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 Hea...