Lesson from the Spirit

We are on a multi-level parking structure, very high up. I am alone, I hear the sound of my footsteps, then the Spirit appears and asks me to come closer to look at what is outside. Outside there are hills, mountains, forests, fields, rivers — nature.
"This is life."
"What are we doing in an empty parking lot?"
"Observing."
"What is this about?"
"These are the levels of your spiritual development. Life is movement. But if you keep moving up one spiral without looking to the sides at what is happening out there, it will be difficult for you to know.
You cannot know yourself without apprehending the world around you.
You are an integral part of this world — its beginning and continuation. Learn to live in harmony with yourself and the world around you.
The soul is much wider, much greater, much more multifaceted.

Those who think they have conquered life, who believe they are at its peak, come here, to this place. They look at it as the endpoint of their development. They were down there, and now they have climbed to the very top.
But when they look out, they see from the height a vast world they did not know until now, a world that was incomprehensible to them, a world with unfamiliar orders. A realization comes that they did not reach the summit of their development by climbing this serpentine. That is not to say it is bad to climb here. From here you get a view of what life is, what development is, and what the world is.
Knowing yourself is not simply climbing a spiral staircase to the very peak of your consciousness; knowing yourself is much broader. Self-knowledge occurs through knowing the world outside, the world around you. It is much broader and farther than what your sight can reach. Feel how the world around you lives and breathes.
"What should we do? How to know oneself?"
"For that you must stop treating it as a privilege; regard it as a given for each of you, as equality.
Why do you fuss? You stir up fuss in processes that do not recognize time. Fuss in understanding yourself, in the unfolding of your soul, is unacceptable.
To know yourself you do not need time. Knowledge occurs outside temporal bounds. It happens constantly."