therefore it does not acknowledge us.
My dear people, we are already the children of God
but what we are to be in the future has not yet been revealed;
all we know is that when it is revealed
we shall be like him
because we shall see him as he really is.
[1 John 3:1-2]
The maker (of the world-projecting artifact) is here, in the animate debris of this world, his memories erased, so that he has no knowledge of his own identity. He could be any one of us, or a number of us, scattered here and there. The artifact, unaware of him, unaware that it is an artifact, unaware of its purpose, will eventually subject this memoryless maker located here to too much pain; this final excess of pointless, unmerited pain inflicted on the life form that, unknown to the artifact and itself, the maker, will cause anamnesis to occur abruptly; the maker will "come to himself," recall who and what he is -- whereupon he will not merely rebel against the artifact and its pain-filled world; he will signal the presiding deity Shiva to destroy the artifact, and, with it, its projected world.
The artifact does not comprehend what risk it is running in the inflicting of unmerited suffering on living creatures. It imagines them all to be at its mercy and without recourse. In this it is wrong, absolutely wrong. Buried here, mixed in with the bulk, the mass, there exists unsuspected even by itself the Urgrund with all the power and wisdom that implies. The artifact is treading on dangerous ground; it is coming closer and closer to awakening its own maker.
The protonarrative of this is found in Euripides' The Bacchae. A stranger enters the kingdom of the "King of Tears," who has him imprisoned for no cause. The stranger turns out to be the high priest of Dionysos, which is equal to being the god himself. The stranger bursts the prison (a symbol of this enslaving world) and then systematically destroys the king by driving him insane, and in a public way that not only abolishes him but [also] turns the king into a laughingstock for the multitude that his reign has oppressed. If the prison represents this world, what does the "King of Tears" represent? Nothing less than the creator of this world: the mecrudiical, ruthless, unheeding artifact itself, which is to say, the king or god of this world. "The King of Tears" does not suspect the existence of the true nature of the stranger whom he has imprisoned. Nor whom the stranger can call on.
Echoes of this protonarrative are found in the Synoptics, with Pilate as the "King of Tears" and Christ as the stranger (it is noteworthy that Christ comes from an exterior province). Christ, however, in contrast to the stranger in The Bacchae, does not avail himself of the power that he can call on (i.e. the power of the Heavenly Father); but the next time Christ appears, he will call on this power, which will destroy the entire system of things, the world and the wicked alike. The crucial difference between The Bacchae and the First Advent is that Christ comes first to warn the world and the wicked before he is to return as destroyer. He is thus giving us a chance to repent, which is to say, heed the warning.
In the fifties a Hollywood comedy movie was filmed in which the following situation was presented: the king of a medieval sort of land had become too old and feeble to rule, and therefore had turned over his authority to a regent. The regent, being cruel and brutal, was oppressing the population of the kingdom without the elderly king's knowledge. In the film, the elderly king is persuaded by a time traveler from the future to don peasant's garb and walk about in disguise, to observe how his people are being treated. Disguised as a peasant, the old king himself is brutally treated by the regent's troops; in fact, he and the time traveler are imprisoned for no reason. After much difficulty, the king manages to escape from the prison and return to his palace, where he dons his rightful kingly garb and reveals himself to the evil regent as he actually is. The evil regent is deposed, and the tyranny inflicted on the innocent population is abolished.
According to the cosmological model presented in this paper, the Urgrund, the ultimate noos and maker, is secretly present in this cruel and spurious world. Being unaware of this, the artifact projecting this counterfeit world will continue heedlessly to inflict the needless suffering engendered by the mindless machinery (i.e. the causal processes) it customarily employs and has always employed. In my opinion the Urgrund has differentiated itself from being the One into plurality. Some fragments or "images" of it are certainly conscious of their identity; others perhaps are not. But as the level of pointless pain continues (and even increases), these separated "images" of the Urgrund will recollect themselves into conscious rebirth -- equal to a sentence of death for the artifact or "regent."
This provides us with another application of Paul's statement that the universe "is in birth pangs." Pain is a prelude to birth; birth, in this case, is not a birth of man but a birth of God. Since it is man who undergoes the pain, it can be reasoned that the birth of God (the Urgrund) will occur in man himself. Mankind, then, as a species, is a Mater Dei: a Mother of God -- an extraordinary concept, which would then regard biological evolution on this planet as a means of bringing into existing a host or womb from which God Himself is at last born. Interestingly, there is scriptural support for this: The Holy Spirit is regarded in the N.T. as an impregnating divinity; it was the Holy Spirit that engendered Christ -- and that Christ is transmuted back into, upon his resurrection. The human race assumes a yin nature, or female nature, with the Holy Spirit as the yang, or male principle. Man, then, does not evolve into God; he evolves into a womb or host for God; this is crucially different. Anamnesis is the birth, in essence the offspring of two parents: a human being and the Holy Spirit. Without the entry into the human being of the Holy Spirit, the event cannot occur. The Holy Spirit is, of course, the Pons Dei. It is the link between the two realms.
In creatures of all kinds there is a major instinct system that is termed "homing." An example is the return of the humpback salmon from the ocean back up the stream to the exact spot where they were spawned. By analogical reasoning, man can be said possibly to possess -- even unknown to himself -- a homing instinct. This world is not his home. His true home is in the region of the heavens that the ancient world called the pleroma. The term occurs in the N.T. but the meaning is obscure, since the exact meaning is "a patch covering a hole." In the N.T. it is applied to Christ, who is described as the "fullness of God," and to believers who attain that fullness through faith in Christ. In the Gnostic system, however, the term has a more definite meaning: It is the supralunar region in the heavens from which comes the secret knowledge that brings salvation to man.
In the cosmology presented here, the pleroma is conceived to be the Urgrund or the location of the Urgrund from which we originally came and to which (if all goes right) we finally return. If the totality of being is regarded as a breathing organism (exhibiting inhalation and exhalation, or palintropos harmonie), then it can be said, metaphorically, that originally we were "exhaled" from the pleroma, pause momentarily in externalized stasis (our lives here), and then are inhaled back into the pleroma once more. This is the normal pulsation of the totality of being: its basic activity or indication of life.