We have to yearn for a real change; yearn to get out of this boring routine, this tiring, merely mechanistic life.

The first thing we must comprehend with complete clarity is that each one of us, whether bourgeois or proletarian, upper or middle class, rich or poor, really is to be found in one Level of Being or another.

The Level of Being of the drunkard is different from that of the temperate person and that of the prostitute very different from that of the virgin. What we are saying is irrefutable, undeniable.

Having come to this point in our chapter it wouldn't hurt for us to imagine a ladder that extends from below upwards, vertically, and with many rungs.

Unquestionably, we are on one of those rungs. Rungs below will have people worse than us; on rungs above will be found people better than us. On this extraordinary Vertical, on this Marvelous Ladder, it is clear that we can find all the Levels of Being. Each person is different and no one can deny this.

Undoubtedly we are not speaking now of pretty or ugly faces, nor is this a matter of age; there are young people and older persons, elderly people about to die and newborn babies.

The question of time and of years, that matter of being born, growing, developing, marrying, reproducing, growing old and dying, is exclusive to the Horizontal.

On the Marvelous Ladder, on the Vertical, the concept of time does not apply. On thus rungs of that ladder we can only find Levels of Being.

The mechanical hope of people serves no purpose; they believe that with time things will be better. That is how our grandparents and great-grandparents thought. The facts have come to demonstrate precisely the opposite.

The Level of Being is what counts, and this is Vertical. We find ourselves on one rung but we can climb to another rung.

The Marvelous Ladder of which we are speaking and which refers to the distinct 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.

It is clear 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. There is no tomorrow for the personality of the deceased. The personality is not the Being.

The Levels of Being, the Being itself, is not of time and have nothing to do with the Horizontal Line.  They are found within us, now, on the Vertical.

It would be completely absurd to seek our own Being outside of ourselves.

It is not superfluous to establish the following as a corollary: titles, ranks, promotions etc. in the external physical world cannot will never give rise to the authentic exaltation or reevaluation of the Being, the move to a higher rung in the Levels of Being.