The Marvellous Staircase

We must yearn for true change, to break free from this boring routine, from this merely mechanistic, tiresome life… The first thing we must understand with absolute clarity is that each of us, whether bourgeois or proletarian, well-off or middle class, rich or wretched, is actually at such and such a Level of Being…

The Level of Being of the drunkard is different from that of the abstainer, and that of the prostitute very different from that of the maiden. What we are saying is irrefutable, unassailable… As we reach this part of our chapter, we lose nothing by imagining a staircase that extends from bottom to top, vertically and with very many steps…

Undoubtedly, we find ourselves on one of these steps; steps below will be people worse than us; steps above will be people better than us… In this extraordinary Vertical, in this marvellous staircase, it is clear that we can find all the Levels of Being… each person is different and no one can refute this…

Indubitably, we are not now talking about ugly or pretty faces, nor is it a matter of ages. There are young and old people, old people who are about to die and newborn babies… The question of time and years; that of being born, growing, developing, marrying, reproducing, ageing and dying, is exclusive to the Horizontal…

In the “Marvellous Staircase”, in the Vertical, the concept of time does not fit. On the steps of such a scale we can only find “Levels of Being”… The mechanical hope of people is useless; they believe that with time things will be better; that’s what our grandparents and great-grandparents thought; the facts have precisely come to prove the contrary…

The “Level of Being” is what counts and this is Vertical; we are on one step but we can climb to another step… The “Marvellous Staircase” of which we are speaking and which refers to the different “Levels of Being”, certainly, has nothing to do with linear time… A higher “Level of Being” is immediately above us from instant to instant…

It is not in some remote horizontal future, but here and now; within ourselves; in the Vertical… It is ostensible and anyone can understand that the two lines—Horizontal and Vertical—meet from moment to moment within our Psychological interior and form a Cross…

Personality develops and unfolds in the Horizontal line of Life. It is born and dies within its linear time; it is perishable; there is no tomorrow for the personality of the dead; it is not the Being… The Levels of Being; the Being itself, is not of time, has nothing to do with the Horizontal Line; it is within ourselves. Now, in the Vertical…

It would be manifestly absurd to seek our own Being outside of ourselves… It is worth setting down the following as a corollary: Titles, degrees, promotions, etc., in the physical world outside, would in no way originate authentic exaltation, re-evaluation of Being, passage to a higher step in the “Levels of Being”…