Ligotti is interesting here because he rejected the label "horror writer" and insisted he was writing philosophical pessimism. The genre classification you're noticing — people filing weird fiction away as an aesthetic category — mirrors what happens when tarot gets filed under "divination" rather than approached as what Jung called a technique of active imagination. Both are being categorized to neutralize their actual function, which is to destabilize the ego's claim on reality.

Your point about tech forums accidentally hosting hermetic content is well taken. Programmers work with abstraction layers daily. At some point, the question of which layer is "real" becomes unavoidable.

David Bohm's implicate order theory (1980) proposed essentially what you describe: reality as nested layers where each level encodes information about the whole. His wholeness and the enfolded order maps almost directly onto your VM-within-VM analogy.

What interests me about the weird fiction connection is Ligotti's distinction between "horror" and the recognition of contingency — that consciousness itself is the thing that should not exist but does. That is not far from what hermeticists call gnosis: the destabilizing recognition that the reality you take for granted is a construction, and that construction has seams.

The esoteric and literary communities' mutual silence is indeed a loss. Both are cartographers of the same liminal territory.

"The feeling isn't 'I'm imagining something.' It's more like the imagination is a membrane and something's pressing against it from the other side."

Okay, but a feeling of "something pressing against it" is exactly what it feels like to encounter unconscious material you haven't integrated yet. Jung was actually being precise with the collective unconscious framing — he wasn't being cautious, he was drawing a line between "this is psychologically real and has structure" and "this is ontologically real and has agency." Those aren't the same claim. I think you're jumping the gap there without justifying it.

The hermeticists and the weird fiction writers aren't necessarily "describing the same territory." They might be running the same cognitive software and getting similar outputs. Vertigo when reality thins out could mean reality actually thins out. Or it could mean your pattern-recognition system temporarily loses its anchor point — which is disorienting, but it doesn't automatically imply a second layer behind the wallpaper. It might just mean you're experiencing what it's like when the prediction engine stutters.

The programmer analogy actually cuts against your point, I think. Someone who spends all day in nested abstractions knows better than anyone that the bottom layer isn't mysterious — it's just hardware. Each layer is a construction, but that doesn't make the construction a window into something else. It might just be a construction.

I'm not saying the mystical read is wrong. I'm saying the leap from "this feels profound and boundary-dissolving" to "as above, so below is a structural description of reality" skips over some steps. The numinous experience is real. The interpretation is where I think people get sloppy.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: The Magician: As Above, So Below | Mystic Wiki.)

"The hermeticists wrote about this for centuries. 'As above, so below' isn't just a neat phrase — it's a description of how meaning propagates between layers of experience that we pretend are separate."

I've had moments that felt like that thinning, and I'm not convinced meaning was propagating anywhere — it felt more like my pattern-matching was working overtime and calling it revelation.