The principle Satanic gnosis is the experience of the spiritual collapsing into the material contained in The Satanic Bible.

He no longer can view himself in two parts, the carnal and the spiritual, but sees them merge as one, and then to his abysmal horror, discovers that they are only the carnal—AND ALWAYS WERE! Then he either hates himself to death, day by day—or rejoices that he is what he is!

There is no ideal realm. There is no spirit world. To be human is to be embodied awareness, and our intrusive thoughts and visions are noises and communications from our own bodies, our own sensorium. The fundamental error of spiritual thinking in the West is the exacerbation of mind-body dualism and the positing of extra-physical sources of insight when our bodies were sitting right there the whole time.

The ego and its states, the sense even of the spiritual, is a product of the condition of the body. The health and status of the body directly impacts our mental states, our very sense of self. We are, in the end, embodied and living, or dead and gone, and the fact that most of us struggle desperately to remain embodied, and to keep our loved ones embodied, belies any talk of the assured ascension of the soul after death. What really terrifies the faithful is the idea that we are these bodies, that our nice, clean, spiritual essence has as its source the natural, dirty, organic world where everything is, in the end, sacrificed and recycled.

The world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides! — Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power

Your life is the pinnacle of the timeless struggle of various particles and patterns to achieve the kind of coherent sentience that is you at this moment, and soon it will end. The miracle is now. Eventually your body will no longer succeed at the juggling act of keeping you alive. One day it will simply crash to a halt, and your special essential soul will go with it. Somewhere inside everyone knows all of this. The only consolation is that you were never all that important to begin with.

We are embodied beings by nature. The desire for disembodied perfection is a spiritual pipe dream that drives out any sense of genuine vitality and purpose. The very thing that would resolve the spiritual crisis experienced by the believer in ghosts and spirits and gods is what he denies most about himself. The spiritualist cannot seem to grasp that we didn't just invent god, we invented the spiritual realm he lives in and all of its occupants as well.

All of these dead forms are the remnants of lived experience, not the living essence but the memory of its passing. The truly significant aspect of life is the feeling of vitality experienced in its living, which cannot be experienced reflectively or labeled in some way as to capture it without having to experience it anew. When we do what we want most to do, arranging our lives to pursue the greatest sense of meaning for us, we enter into a daemonic existence in which our actions flow according to a sense of “the good” that is an entirely personal equation, that is whatever leads to eudaemonia, to ataraxia, to a place without any need for reflection, or words, or self-awareness.

The “spiritual” can only have meaning to the Satanist when it refers to vital existence, here and now, in which the self can become lost in being itself. Our “spirituality” then is whatever keeps us in service of ourselves and free from the intents and desires of others, whatever maintains us in our pursuit of joy and True Will, and whatever deepens our connection with the body and the daemonic aspect of our awareness.