The Meaning of Life:
Ascending Jacob’s Ladder

Hazy Notion




The Book of Genesis tells a story about Jacob, alone in the desert, dreaming of “a ladder set up from the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and the angels of God ascending and descending”. In the vision God stood at the top of the ladder. For people of Judeo/Christian faiths this is the original idea of a pathway/stairway to heaven and mystics associated with these religions have frequently used Jacob’s Ladder as a metaphor to illustrate their mystical insights.  The essence of what they describe is a relationship between mundane, earth-bound aspects of the human condition and higher ideals associated with the god-head.

To make better sense of this idea of a ladder to heaven it might be useful to convert the image into one that is more accessible to contemporary language and thinking. This can be done by thinking of it as a spectrum of psychic energy. A spectrum that is comprised of progressively higher wavelengths of energy which, metaphorically, are like rungs of a ladder, or stairs, rising from the base human mental state up to the sublime.

This form of energy is traditionally known as spirit and drives the inner core of the human psyche. The religious name for the inner core is the ‘soul’, or, in contemporary secular language, the ‘identity’. Under normal conditions souls/identities draw their motivating energy from the lower end of the spectrum. The god-head — that is, the image of human perfection — draws energy from higher wavelengths.

From this perspective the purpose of human life is to raise soul/identity, both individually and collectively, from lower to higher wavelengths. This raising process is to go on until eventually a union is made with the model of human perfection, the god-head. The movement from lower to higher wavelengths can be seen as an aspect of a larger evolutionary process.

Next: Evolution

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