Meaning of Life: Not in Scrolls

"Jacob had a dream: a ladder was there, standing on the ground with its top reaching to heaven; and there were angels of God going up it and coming down. And Yahweh was there standing over him" (Genesis 28:12).

The fourteenth century Dominican priest and mystic, Meister Eckhart, emphasized that the kingdom of God is not apart from us but is within us and all around us. In Passion for Creation: The Earth-Honoring Spirituality of Meister Eckhart, Matthew Fox reveals how Eckhart does not separate God from His creation. Really feeling the presence of the Divine in nature became a daily experience for me during my time in Tikal. As I sat with the Mayan shamans and walked through the jungle near Tikal, I found my heart awakening to the Divine in everything.

For centuries, Jacob’s ladder has been a major symbol for Christian mystics. Meister Eckhart reveals that the true essence of the ladder is not as a way to leave Earth and literally ascend to God. To him, it is about how when we awaken our consciousness to the spiritual dimension of life, we realize God is always with us and around us. Matthew Fox points out that Eckhart calls us to be like Jacob and wake up in joyful celebration.

"Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Truly Yahweh is in this place and I never knew it!’ He was afraid and said, ‘How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven!"’ (Genesis 28:16-17)

Jacob’s Ladder can be seen as an ancient bridge between the apparent opposites of heaven and earth. Jacob sees angels both ascending and descending. All we need to do is to wake up like Jacob and see through the eyes of love that the Divine is in the ordinary. The sacred is in the profane. Our journey is one of becoming whole in an inner marriage of body and spirit, of head and heart. It is a journey of becoming practical mystics.

The image of Jacob’s ladder ties in with the Mayan idea that within our heart we are all connected to both heaven and earth. Jacob’s ladder had angels ascending to heaven and descending to earth. It appears that there is a continuous flow of angels. It seems to be a telling image of how there is a continuous energy flow of love, angels, to help us work the magic necessary to make our world a more peaceful and loving place as the Maya urge us to do.

The ladder in Jacob’s dream can be seen to remind us that there are higher and lower levels of consciousness. The angelic energy of love descends to us and returns to heaven. This is a metaphor for the idea that there are levels of consciousness beyond our ordinary state of consciousness. Like a radio tower broadcasting different bandwidths and frequencies for different stations, the rungs of the ladder of consciousness take us into other levels of reality. When we have our radio tuned to 106.1 FM, we do not hear 96.5 FM or 1290 AM. And yet these stations and countless others still exist even when we are not tuned into them. Thousands of stations are broadcasting simultaneously.

The ancient wisdom of the Kabbalah and modern physics concur that reality is made up of ten levels or dimensions. In our metaphor of Jacob’s ladder, we could say there are ten rungs but this is beyond the scope of this book. Nine of the dimensions are said to be beyond space and time: the coordinates of our physical world. These nine cannot be accessed by ordinary consciousness.

Like Eckhart, the Maya believe that awakening to the spiritual dimension of life involves the recognition that God is not separate from His creation. Instead, God infuses everything with His Spirit. God is talking to us through nature. Right after I finished writing this about Meister Eckhart and the Maya, I took a short break and turned on the television. The end of the movie Stigmata was on. A priest was reading aloud from the lost Gospel of Saint Thomas that we are told in a postscript was found in the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels in Egypt in 1945. The passage is right in line with what I was writing. God is not separate from nature but is hidden within nature. Christ is quoted as saying:

"The kingdom of God is within you and all around you
and not in mansions of wood and stone. Split a piece of
wood and I am there. Lift a stone and you will find me."

Now compare the similarity of the following words Gerardo shared with us during one of our meetings with him.


"The angel of life, the meaning of life, is not written in
the scrolls. The living word of the living God is found
in stone, in the rocks, and trees, and within yourself."

• Today, pay attention to the meaningful coincidences in your life. For example, moments after my friend Bill's father died, Bill turned on the car radio to hear the words of a song that summed up his father's approach to life: "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." A year later, on the anniversary of his father's death, Bill thought of how he had not heard that song all year. Right then, walking into the kitchen, Bill heard "Come on people now, smile on your brother, everybody get together . . . gonna love one another right now." The dialogue with the Divine, the living God, continues even as I write this blog posting. I will keep sharing this part of the journey as it appears. However, I will not be able to share all of the times the messages come as it happens often. I will have to pick and choose the messages that seem most relevant. After all, as the Maya tell us: God talks to us all the time.