This Is the Stairway to Heaven

This is the stairway to heaven.  I am on it, both feet, but still need to grip the handrail.  Have been slipping on the steps and have stumbled, but am still on the stairway to heaven.

I know, for various reasons, and most too much to describe.  But I also know due to the tremendous chaos in my life for the past several weeks. It is the evolving soul's earthly and spiritual battle between temporal and mystical.  But at some point, there will be the metamorphosis that comes but once in a lifetime, and that is to be on the stairway to heaven.   

The chaotic backlash is an indicator of oppositional forces in our body, mind, spirit and soul clinging to the impurities to which we have become so attached in the temporal life. And these give indication to the greatest indicator: the battle of the soul being rid of vices and its unnatural but human, temporal love of them, versus the infusion of virtues of the purity required for the body, mind, spirit and soul to exist comfortably (as yet embodied) on the stairway to heaven. 

The more our temporal body, mind, spirit and soul tries to pull us from the perceived crucifixion necessary for existing on the stairway to heaven, the more we must hang on--though nescient to life on the stairway.  

Consider a baby, just learning to walk, who discovers a stairway.  Grown-ups are hard-pressed to keep the toddler from attempting to climb.  And how does a baby begin climbing stairs?  It learns to climb from clumsy, awkward, and painfully injury-laden attempts.  How does the baby respond to repeated stumbles on the steps?  After crying-- instinctual response--the baby tries again. 

Persevere!  Do we know of many children or adults who do not climb steps now, with ease?  Many run up and down stairways, in fact.  Some are so agile as to not use the handrail.  Of course, later in life people tend to lose balance and wisely avoid climbing steps. But this is of the temporal.

Yet we see in this analogy that the stairway to heaven takes some getting used to, just like a temporal stairway.  We must desire to climb, and return again and again to attempt it.  Persevere!  Yes, we can cry when we fall, but better to figure out that the handrail is given us for a purpose, and these equate to the sacraments of the Church, Scripture, virtues, prayer and penance.  Use that handrail and do not let go.  No thinking we can trot up this stairway to heaven before we are spiritually developed and able to do so.

Another aspect of the stairway to heaven is the sense of isolation.  How many are on a step at one time?  How many are noticed or visible when on a stairway?  The stairway to heaven, like any stairway, is between levels.  It is a means of passage.  It is a dimensional experience as well as perceptional and mystical.  When a soul is on the stairway to heaven, the temporal experiences are, for a fact, affected by the mystical infusions.

No, it is not easy or comfortable at first.  The body, mind, heart and spirit are not accustomed to the unique way in which the soul shifts, and the transfiguration is individual for each soul.  

There can be no way to anticipate how God will have all aspects and effects unfold in this mystery...not until one is on the stairway.  And even then there is tremendous adaptation involving a sense of suffering, such as when a baby is born or a body dies.  But note that suffering is but a perception, pain "felt" by letting go of one spiritually inferior way of being and adapting to that which is superior...and ethereal.

From this point onward the stairway to heaven is finely tuned, perfectly individualized according to God's will for any given soul.  Language struggles to describe that which would be universally understood.  The soul's process changes, and the experience is filled with the unexpected, the ineffable.  The soul must wait in actualized silence, solitude, slowness, suffering, selflessness, simplicity, stability, stillness and serenity.

The soul finds itself, if on the stairway to heaven, in varying stages of very real crucifixion.  Access to the stairway to heaven is gained solely by the Cross.  Its form is the Cross in structural substance as well as essential structure.  The soul will find relief, sooner or later, only when acceptance, adaptation and transfiguration is attained into the pure love of Christ.  

This relief requires death.  As in any "death", the process is impeded or progressed through either the clinging to or the letting go of the lower level, of the attachments to the temporal in substance and essence.  The former component, substance, is released only to the degree that the senses, emotions, imagination, memory, understanding and the soul's core (intellect and will) can embrace the mystical wisdom and reality of God-is-love.  

When this occurs, the temporal will otherwise remain visible, but the then transfigured soul is able to transcend and exist anew in love--mystical love--that is unseen except by the filtering outflow through charity (holy love) in all of its temporal and spiritual forms.

This, again, is a process that continues once we are on the stairway to heaven.  And this process in adaptation and transfiguration while actually being on the stairway to heaven may occur in some while they yet exist as humans on earth.  

The souls in this state and process are not common because the shift involves the pain of suffering which persists until the soul, yet in its body, can accept and adapt to this way of existing on the stairway between levels or "worlds" (for lack of better images to explain).  How many desire detaching from the temporal in order to painfully climb onto an invisible cross of which unknown elements of dying to self is the risk, and the reward is tangential?  

However, once a soul finds the stairway, accepts and adapts, there are decreasing slips and falls, and the real and perceived sense of isolation subsides.  The pain of misunderstanding and rejection by those in the temporal, as well as a sense of loss for the known aspects of the temporal, are recognized and understood, inexplicably so, by subsumption into the invisible, mystical wealth of Christ, of God-is-love. 

When one is on the stairway to heaven and has adapted to existing in the mystical (while yet in body), the theological virtues of faith, hope and love become actualized.  The soul acclimates to and accepts its veritable crucifixion, a death to self that distances one from the hitherto perceived comforts of, and also the perceived negativity of, the temporal. But the negativity is not as temporal minds would have it be.  No, the negativity is simply a term allowing comparison to the positive, and temporally deemed as oppositional forces. 

Perhaps it is more clear to consider the soul as in an experience of being neutralized when it is crucified, to what was, and then to prepare the soul for being posited in the totality: the transcendent reality of Christocentric love. 

Regardless, the actual experience is of the mysteries, the hidden wisdom of God of which St. Paul writes in I Corinthians 2:6-10; nothing more or less can be understandably expressed.  What is truly ineffable for an embodied soul undergoing the transition from one level and onto the "stairway" that leads and connects into heaven, the eternal beatific vision--is finding itself cocooned in actualized, experiential, mystical metamorphosis: the transfiguration of being, existing on the stairway to heaven.  

Again, there is no means to explain what it is, this dying to self and being born again into the mysteries of God is love.  The temporal effects of it, however, are real enough and excruciatingly painful.  The mind enters a fog and darkness of clarity so bright that the sense of isolation from what was and where others may remain, is utter self-deprivation to the temporal view, ever passing away but now realized for what one was, is and shall be: dust. 

The freshly crucified, quaking soul must pray:  wait, fear not, and love, in this dark brilliance.  Accept that which the soul never fathomed, during earthly life, that it would accept or endure in suffering.  This suffering is the very real, yet painfully lonely and individualized, departure from the temporal level. It is also the strangely, seemingly insufferable, entrance into the mystical, while yet on earth.  Accept and endure.

This is the stairway to heaven.

[Readers Note: This post concludes, or so it seems probable, this blog: Stairway to Heaven.  From here, the soul in body in this temporal realm, is on the mystical stairway, and as every larva that spins its cocoon, not one is alike in itself or its experience.  Nor will it be as any other butterfly upon its eventual breaking forth from its body into heaven.  To describe my particular experience while on the stairway would not be understood by those reading, unless they, too, have sought and found and been crucified to formation upon the stairway to heaven, while yet in bodily form, on earth.  And these souls will comprehend and not need to know, for they are existing in the womb God has chosen, each to His own choosing.]

The Nine S' Illustrated, by Seraphim's Wife