We live in a snake and ladder world. By analogy, we experience life as a series of experiences in which we ascend and descend along the pathways that we have chosen as our preferential pathways.
We prefer certain things,certain experiences, certain combinations, certain activities. The more we make these preferences specific the greater the combination of aspects that we rely on to make them possible. To become ever more specific we built supports that give us the specificity we desire.
The problem is that we experience life as a series of periods when we can rise up towards goals, and periods when we slide down away from them. We try to predict the snakes ahead that take us away from our goals, but this is exceedingly difficult as we follow pathways that are increasingly dangerous. Some times we are not even aware of the dangers that some pathways portend.
The problems of our snake and ladder world is a very old one. Every day, you will have experiences that show you how brutal a world the snake and ladder world can be.
This is not to say that there is sin in pursuing goals, which represent our ladders, but rather there is a risk attached to all goals. The world game is a game of snakes and ladders. The more you try to achieve goals, the more you have to research the potential downside risks, the snakes than will take you down. The higher the goals the greater the downside possibilities. The more we achieve goals, the more we may suffer as a result when we leave off our effort, or relax, thinking mistakenly that we are above the downside risks. Why is this? It is because the world is a snake and ladder world.
The Wuh Lax Physical Law of Light and Energy
The Wuh Lax physical law of light and energy is that there is a tendency of all lines from light to be equidistant between the source of light and the ultimate goal of light. Since the path of light is an enormous circle, we will always, for ever, be subject to the laws governing it.
This means that there is a tendency within our Wuh Lax universe for all lines of existence or being to even out over the longer term. In other words, no matter how high you or mountains rise, there is an active opposite tendency for you to fail or mountains to fall or wear down. This is a physical law of the Wuh Lax universe.
Wanting something is not the only thing involved in getting the something you want. While you may temporarily follow the light and rise to achieve your preferences and desires, you will eventually fail and fall to your ultimate level. How far down, you fall depends very much on how high up you rise. There is a tendency in the universe for these to balance out over the long run.
Ladders
We tend to focus on the ladders because it is they that take us to our highs and safe areas far away as possible from our low points and regions of danger. We try to distance ourselves more and more from the lows and in so doing we create higher and steeper ladders to climb.
We construct our fortresses and malls for our communities and we build our castles and homes for our families, our towers and vantage positions in the landscape for our colleagues to oversee the realms that we have created and the domestic and commercial domains over which we rule.
Today our efforts are increasingly digital in a digital age as we move from operations carried out in the very large and local to operations in the extremely large and diffuse and extremely local and intense.
Rules Govern our Ladder Building and the Use of Ladders for Elevation
Increasingly, we see that the use of ladders can actually be a dangerous means of protecting ourselves from what lies below or for attaining the high up spots for repairs and viewing advantages commensurate with high faulting observation.
When we distance ourselves from the lower regions and peoples of the low lands, we bring about separations that increase risk. As we go higher, we tend to lose sight of what it takes to support the edifices we construct, and in so doing we create an additional risk of crashing ladders as well as sliding down the 'snakes' or pitfalls of our neglect of our real environment.
The ladders of our landscape give us the tree tops, the mountainsides, the points of high vantage, while the snakes like rivers in the landscape flow downward into the valleys and the crowded nether regions of our societies existence. With the lower regions we construct ladders to give us relative vantage points.
One rule of using a ladder is that it is dangerous to walk under the ladder. This is because ladders are biased towards falling down should there be any errors in their placement. Like a house it is often best to place a ladder on stone rather than soft sand.
In placing ladders it is wise to select a ladder length that will give stability. We are advised to move from lower to higher levels gradually, which greatly reduces the risk of a ladder falling.
In the modern age, we are guided to use platforms rather than ladders because platforms are more stable. Within platforms there are ladders, but it is assumed that we achieve higher levels more gradually and do not expose ourselves to great risk. The platforms themselves become ladders and we find that the incidence of toppling over is greatly reduced.
The Relevance of the Snakes
We see it in the early books that guide us how to live. The old story of the garden is the story of our passage towards our preferences, the high up apples of our existence. The danger of such gardens lies in the snakes, those slides that we experience when we take risks like going after the apples in the tree. Snakes represent failing while apples represent goals and the temptations that bring us to those goals.
The story of the garden is a not story that we should not seek apples
The story of the garden is a not story that we should not seek apples, but quite the opposite. We should always seek apples. The essence of the apple story has been misconstrued by those wishing to crush enthusiasm for life and living life to its fullest. It is horrible to suggest that we have or embody original sin. We may have to endure the consequences of our parents pursuing goals for which they did not understand the risks. An example is smoking. In the Wuh Lax world, the notion of original sin as portrayed by some is blatantly illogical and irrelevant to our respective realities.
What the story of the garden seeks to tell us is that we need to take account of our mortal risks. The apple story that is given as a warning about seeking rewards in a world in which there are risks. We all live in a garden of apples, and we all live in a world of snakes and ladders.
We need to research how to eat those apples in full recognition of the risks that eating entails, the snakes of our world, or the failings that pursuing goals without knowledge of risks.
What we may not comprehend is the relevance of the snakes in our landscape and the garden story was not to tell us about our sins of eating apples, but our sins, the failings of not learning and gathering knowledge about the garden and the risks that the garden, our wonderful world, entails.
We need to be aware of the snakes in the garden and the ladders that fall when we use ladders to gather apples from the tree. So it is that the ignorance of the parents can be handed down to the children, but it is not inevitable.