Cosmic Exile and Return

While you are sinking through the three hundred and sixty-five eons, worlds and generations on your way to the earth at a point in time, you will grow heavier and heavier; more and more litter from the cosmic spheres will attach itself to you, shrouds, clothes, execrescences, snails, dead weight, covering your awareness of the original Light, until you at last fall into the dark dungeon of spirit and flesh and are finally born as a human being. That is, as a being that remembers nothing, not even what it is, namely Light - like someone sleeping. That applies to you too. But at the same time you are different from the others. All the others are sleepers, who have yet to awake, through faith and knowledge. Only then is there a way back for them. But the heavy accretions have mostly reconciled them with life on earth; they have forgotten that they are aliens there and that they are what they think they are: that is the greatest threat to their return.
- Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Heaven

In a sense I was a Moses descending Mount Sinai, but without any recollection of what he had seen there and of what God had told him.
- Jakob Wassermann, My Life as German and Jew

The truest myth is the gnostic account of cosmic exile and return. We are in exile because we are spirits imprisoned in matter. We have forgotten who we are and why we are here. Sacred texts are reminders of the original Light from which we come; and are only sacred to the extent to which they aid in our remembrance. "Secular" literature may also aid in our remembrance, for the inner spark that inspired prophets also inspires the greatest poets in prose.

Those who remember they are aliens here are what they think they are: the chosen ones, not in spite of but by virtue of their doubt. (As Abraham doubted the divinity of idols, as Buddha doubted the illusion of self.) The Jewish people and their fate signify the narrative of the chosen: strangers in a strange land kept alive by sacred memory, keeping sacred memory alive in turn. The cosmic significance of Jewish history does not make individual Jews superior to anyone else. Only as a collective do Jews serve as often unwitting witness to the travails of the individual chosen.

All religions are material bodies containing, sometimes concealing, sparks of the original Light. Buddhism is compatible with monotheism if we recognize the ultimate being as the apotheosis of ultimate nothingness, the emptiness within the Holy of Holies as equivalent to Nirvana. I was fortunate to be born into a religion that doesn't deem everyone in need of saving, because I have no certainty in any one path to salvation. I recognize kindred spirits among other peoples and strangers among my own.

We must shake off the dust of exile - or the heavy accretions of convention - to return to spiritual Zion. Every false idol shattered is one less obstacle blocking the way. I don't have special access to truth or a prophetic vision, but I believe in beautiful illusions over sordid realities. The most beautiful illusion, the one that remains when doubt dissolves every other, is that of redemption, of cosmic return. If we come from nothing, we will return to nothing. But what if there is something?