It’s really no surprise esoteric thought is drawn to the
cosmos. There is something precious about the cold infinity of abyss set afire
with clusters of life-giving suns. The ancient saw no distinction whatsoever
with the cosmos of Nuit and their god-forms. They were one and wholly the same.
Have we lost this in modern times? I often wonder whether it’s the cosmologists
and physicists that are now the only real proponents of religious thought. That
perhaps the trajectory of religious feeling
has been lost on religions and preserved in those that traverse space. Listen
to them talk. When NASA landed a spacecraft on the Rosetta Comet in 2014, the
press conference revealed much of the state of mind of these off-world
travelers. They spoke with reverence.
With an air of excitement, these scientists evoked a sense of the sacred much
more than anything I’ve seen from current religious milieus. The tone of these
scientists reminded me of Wickes when he remarked, “I looked upon space and I
beheld darkness. In that darkness moves mysterious forces. Not like the gods of
man’s conceiving were they, but strange primeval beings born before the gods of
human form. They were hooded in darkness. Through their fingers they drew the
threads of blackness and even wove them back and forth.”[1]
A plea for the intangible and ethereal and bewildering, these men of science
were not unlike their god-fearing predecessors such as Copernicus, Galileo, or
Newton.
Hollywood has begun to catch on. Although Kubrick’s 2001 certainly had religious overtones,
the more recent Gravity boggles the
mind in its blatant use of esoteric paradigms. Watch it again. And for god sake
listen to the music. Bullock’s character is separated from the world, undergoes
a liminal set of Ordeals and comes blazing back to earth a new Being. The
experiences this character has in the vacuum effectively leaves a wreckage of
her former self. We bear witness to her dissolving
as every possible thing that could go wrong does. Nuit herself is a catalyst
and agent of change. It is in the expansiveness of the abyss that we are
confronted with the terrifying purge of form that leads to recognition of the
immanent. The film is a mystery teaching.
Watching it evokes Bendyaev when he wrote that “The absolute is a definitive
mystery. God is transcendental; an abyss separates man from him. But the
transcendental nature of god is our immanent experience.”[2]
In the film’s concluding sequence we see the transformation and utter
bewilderment of emerging a new Being. Bullock looks up in almost disbelief of what she just underwent.
It’s a sad state of affairs when our representatives of
religion are no more spiritual than the atheists they pretend to despise. When
they are paid millions to deliver spiritually empty prayers, ask for more
millions, and provide ‘spin’ on secular issues having nothing at all to do with
renewal. But it is equally baffling and indeed encouraging to know that science
has taken up the mantle. That we can find honest
spiritual milieus in government space programs and in privately funded
manufacturers such as SpaceX. Who would have thought given the history of
science and religion that it would be the scientists that embody the ineffable
and mysterious? Perhaps this is what the ancients knew. They knew that in
preserving child-like grace they retained the wonder and awe of the
numinous event. And while doing so, honor a time before religion became a slave
to man. Somewhere, Giordano Bruno and Galileo are having a well-deserved laugh.
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