Inside the hive

Inside an opaque paper structure with cells, a being could not see what is happening in other cells. Eventually it would simply experience change in local conditions. Collectively, all the participants are carrying out lives, experiments, dying, functioning in one way or another, and bringing about change as they do so.
Like an external hand pushing on a sponge, all cells in a sponge are shifted a little. The external pressure would be godlike, and as a metaphor for us, not surrounded by opaque paper, we can see across boundaries and move more directly, perhaps as through a glass darkly. We made the sponge, and direct its squashing.
The paper form, seen as a container of beings, could contain its own destiny with no god-like director outside it. Each occupant could alter the contents of its niche and consequently begin to affect the others. More walls could be made, and new boundaries arise that allow comparisons, off-shoots, to be made. 
With no concept of any external directing force, all changes the occupants bring about would be immediately evaluated in the present, and their consequences not seen as a paradigm of the hereafter. Good deeds and suffering would not be seen as a ticket to happiness in the after-death. 
Walls converge and might squeeze an occupant, but they also diverge and provide living and breathable space. If the walls are infinite, no exit is possible. The system is self-perpetuating, but may evolve into forms that have no life, or at least not a loved one. 
Beings could move from niche to niche by traveling through or along the walls, but they always travel within the system. With no location as an exit from the system, or an ending in time, there may be not be a point or time where one could say the structure originated, either.
 Another structure I made had holes punched in the walls. This might offer occupants an exit, rooms with a view.