Climbing the Ladder of Human Consciousness
Chasing success has become a kind of default ambition. The problem with pouring a whole life into climbing a ladder is simple: you can reach the very top and realize the thing was propped against the wrong wall. I want to separate two different ladders here. One is the corporate climb, which tends to leave people empty no matter how high they get. The other is a climb through consciousness itself, which has more to do with getting free of the mind's traps, the anxiety and the depression that quietly run so many of us.
There's a way of mapping consciousness on a scale that runs from 0 to 1000. A reading of 1000 would mean a state most people would describe as god-like, and by this account only two figures are said to have touched it: Jesus Christ and the Buddha. Read through a Christian lens, that gap points back to the two trees in the Garden of Eden described in Genesis. My own sense is that the Buddha stands for the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the path that keeps a person turned inward toward the self. Jesus, the Messiah promised across the Hebrew scriptures, stands for the Tree of Life, where a person lets God live through them by way of the Holy Spirit. For someone holding a Christian worldview, that second path offers a fuller life, since the power driving it comes from something larger than your own thin reserves rather than from them.
Down at the bottom of the scale, below 200, is where you find the grip of the seven deadly sins and where most people actually live. Anger, psychosis, mania and bipolar swings, anxiety, depression: these tend to park a person in this lower band. People stay there until they start learning to steady their emotions and walk toward their fears, usually through one therapy or another.
Working through those mental health struggles brings a real sense of having come into your own power. That shift can carry someone into the 200 to 400 band, which is roughly where the average person sits, someone not wrestling with mental illness but not operating at genius level either. After clearing the psychological wreckage, people often get hungrier for life and for building something.
Maybe a fifth of people push past that middle and land somewhere in the 500 to 600 range. These are often the ones leading, the entrepreneurs, the people too restless to accept a 9-to-5 and a settled, unremarkable life. Because the group up here is so small, those in it can spend much of their lives feeling alone, since most people around them have no idea how to relate. The usual answer is to disappear into the work and try to change things in quieter ways.
Only a genuinely god-like person reaches 1000, so the ceiling for an ordinary human sits near 900. By a rough estimate, maybe 1 percent ever cross into the territory between 600 and 900. People who get this far sometimes let go of ambition entirely and turn toward a devoted life, the way a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi did, or any spiritual teacher who gave up possessions to love and serve other people. This is the register of willing self-sacrifice and love with no conditions attached, and those who live there carry the benefit of it far beyond this life.
Set the consciousness ladder beside the material one and the difference becomes plain. The material climb, fixed on earthly things, never pays off, because the flesh is wired to want more the moment it gets anything. The consciousness climb runs the other way: the higher you go, the deeper the satisfaction, and it lands in the spiritual part of us, which matters more because we are not only blood and bone. Few people travel far up it, pulled back by how strongly the world's possessions tug at us. Still, even reaching the average band, where half of everyone lives, is enough to build a decent life, one without the weight of depression and anxiety. - Erwin Bishop