consciousness was removed and they experienced unmediated Reality, the prophets always cried out like Isaiah, “Woe is me, for I am undone.”
That is not to say that there have not been those who have tried to deaden and conceptualize the realm of the esoteric. The human mania for systematization knows no limits, and indeed those who have tried to categorize symbols rather than encounter them are too great to number. But suffice it to say that the difference between true esotericists and dilettantes is the knowledge of experience over and above concepts. It is the knowledge of the heart, where being and knowing meet.