Being

In your moment of changing altitude, striking down your troubles from a higher dimension

Scripture

Light condenses into stairs; each stair is crystal-clear.

Looking down on the ant kingdom; fine dust is bustling.

One stair, one world; the world becomes the base.

Yesterday’s summit is today’s base.

Being is climbing, is surpassing; each step gives birth to light.

Wenzi · On Being

You are trapped in a maze. The walls are bricks of yesterday’s unreplied messages, stacked bills due tomorrow, that sentence stuck again and again in your throat and never spoken. You charge left and right, bloodied. Just at the edge of despair, you happen to look up—and see, in the ceiling, a seam condensed from light. You strain onto your toes and reach for it. The light has substance—cold, hard, like crystal. You pull hard, and that beam is pulled out into a transparent stair (light condenses into stairs).

You step onto it. The stair is clear as crystal; you can see below the maze where you were struggling a moment ago (each stair is crystal-clear). The view has changed.

“Looking down on the ant kingdom; fine dust is bustling.” From this one step, the vast maze that suffocated you a moment ago has shrunk into a busy “ant kingdom” (looking down on the ant kingdom). Those entanglements and conflicts that pained you so are nothing but dust-mote creatures crowding and bustling (fine dust is bustling). The troubles have not vanished—but they have lost the volume that oppressed you.

Good. Do not stop. Keep climbing. With each step up, the world beneath shrinks one layer, clarifies one degree. “One stair, one world; the world becomes the base.” Each new stair (one stair) opens a new cognitive “world” for you (one world). And when you stand in this new world, the old “world” that troubled you has become your solid “base” (the world becomes the base).

“Yesterday’s summit is today’s base.” You suddenly understand: the cognitive “summit” you reached with all your strength yesterday (yesterday’s summit) is, seen today, no more than a “base” you can step over with ease (is today’s base).

“Being is climbing, is surpassing; each step gives birth to light.” You are in the midst of “climbing the stairs” and “continually surpassing” (being is climbing, is surpassing). And each step taken is not expenditure—on the contrary, new stairs of light are “born” beneath your feet (each step gives birth to light). Strength lies not in resistance, but in elevation.

You stand at some momentary height and look back at the road you came.

The maze has become a child’s sand-table game.

You are not the expert solving problems in the maze—

you are the architect who keeps building crystal stairs for himself

and takes the whole maze in at a glance.

Being-Stairway: you are not the problem-solver—you are that cognitive staircase, ever growing, which turns the problems themselves into scenery.