The Scale of Being

Every lesson of this journey has assumed, without quite drawing it, that a person can be at different heights — more asleep or more awake, more run-by-machine or more present. This last panel of the map draws the height itself: a scale of being, a ladder the whole Work has been quietly climbing. It has to be handled with more care than anything else in the act, because it is the one idea in the entire system a small self will try hardest to turn into a scoreboard.

The lower rungs first, and they are not an insult. The old teaching numbers people who have done no work yet as Man number one, two, and three — and these are simply the three centers you already know, one dominant per person. Man one lives mostly from the moving center, run by the body and its habits. Man two lives mostly from the feeling center, run by likes and dislikes. Man three lives mostly from the thinking center, run by theories and logic. That is the whole of the distinction: which of the three engines is in the driver’s seat. All three are asleep in the sense this journey has meant from the start — which means the lower rungs are not other people. They are nearly everyone, the writer of this lesson and its reader included, on nearly every ordinary day.

The scale only starts to climb above that at Man number four — and Man four is not a saint. It is only someone in whom the practices of this journey have begun to add up to something continuous: a real center of gravity forming, a permanent aim that outlasts the mood of the hour, an “I” that is starting to be the same “I” tomorrow as today instead of the rotating crowd. Everything after — five, six, seven — names degrees of a unity most people never begin, and it would be dishonest to describe from the outside what those who reached them barely found words for. What can be said plainly is the direction: toward a person no longer a crowd, no longer asleep, no longer run.

The contemplative tradition mapped the same climb in three great stages, and the mapping onto the upper rungs is an interpretation offered here, not a proof: purification, the long clearing-out of the passions that this whole act has been practicing in miniature; illumination, when the cleared attention begins to actually see; and union — theosis, the ancient name for a human being so filled with the divine life that they become, by participation, what God is by nature. That is the top of this ladder. It is worth naming plainly even from the bottom of it, because a climb with no visible summit is only a treadmill.

Now the warning the whole lesson has been walking toward. This scale is not a ruler for measuring yourself, and it is certainly not one for measuring anyone else. The instant you catch yourself deciding you are “probably a Man four by now,” a small self has grabbed the ladder and turned it into a trophy — and pride is heavier than any passion this journey has named. You do not climb this ladder by assessing which rung you are on. You climb it, if at all, in seconds: one received impression, one arrow that held, one fee withheld — each a moment of being slightly higher than the moment before, none of them a rank. The next act leaves the person entirely and turns to the laws that run all of this, the machinery underneath the whole climb.