Philosophy The Writers' Cafe: "If we take apart the concept of the spiral staircase we might first ask “Why not a ladder, instead of a staircase?”.
After all there are verses in our holy Torah that we relate to the vision that Yakov saw in a dream the well know idea of Jacob’s Ladder. The mefarshim (explainers of Torah) do a good job explaining how Jacob’s (Yakov’s) vision is about how neshomas (spirits or souls) are on different rungs of a ladder which goes up to heaven and back down to our world.
If I remember the explanation correctly Yakov could have stopped what ever he was doing right then and there and could have taken his place on the ladder. However Yakov did not do this for reasons which are beyond the scope of this piece.
In our own individual lives we are all somewhere on this great spiral staircase.
Life as we experience it is rarely just one straight and direct line from point A to point B. Perhaps if life was like that then perhaps life itself would not be so very interesting. I imagine one of my readers dropping his head into his hands at this point and saying to himself “interesting, that’s what you call my endless tsuris, struggles and aggravation, interesting!” yes exactly"
http://thewriterscafe.org/?page_id=71
