The fall into matter proceeded through many spheres, each one denser and smaller than the one before.  The first and largest of the manifest spheres is made of the finest substance, an ethereal form of matter imperceptible to physical senses and instruments.  It has been called the Talasphere, meaning a “primordial place”, and the inhabitants may be called Talasins.  Their first parents were cast in the image of Alpha and Omega, but here in the created realm they were no longer the Be-All and End-All.  We christen them Unam and Deuce, for the yang being still had a rudimentary sense of Divine Oneness, while his yin partner was focused on the twoness of sensory experience, and especially propagation.

     In their first act of love in the new sphere, Unam did all in his might to direct the energy upward, but it was finally sucked down by the mightier force of the maternal instinct fueling Deuce.  Thus began the first generation of Talasins, who soon waxed prolific.  Some had a greater proportion of yang or yin, while others were arrayed in a spectrum between the poles.  It was easy for the unpolarized beings to glom together and merge into One; but though it was ecstatic for them, the loosh it produced was insipid.  God could have paraphrased one of his later Avatars and said, “Because you are neither yang nor yin, I vomit you out of my mouth.”  It was much more palatable when beings from the opposite ends of the spectrum tried to merge, because it was very difficult for them and the energy of their efforts increased the quantity of loosh.  Furthermore, the struggle of the opposites to conjoin generated a kind of friction which improved the quality of the loosh when they succeeded.

     God pondered the question of how to increase the polarization of the Talasins, and thereby amplify the intensity of their matings.  How could the distance between them be widened and sharpened?  How could their desire to meld be heightened to desperation?  These thoughts drew God back to the memory of his own experience of the ultimate extremity: facing death in the Ultrasphere, as told in Cosmogenesis chapter 6.  He recalled the absolute emotional certainty that his death would be the end of everything, a veil so black and final that he rent it asunder only by inflicting death upon himself and rising again, as told in Cosmogenesis chapter 7.

     And now God had the answer to his question: he would drop the veil of death upon the Talasins.  He would render their individual forms vulnerable to cessation, and create an impenetrable illusion that this would end their very existence.  In reality, of course, death would simply be a return to the Oneness they craved; but because they wouldn’t know this, the illusion of their separation one from another would be complete.  Therefore their will to conjoin would become in their minds the urgent need to avert extinction, the only way back to Oneness.

     Tala had been a tranquil paradise, but now God stirred up a great tempest which subjected the denizens to the etheric equivalent of hurricanes and earthquakes.  The Talasin bodies were protean compared to ours, but had to maintain the same integrity of form to continue to function.  When the storm at length passed, those who had weathered it beheld the inert broken bodies of those who had not.  At first they were perplexed by the stillness of their comrades ~ surely they must soon revive and arise.  When they did not, the Talasins grappled with the unthinkable, and finally grasped that life had ceased for the multitudes who had fallen ~ their friends had somehow vanished, even though their forms remained.  As grieved as they were for those they had lost, the next realization struck them numb: the same thing could happen to any of them at any moment ~ and might be inevitable in the course of time.  Thus the awareness of death dawned in the minds of sentient beings, giving birth to fear in their hearts.