What is the world? It is an objectified reality around you in which you live and evolve. It allows you to have a multitude of experiences needed for the growth of your emotions and consciousness. When you are born, you find yourself in the physical body, fully identified with it, seeking survival and pleasure and avoiding pain. One could theorize that our body is the prison of the soul, as was suggested in some Western occult teachings. Yet, without the body we simply die, and there is no soul to be free from it anymore. So is it really the body that imprisons us, or rather we are prisoners of the mind? What is this world really, and what is our body? We are separated from the world, and any attempts to reach so-called oneness fail miserably. Why is that? It is because if you try to be one with something that is outside of you, you are already asserting your separation. Before we even consider changing our relationship with the world, we must consider our own body, which is the ‘immediate world’ for us.
Humans are not their bodies, and they are not in the body of the world. We are separated from everything that constitutes the environment of our experience of reality. The idea that our body is the prison, being of lesser density than the soul, comes from Greek philosophy, but then it became a part of the philosophy of Gnosticism, which developed in early Christianity. It was an interesting philosophy, because it presupposed that this world was created by the ignorant, lesser, inferior and/or even malevolent god, the Demiurge. I would like to say something about Gnosticism, in order to give us an alternative view on this reality. Whether its theory is correct or not is actually not the most important here. It is a theory of a God that no one has ever seen, but its concept has always had a great impact on the evolution of the human mind.
Perspective of Gnosticism
The Demiurge, alone and ignorant of the higher divine reality, fashioned the material cosmos, declaring himself to be the sole, supreme God, with a hubris that reflects his imperfect nature. He was the god of the Old Testament, who claimed to be the only god, and in his arrogance declared that there are no other gods but him. He is also called a Saklas ‘fool’ or Samael ‘blind god’.
“In Gnosticism, the Demiurge (often Ialdabaoth) wasn’t ‘allowed’ to create the world by a higher authority. Rather, his creation stemmed from a cosmic error, often linked to the divine emanation of Sophia (Wisdom), who desired to create independently, resulting in an imperfect, flawed being who is ignorant of the true, transcendent God. The Demiurge, a lesser, ignorant craftsman, mistakenly believed himself to be the actual God, creating the material world as a flawed imitation of the spiritual realm (Pleroma) and trapping divine sparks (souls) within it, making the world a prison from which Gnostics seek escape through gnosis (knowledge).”
One theory was that a semi-god, or demigod, created the world for malevolent purposes to entrap aspects of the divine in materiality. Other theories proposed that he was not malevolent, but simply foolish, trying to replicate the divine world based on his faint recollections, and thus creating a world that is fundamentally flawed. The theory of Gnosticism was in some ways developed to explain the great suffering in this world, which none of the religions were able to reconcile with the mind-based idea of the perfect God.
The world and its physical bodies are considered a prison designed to hold divine sparks (human souls) away from their true spiritual home. It was not a benevolent “permission” (of God), but a consequence of a cosmic spiritual error, a necessary unfolding of a flawed process. “I will attach tendons to and your flesh come upon you and. cover you with skin. I will put breath in you. You will come to life. And then you will know that I am the Lord” – Ezekiel 37:6.
The conclusions of Gnosticism are very interesting and somehow unique. This world is defective in many ways, and it is not surprising that some people began to consider it as an actual error. It could be that what some call ‘Satan’, the fallen angel, is in fact this semi-god and creator of earth. Humans were always afraid of going to Hell, but what if they already live in it? Satan due to his pomposity separated from God, but then he created earth from mud (lower material energy) because of his lack of access to light. We are the manifestations of his ‘arrogance’ and considering that we are created in his likeness, we might be just as miserable as he is, separated from God.
One of the names of the semi-god was Yaldabaoth, depicted as a lion-headed serpent, linked to Samael or Satan. Samael was an archangel associated with harsh judgment and the forces opposing true spiritual knowledge. Some systems portrayed him as a misguided, albeit powerful figure who eventually seeks redemption. Valentinian Gnosticism presupposed that salvation is not reached through faith and grace, but through gnosis, or knowledge. It divided humanity into three categories, those who have potential for salvation, those who are soul-oriented, and finally those who are damned by total identification with material reality.
In Judaism, they made the demigod into the main god. And it continued in Christianity. They put the false god on a pedestal, making him very happy. Ironically, from this perspective they actually did not worship God but what they assumed to be his adversary, Satan. But is the creation of earth an error? It might be an error on some level, but not on another level. We need to go really deep into the nature of this very imperfect reality, which nevertheless offers abundant opportunities for our evolution. The idea that someone other than God (the head-creator) created this world is not as absurd as it might seem. Even we humans have the power to create our reality. The fact that a powerful deity, other than God, created this world for its own could be theoretically sound. However, God oversees all of his manifestations, including semi-gods who could just as well create a very flawed universe. He could have known that no matter what world we are living in, our essence is and always remains divine. The soul is transcendent, because our sense of me belongs to God. Seeking freedom from the prison created by semi-god is the search to come to God.
Incidentally, the theory of Gnosticism is not much different from the concept of Prakriti created by Kapila and then incorporated by Yoga, as in the Yoga Sutras. Prakriti was meant to be the ignorant force of nature keeping souls (purusha) in bondage. Prakriti was very much an insentient, mechanical force designed to keep people in ignorance. But it also had some kind of wisdom, to provide all the necessary components and drives for the soul to break free. But the semi-god, as an individual intelligence of a more powerful being, acting from Prakriti was not mentioned, even though he might be part of Prakriti and present behind this flawed design.
Demigod is not evil, but he created evil. He may have wanted to create a good world, but his capacity for it was very limited. His design was to create a world based on suffering, so that we would seek transcendence. But the problem is that there is too much suffering to make transcendence possible, as most people are broken by their suffering. Furthermore, this dimension is too unconscious and ruled by so much forgetfulness that makes transcendence close to impossible for almost everyone. Looking rationally, this dimension has no much justification to exist, but we need to look deeper to reveal its purpose. This world has not been directly created by God, and he does not participate in its unfoldment. The power of creation comes from God, but then is distributed throughout creation. Even we humans can create. Our creativity is a very far-reverberation of his creativity. When we tap into our spiritual creativity, then it is directed back to God. This is where the power of the soul comes into play. What is the soul? It is but the immanent God in us. God cannot help us from outside, for he has to be reached through our own evolution and surrender.
The Truth of this World
It is a world of suffering, as Buddha very eloquently pointed out. So what was the intention of the demigod to create such a reality? He planted the seed of consciousness in the physical realm of single and multicellular organisms to begin evolution in this very imperfect world. It appears that he could not come up with a better design, but this is what it is.
But what difference does it make for us if our world was created by a demigod or not? Either way, our situation is unchanged. However, if this world was indeed created by a demigod this changes our perspective quite a bit. When Buddha reached his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, he famously said that he found the ‘builder of this house’ and the builder cannot build the house of the body anymore. This is similar to the Gnostic view. When we understand that this world was created by an inferior god, this becomes a waking up call to evolution towards transcendence. This may be the reason that a semi-god was allowed to create this reality, which is not our real home. Even if his creation was a cosmic error, it still serves a purpose of stimulating our desire for transcendence. To quote Anthony Hopkins from the Westworld show: “Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life on this planet using only one tool: the mistake”. The main flaw of this design is the objectification of the world and the body. The great suffering that is intrinsic to this reality is the unavoidable result of this objectification.
From the higher perspective, it is not the world that is the problem, but our perception of it. It is our perception that is the cause of our ignorance. Demigod did not just create the world, he created the perception of it. He forced upon us the will to exist in the material universe so that we resist death at any cost, the constant and illogical struggle to survive in a reality of suffering. However, since this perception is universal to all humans, on a practical level it cannot really be separated from the world itself. This world is the perception of it. If we change our perception, we change the world from within its flawed design.
To say it again, what makes this world the world of ignorance is its objectivization. We are born into this strange reality where everything is external to us. We can never be sure what the outer world will manifest and live in fear. We are threatened by the outer world, while desperately holding onto the hope that we will be taken care of. One can assume that it is the physical world with its imperfections that is the source of our suffering. But the physicality of this world is merely our perception of it, which is based on objectivization. It is not that we need to go to some better place, because wherever we go, it will be just the same. We must change the very experience of this reality by awakening to a higher world.
While the theory of Gnosticism makes sense on many levels, it is also very limited. It speaks of spirit being imprisoned in matter, but what is this spirit? People are not born with souls, but rather souls need to be created in the body. When you consciously surrender to your body, does it feel any more like a prison? It does not. In fact, the sense of physicality dissolves and only the soul remains. It is the same with the world outside of you. If you stop seeing it as outside, it then becomes another world, it becomes pure subjectivity experienced as our oversoul. We could view spiritual enlightenment as transcending the world created by the demigod, so that we can return to the realm of God himself. We may think the demigod is responsible for the cruelty of this place. But is he? We are. We are not just his slaves or victims, but we are him. He is not transcendent to us, as he created the world from within us, so that we became the protectors of the false while some of us seek the real. Because he is immanent to us, we must transform from within the totality of our perception of reality in order to be free.
When the term ‘demigod created this world’ is used, we assume that he is outside to it, but he is this world. Evolution happens from within each cell, each organism that gradually becomes conscious of its existence. This is how the sense of separation begins. Our body is the very manifestation of it within which egoic self forms the division between inside and outside, me and the.
Who is Demigod?
In our tendency to objectify reality, we immediately assume that if he exists, he is some kind deity or entity looking at the world from his heavenly palace. But he is neither an entity nor is he outside of this world. He is this very reality. Of course we could say the same about God, that he is this reality, but he isn’t. This reality is separated from God.
So who was the demigod originally at his conception? He was the force-energy-intelligence that emerged from God and was given free will to evolve and to create. But he could not evolve alone because he was neither one nor many. He could only evolve through his creation by becoming one and many. He was neither lonely nor felt love, he felt nothing all except the desire to feel. He needed to find a reason to exist at all. That’s why, demigod created our world. To evolve. Because irrespectively of its power, he lost unity with God. But why did he create objectivization, you may ask? This was the only way that he could become aware of himself, via object. First, through the insentient matter he became aware. And then through sentient life he became self-conscious. This impersonal force did not have a sense of me, and its purpose was to actually become Me, as one and many. It has become the world, and it is inside each one of us. It created an imperfect world due to its limitations, lack of enlightenment, and consciousness. It evolves through this world, through each one of us into consciousness, intelligence and love. But it has a long way to go, and in the process it needs to correct many of its errors.
If we use the term demigod for the purpose of this contemplation, he is both our ignorance and our awakening. Ignorance is his past, awakening, what he is becoming. When you feel regressing spiritually, losing your dedication and being pulled into the collective inertia, this is his past. The force of ignorance is much bigger than you, it is infused with the whole universe, because it is his past that he struggles to transcend through all of us.
Our Body as an Axle of Separation
The reason that our body feels like a prison of the spirit is because it is the watchtower of the individual self, from which you relate to whatever you perceive to be outside of you. Eyes are the windows of the soul, but the one who is behind these windows lives in prison. ‘I see you, I see them, I see it, I, I, I…’ The one who sees is not yet a pure spirit because it knows itself only through affirmation of its otherness and separation. Our head is the fortress from which we look at the world outside. All those heads walking on this planet are locked in separation. We are so isolated that we desperately look for some kind of bridge to the outside, and we usually call it love. But is it really love or desperation? You want to know love? To know it you need to realize your body as all-encompassing pure subjectivity so that you can see the other person for who they really are, as you. The true reason that the body is our prison is not because we are in the body, but quite the opposite – because we are not. Our body is a phantom prison of the phantom self. This has to change.
And this is the place to address Love. As long as you see the world outside of you, and the other person outside of you, this is the very opposite of love. We can talk about love as much as we like, but we cannot know love unless we transcend the isolation in our body. It is done not by leaving the body behind, but by awakening the pure perception where nothing is outside of us anymore.
As long as we see the world outside of us, all is false, but on the empirical level we can come closer to a relative truth. Aristotle thought that apples fall down because they love earth. As we know, it is false, but he just could not conceive of any better explanation. There are levels of the false. Humans have developed a very sophisticated understanding of the workings of the universe and our physical dimension. This is called ‘truth in the false’, because it helps us to better understand the world of ignorance and forgetfulness. So you can know many things about this world, but from a higher perspective all of this knowledge is but a dream.
We could say that there are only two theories about the world: that the world is outside of us, and that it isn’t. The first one is the mother of all human ideas about the nature of reality, and it is the first error that we must correct, not by creating better or higher theories, as they all are bound to fail due to being based on the false postulate. It is only when all our theories about the world are dropped that we can realize the truth, and this truth is not another theory, but an entry into the real world. However you view this reality, it is false because you are living in the wrong universe. Truth is only found in the real universe that you must enter. The real universe was never ‘created’ – it simply is. Everything comes from Self, and this is not a theory but direct truth. However, as the evolution of his creation moves further away from his center, it is being taken over by lower gods, and this is when it degrades. We are also gods who create, and we too can help the creation or degrade it even further, depending if we choose to serve our lower or higher truth. Our purpose is to realize in the midst of this confused and objectified reality that which is always perfect, our true self, and to further awaken to the fact that nothing in the world is outside of us, that it is the same perfect Self within us and all around us.
Meaning of Hell and Heaven
Hell on Earth
First of all, to see the meaning of these terms one has to really leave behind the religious (Christian) associations. The origin of the word ‘hell’ is simply ‘abode of the dead’, or ‘underworld’. In China the similar term is Diyu, which means ‘earth prison’, similar to underworld, a subterranean realm where souls go to atone for their sins. Their idea was influenced very much by Buddhism. Before that, Chinese just believed that the soul after death joins its ancestors. So where is such Hell? Nobody knows, but somewhere inside the earth, apparently. What is the symbolic meaning of this? It signifies that Hell is a dimension of earth. So when I sometimes say that we live in Hell, this does not mean that earth is Hell, but that people live in Hell on earth. Meaning, that they live in a dimension of forgetfulness that is deeply painful and ignorant. If one says that the material plane is Hell, what is the material plane really? Is it just a dimension formed from energy that appears to be solid? Or maybe it is just consciousness lost in appearances that appear solid in spite of being inherently empty? No, the material plane may be imperfect, but it is not Hell in the way we mean it.
Earth is not Hell but there is Hell on earth, and there are more levels of Hell than Dante imagined. He spoke about nine planes of Hell that represent the increasing levels of wickedness, culminating in the center of earth; yes, the center of earth – you definitely don’t want to end up there :). We could go into the subject of wickedness, and how many kinds of evil can manifest on earth. We could speak about lower tendencies such as selfishness, greed, envy, anger, resentment, indifference, cruelty, lack of compassion, and countless other human tendencies. Or perhaps we could refer to Hell as the deep suffering of human beings coming from lack of love, from fear, sadness, depression, grief, sorrow, loneliness, and so on. We could even refer here to the physical forms of suffering, like physical pain, sickness, decaying of body, aging, and the inevitability of death. But this is not the meaning of Hell intended here.
When simple people thought of Hell as literally hidden inside the earth, this symbolizes the absence of light and place of eternal darkness because sun cannot reach there. But Hell is not hidden inside the earth. It is ‘hidden’ on earth, as the absence of light. It is invisible because you first need to have light in order to see it. You cannot see Hell because Hell is not the presence of something – it is the absence of something.
We are contemplating the concept of Hell from the perspective of creation and demigod. Deep down, Hell is simply our spiritual ignorance and the absence of our true self. When the demigod became earth, his ignorance of Self took the form of the physical realm, and then his evolution began for billions of years. Evolution to what? Evolution to sentient life and consciousness. However, with the rise of consciousness another problem arose – pain coming from recognition of the absence of Self. We call it the spiritual suffering which is the greatest suffering of all. You could assume that less evolved beings, including most humans, do not recognize the absence of Self so they should not suffer for this reason. But they do, they just don’t know it. Every human suffers deeply because of the absence of Self. It is suffering of being, of existing, of being conscious…
It is not earth in itself but the absence of Self on earth that is Hell. The only way out of this Hell is to Remember who we are, to come back to Self. It is the demigod who must remember Self through us, because he is us, and we are him.
Heaven on Earth In many cultures, they spoke that we live between earth and heaven, the sky above us. Earth is physical, heaven is an empty space illuminated by the sun. This empty space of cosmos is the closest we can get to non-material existence, which is very symbolic. There is space on earth too, space between objects, space where sky reaches to the oceans, or deserts. The sky is not only above our heads, it expands into the earth. We could not live without space. You even need space between yourself and other people. It is written in Tao Te Ching that what makes a house are not the walls, but space inside of it. Space or emptiness are fully fused with the material universe, especially that matter itself is fundamentally empty.
But religiously speaking, Heaven has been usually seen as the ultimate eternal afterlife where one returns to the peace and love of God. No one actually knows what this means, so people usually imagine it to be just like earth but much better, perfect, without any worries or fears and where all our desires are fulfilled. Similar to a Paradise which is the name for the Garden of Eden on earth. But what is Heaven really? How can we know it if it is beyond human imagination? It is beyond imagination but you do not need imagination to know it. You can know it by entering it while living on earth.
To put it simply, Hell is not knowing who you are, and Heaven is knowing it. Heaven is another name for your pure nature and it is by awakening to pure subjectivity that you enter Heaven.
Here you realize Heaven on earth, but you still do not experience earth as Heaven due to your separation. In awakening, you stop being separated from yourself but you still remain separated from the world. For earth to be realized as Heaven we must awaken to earth as pure subjectivity. This is how the demigod actualizes himself and his own creation as Self. To enter Heaven we must actualize this world as the all-pervasive space of the Divine
Demigod vs Pantheism and Panentheism
Pantheism is a theory saying that God and the universe are one and the same; the divine is the totality of everything. Panentheism says that they are not the same, but rather that the universe is contained in God who is transcendent to it. Both theories are intellectually acceptable, but neither is true because the world is separated from God. Pantheism when reinterpreted is a valid concept, not because God is the universe, but because the demigod is. Demigod is not inside God, but split from him. He needs to evolve through this universe in order to enter the dimension of God, to reach divine unity.