""To seek myself and know who I was and who and in what manner I now am, that I may again become that which I was:" This is a characteristic formulation of the Gnostic goal. According to Gnostics, we must realize that there is at our core a spark of spirit which was once part of the universal spirit; that this individual spirit has become embedded in gross matter, in the body, through activities of lesser powers (often called archons or rulers), like the creator-lawgiver god of the Jews, who wish to keep the human spirit in thrall; that we can escape this bodily prison by recognizing our true original home and evade the grasp of the archons and ascend again to that home — the spiritual Pleroma, the Fullness — to be reunited in Oneness. To put it another way, a human being can overcome the differentiation of this world, its dividedness into multiplicity, and merge again into the primordial unity."