The Marvelous Ladder

We must long for a true change, to get out of this boring routine, of this merely mechanistic, tiring life …

What we must first understand with complete clarity is that each one of us, whether bourgeois or proletarian, wealthy or middle class, rich or poor, is really in this or that Level of Being …

The Level of Being of the drunkard is different from that of the abstemious, and the Level of Being of the prostitute is different from that of the virgin. What we are stating here is indisputable, irrefutable.

Upon reaching this part of the chapter, we lose nothing with imagining a staircase that extends from the bottom up, vertically and with many steps …

Unquestionably, we find ourselves on any one of these steps. On the lower steps will be people worse than us, and on the higher steps persons better than us will be found.

On this extraordinary Vertical, on this “Marvelous Ladder,” it is clear that we can find all the Levels of Being.

Each person is different; this is something that no one can dispute.

Undoubtedly, we are not talking about pretty or ugly faces, nor is it a question of age. There are young and old people, old persons about to die as well as newborns.

The subject matter of time and of years, that matter of being born, of maturing, developing, marrying, reproducing and aging is exclusively of the Horizontal.

On the “Marvelous Ladder,” on the Vertical, the concept of time does not fit in. On the rungs of such a scale we can only find Levels of Being.

The mechanical hope of people serves no purpose. They think that with time things will get better. Our grandfather and great grandfathers thought that way; however, facts have arrived to precisely demonstrate the opposite of this.

What counts is the Level of Being, and this is Vertical. We are on a rung, but we can climb to another rung.

The “Marvelous Ladder” that we are talking about and that refers to the different “Levels of Being”, certainly has nothing to do with linear time …

A higher Level of Being is directly above us from moment to moment. It is not in any remote horizontal future but here and now, within our own selves, on the Vertical.

It is ostensible and anyone can understand that the two lines, Horizontal and Vertical, intersect from moment to moment in our psychological interior and form a cross.

The personality develops and unfolds on the Horizontal Line of Life. The personality is born and dies with its linear time; it is mortal. A “tomorrow” does not exist for the personality of the dead person. The personality is not the Being.

The Levels of Being are not of time. Since the Being himself is not of time, He has nothing to do with the Horizontal Line. He is found within our own selves, now, on the Vertical.

It would be manifestly absurd to seek our own Being outside of ourselves …

It is worth noting as a corollary the following: Titles, degrees, promotions, etc., in the external physical world, in no way would they originate authentic exaltation, reevaluation of the Being, passage to a higher step in the “Levels of Being”…

Samael Aun Weor