A black hole is the collapsed remains of a star that has become so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping it.
We can use the idea of a black hole as a way to describe a Cosmology.
Anatomy of a Black Hole
Black holes have multiple parts. Outside of one is just normal spacetime. Everything behaves as we expect it to. Externally, only the center appears black. The outside brightly flares and dances, like a star.
As we get closer, we find that orbiting the black hole is a ring of matter called an accretion disk. This is dust and particles which grind together, creating heat and light from their friction as they spiral downward. As it orbits, the gravity of the black hole acts like a lens, causing us to be able to see the light from the disk behind the hole as surrounding it above and below. This causes an image looking much like an eclipse, with a ring across its front.
Inside the accretion disk is what is know as the photon sphere. Light from outside the black hole comes at it from all directions, always moving at the speed of light. Some of this light approaches the black hole at a perfect angle to end up in an orbit around it. Eventually, this orbiting light will either fall into the black hole or it will shoot away from it. In our image of a black hole, this looks like a thin ring outlining the hole itself.
Further in from the photon sphere, we come to the event horizon. This is the point of no return. It is also the only part of the black hole which is actually black, as any light that passes this point inevitably stays within the black hole and is never able to reach our eyes to be seen. This happens for a peculiar reason: Once this boundary is crossed time and space are actually physically bent by gravity to such a degree that they switch places. The only possible future now becomes a direction leading toward the center of the hole, and the only time that exists is the distance of the journey to this center. Black holes do not only collapse space, they collapse time as well.
On this horizon, because information cannot be destroyed, we actually have a record of every single piece of matter or energy which has fallen into the hole. It is temporally encoded onto the horizon itself. If you watched something cross the event horizon from outside, you would not ever actually see it cross the border. Instead, time would appear to move slower and slower for it, its color would shift to become redder and redder, and eventually it would pass out of sight in the visible spectrum and become invisible to you. From this external view its not actually possible for anything to ever fall inside of the black hole, as it would take an infinite amount of time.
The object that enters the black hold finds that the interior is not actually black. It is filled with light from every direction in the universe, there is just nothing solid for it to bounce off of, nor is that light able to escape the hole. Were you to fall into one, and magically not be torn apart as you cross its boundaries, you would experience your view of the cosmos collapsing. “Below” you, toward the center of the hole, there would be nothing but blackness. Looking back from the direction you came, you would see your field of view folding in upon itself, becoming smaller and smaller, until it is a single infinitely bright point.
At the very center of the hole is what is known as the singularity. This is the point of infinite density to which everything crossing the event horizon eventually reaches. Physics as we know it dislikes infinities, and so it begins to break apart at this point as time and space both come to a complete stop.
The Cosmology
Let us look at a black hole as if it is the structure of the Divine creating the universe within itself.
Light pours into a black hole infinitely from every possible direction.
We can look at this light as the top level of the Divine. We can match it up to a Sephirotic Tree of Life and say that this light pouring inward is Kether.
As this light reaches the photon sphere and begins to orbit it gains a preliminary structure. This would correspond to Chokmah. This light crowns the black hole, creating a literal ring around it, similar to looking at an eclipse. It outlines it, making it visible despite being a dark void.
Next, we reach the event horizon. This spherical plane corresponds to Binah and though it has no physical form it can be thought of as the material of the Goddess. The Nuit of Thelema. Because it encodes everything external, it is not a flat surface. It has ripples and wrinkles that relate to every possible future and past, because it is encoding not only energy and matter, but also time itself as it falls into the hole. This also somewhat matches the classical near-eastern concept of the Firmament.
We now descend down through the Abyss, the emptiness without form. There is only confusion and chaos around us as we fall into darkness.
However, light is pouring into the black hole from all directions. As it does so, it passes through the surface of the event horizon and is modified by it. It then further interferes with itself, brightening in some locations and darkening in others. This interference corresponds to Chesed, Gevurah, Netzach, and Hod on the Tree of Life. Looking upward through the material darkness of the world around us as this light converges towards the center, Yesod, we see the Divine as a singular infinitely bright point above us: Tiphereth.
When this happens as light passes through the surface of water, we call the resulting pattern a caustic.
When coherent light from multiple directions passes through (or bounces off) a surface that is encoding information, such as a piece of photographic film (or, again, the surface of water), the resulting appearance is that of a 3D image. We call this image a hologram.
So as light falls into our black hole from every direction, modified by crossing the event horizon and interfering with itself, falling an infinite distance inward, the result is a 3-Dimensional holographic projection.
This projection is the world as we know it. We have reached Malkuth. When you look outward with your eyes, you are looking at an infinitely far away spherical plane that is the surface of the Goddess as the Light of God passes through and is modified by it. Even things that seem close to you are part of this projection from an impossible distance.
At the center of this projection, the center of you, the very Heart of your Heart, is the singularity of the black hole. It is infinitely dense, timeless and dimensionless, and contains all of the information spiraling in from outside.
We can think of this singularity as a hole within the black hole which contains itself. Though no light escapes the black hole, all light from the external universe outside the hole is streaming downward to this one point. As such, it is effectively no different than the exterior of the black hole, which also has all light streaming in to it.
This is the Divine Self, the light of the Divine within you. It contains the entirety of Creation and Eternity within it, including you and itself. This is the Hadit of Thelema, the core of the condensed Star, and the perspective from which you view the projected world around you.
Our Katabatic journey into the center of a black hole is now complete. Were we to go further downward, the process would recursively repeat through infinity.
Because we are a sizeless point observing a 2D projection of a 3D world, we cannot consider any specific point to be the center. Rather, EVERY point that we observe can be thought of as the center, and thus every person you come across has the singularity at their core just as you do.
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I also recently wrote a guest article, titled The Last Proton, for my friend Paddy Murphy’s Substack. I recommend checking him out if you enjoy this blog.