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Chapter 2: The Marvelous Ladder

We must yearn for a real change to get out of this boring routine, out of this purely mechanical and tiring life. What we must first clearly understand is that each of us, be we bourgeois or proletarian, wealthy or middle class, rich or impoverished, is in fact at one level of being or another.

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 saying here is indisputable, irrefutable.
On reaching this section of our chapter, it wouldn’t hurt for us to imagine a ladder extending vertically upwards, consisting of many rungs.

Unquestionably, we find ourselves on one of these rungs. On the lower rungs will be people worse than us, and on the higher rungs people better than us. On this extraordinary vertical, on this marvelous ladder, it’s clear we can find all levels of being. Everyone is different; this is something no one can deny.

Undoubtedly, we are not speaking here about pretty or ugly faces, neither is it a question of age. There are young and old people, elderly persons about to die as well as those newly born. The question of time and years, of being born, growing, developing, marrying, reproducing, and aging is exclusive to the horizontal.

On the marvelous ladder, on the vertical, the concept of time does not apply. On the rungs of that ladder we can only find levels of being.

The mechanical hopes of people serve no purpose; they think that with time things will get better. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers thought that way. The facts have come to demonstrate precisely the opposite.

The level of being is what counts, and this belongs to the vertical line of life. We are on one rung but we can climb to another rung.

The marvelous ladder of which we are speaking, and which concerns 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 us, on the vertical line of life.

It is clear and anyone can comprehend 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. It is born and dies with its linear time; it is mortal. There is no tomorrow for the personality of the deceased; the personality is not the Being.

The levels of being, the Being itself, are not of time and have nothing to do with the horizontal line. They are found on the vertical within ourselves now.

Obviously, it would be absurd to look for our own Being outside of ourselves.
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It is not superfluous to establish the following as a corollary: titles, ranks, promotions, etc., in the external physical world, cannot in any way originate the authentic exaltation or re-valuation of the Being, the move to a higher rung in the levels of being.

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