The Ladder

The stairway rises through the center of the living body.

Its base rests upon a bone whose anatomical name still carries the word sacred: the sacrum. Above it, the vertebral column gives the body an upright axis.

The familiar count of thirty-three refers to the usual developmental segments, including those that later fuse in the sacrum and coccyx. Esoteric imagination has turned this number into the thirty-three rungs of an inward ladder.

Let the number serve the image of a complete ascent through embodied life. The biblical account of Solomon’s temple describes a winding or side stairway in different translations; it does not give us an anatomical staircase of thirty-three steps. The ladder we climb here belongs to the spiritual reading we are creating.

It is an ascent through the person.

At its lower reaches are the forces that bind us to survival and continuation. Higher along the inward axis, the same life acquires the powers of relationship, expression, discernment, and dedication.

Nothing has to be discarded at the foot of the stairs. The force of life is what the journey will carry.

The spine joins the head to the body’s continuing life. Along this vertical passage, breath, sensation, movement, and the rhythms of embodied existence are sustained through the nervous system.

Ancient images gather around the ascent.

Jacob dreams of a ladder joining earth and heaven. The Egyptian djed stands upright, a sign of stability associated with the backbone of Osiris. In the Tantric subtle body, Kundalini rises through the central channel toward the crown.

We allow these images to accompany the same inward movement: the whole force of embodied life becoming available to a more encompassing consciousness.

At the foot of the ladder, a stone rests upon the ground.

Jacob places a stone beneath his head and dreams. Earth and heaven are joined in his vision. When he wakes, he sets the stone upright, pours oil upon it, and names the place Bethel, the house of God.

The image contains much of our journey in a single scene: the head, the stone, the ladder, the oil, the awakening, and the recognition of a sacred place.

We can carry it inward without taking it away from its biblical world.

The stone becomes an image of what has hardened within us: an explanation that admits no encounter, a defended identity, a habit of seeing that cannot allow life to surprise it. The oil becomes dedication brought to that very place.

The hard surface need not be hated. It can be consecrated.

The house of God is recognized where an ordinary traveler had expected only a place to sleep.