To this central concept other terms and images are organically related. If the “Life” is originally alien, then its home is “outside” or “beyond” this world. “Beyond” here means beyond everything that is of the cosmos, heaven and its stars included. And “included” literally: the idea of an absolute “without” limits the world to a closed and bounded system, terrifying in its vastness and inclusiveness to those who are lost in it, yet finite within the total scope of being. It is a power-system, a demonic entity charged with personal tendencies and compulsive forces. The limitation by the idea of the “beyond” deprives the “world” of its claim to totality. As long as “world” means “the All,” the sum total of reality, there is only “the” world, and further specification would be pointless: if the cosmos ceases to be the All, if it is limited by something radically “other” yet eminently real, then it must be designated as “this” world. All relations of man’s terrestrial existence are “in this world,” “of this world,” which is in contrast to “the other world,” the habitation of “Life.” Seen from beyond, however, and in the eyes of the inhabitants of the worlds of Light and Life, it is our world which appears as “that world.” The demonstrative pronoun has thus become a relevant addition to the term “world”; and the combination is again a fundamental linguistic symbol of Gnosticism, closely related to the primary concept of the “alien.” [Hans Jonas  ]