A Meta-Myth?

Once upon a time before time, "There it was" -- here it is, rather -- "a point alpha, an undiscriminated and mysterious source of everything" (Panikkar, ibid. below).

Not in the horizontal past, but rather, at a right angle to any- & everynow. 

For whatever motives, or more properly without external motivation....

Creativity isn't creative if it isn't free, rather, but a necessary entailment of prior conditions.  

the Abyss, the Beginning, the God, the Void, the Non-Being... stirred within and produced Being, the World, light, creation and, at a certain moment, humans.

Beyond-Being --> Being --> human Being. 

Regarding the first,

an undifferentiated Unity, a mysterious Principle, moved itself from solitude, freed itself from inactivity, created, produced, gave birth to existence, to time, space, and all that moves in-between. 

Except there never was a time when this undifferentiated Unity was without its differentiated Other. The principle of creation -- and of freedom -- goes all the way up, where it is also entangled with love:

Now this Origin creates, produces, originates, divides itself precisely because it does not want to be any longer alone.

So to speak. But in any event, it is not good that God should be allone! 

God begets and creates, he dismembers himself and creates the World, the One becomes the hidden source and produces multiplicity.  

I don't know about "dismembers," since the cosmos is not a separate part of God. But once the many become mani-fest, it is true that the One becomes hidden in them, like the forest in the trees.

Out of this process comes Man. Hence Man has the same origin as the Cosmos, the same source, the very power of the divine which stirred at the beginning.

Well, the six-day story of creation in Genesis places the origin of man in a cosmic context, does it not? And if man is the image and likeness of his Creator, then certainly he shares in "the very power which stirred" -- which stirs -- "at the beginning."

The three coexist.

Which is to say, Theos, Cosmos, Anthropos. After all this is a cosmos, and it doesn't explain itself. And it is so finely tuned for the existence of the Anthropos that this might as well be its purpose: to host the anthropic mirror of the theos. 

What could go wrong? "The Fall may be this first moment itself" -- the one from Unity to differentiation -- "or it may come at a second stage." 

We'll go with doer #2, even though -- obviously -- none of this would have happened without the #1 doer doing all this creative differentiation. In other words, no creation, no problems. Not blaming God. Just sayin'.

At any rate, there is a Fall, and the result is the historical situation of Man....

History is like a prolongation of the Fall, or something, a journey into a parallel looniverse. Not totally loony, of course, just off kilter. A mixture of light and shadow. And often self-defeating. I wonder why?

There is in Man a thirst, an urge, a desire to be God...

No doubt precisely because we are s'durn godlike to begin with. Lower animals do not have this temptation. My dog, for example, veritably worships me, nor is she tempted to worship another, much less herself. But man? 

Nevertheless, man retains a natural urge toward God, even if this urge is misdirected toward idols and other cheap imitations, including himself. At the same time(less), 

There is in God a parallel ardor and an unparalleled love for Man and the World.

Which must be frustrating. Unrequited. But in any event, there is a sort of double-movement,

from below to the heights, from the World spurred on by Man to God, and from above into the abyss as well, from the One to the Many... 

So,  (↑) and (↓) are built into the nature of things. Which means that the prime directive is, so to speak, "to re-member the dis-membered Body, to make it whole, to heal and to integrate" what is scattered through space and time. But the energy to do so "has only one source," and it's not from us. In other words, (↑) is always already (↓), and vice versa.

Which reminds me of a passage on p. 248 of the book:

In the end, we are no longer a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that comprehends and transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos....

Thus, in the words of the Christian esoterist Jean Borella, "the end of our spiritual destiny is really an origin..., a return to the beginning, a veritable re-ascent of time back to its non-temporal source."

Well, good:

We are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany and exhaled himself into a world of sorrow and ignorance. Back upin a timeless with the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made, a Light no longer dispersed and refracted through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One. Back at the still point between the vertical and horizontal, where eternity pierces the present moment and we are unborn again.

Isn't that a tad neoplatonic?

I suppose so. It was the best I could do at the timeless. And Panikkar himself was a Catholic priest.

"It depicts the interconnectedness of the divine, the cosmos, and humanity, evoking themes of unity, creation, and a return to a non-temporal source."