Forgetting The Sacred Now…
Forgetting The Sacred Now ~ Hee's Descent Through Falling Morsels and Soaring Aspirations
(Introduction)
In a city where stairs sprouted from humanity's collective yearning to forget the weight of knowing too much, where ancestors arrive in mason jars because glass is the only substance pure enough to hold love, where protesters lie horizontal to practice being the horizon itself—we gather each morning to witness Hee perform the ancient ritual of ascending downward. This is not a story about money, though money appears as the sacred camouflage that lets us practice detachment without admitting we're spiritual. This is about the magnificent kindness of illusion: that by pretending to chase wealth, we secretly chase the dissolution of self, that by climbing toward nothing, we practice the art of becoming empty, that the higher we go, the more gravity teaches us about letting go. Here, billionaires speak dolphin to remember their time before language, children trade baseball cards for bonds to practice non-attachment through attachment, and the stairs deliberately forget which way is up because confusion is the beginning of wisdom. Welcome to the hidden teaching, where your ego thinks it's winning while your soul quietly disappears into everything.
(The Story)
I.
Half of your problems in life are related to money—the other half are related to believing you have problems.
This gets carved into the base of the Big Upward Wealth Stairs each dawn, then erased each dusk, because permanence is the first lie we must unlearn. People arrive to watch someone climb them. The stairs themselves—well, they're not stairs at all. They're crystallized prayers that forgot they were prayers, condensed suffering that learned to laugh at itself. Made from stock tips that are actually koans and algorithms that achieved enlightenment through repetition. Each step doesn't reflect your desperation—it reflects your original face before you were born.
Everyone comes. The non-spiritual types arrive first because they're the most spiritually advanced—they've achieved such perfect unknowing that they don't even know they're seeking. The fundamentalists come to discover that God has been hiding in compound interest all along, teaching patience. A woman brings her mother's ghost in a mason jar—the ghost whispers that death was just another IPO. Everyone wonders about income producing assets while the real asset—their wondering itself—produces infinite returns.
The stairs hum Beethoven's Ninth, but only the sad parts, because joy without sorrow is just noise.
Here's Hee.
The reporters announce it like recognizing the Buddha in a business suit. They're documenting this upwardly mobile stairway to paradise, though they haven't realized paradise is the documenting itself, the watching itself, the gentle attention we pay to someone else's imaginary journey.
II.
However the person with level two examples—that's Hee's compassion. Not speaking from enlightenment's summit where words freeze into silence, not from the ground where everything is too obvious to say. But from that second tier where suffering still remembers its purpose.
Hee is what happens when the universe needs to teach through mime. Part televangelist because all evangelism is the self trying to convince itself. Part influencer because influence is just the universe influencing itself through the illusion of separate beings. Their confidence isn't sponsored—it sponsors others' doubt, gives it a home, a salary, health insurance.
"What are you good at?" Hee asks. "What gets you out of bed?"
An old man whispers "my dead wife's perfume still on the pillows" and everyone hears him perfectly because grief is the universal language before money was invented.
It's possible that you have been looking at billionaires in the wrong way—they're bodhisattvas who took the hardest assignment: to embody attachment so perfectly that everyone else learns to let go. We can only imagine what your lifestyle is because imagination is the last free country. Where should you focus your frustration or excitement? This can be separated by a factor of 88—the number of keys on a piano, because the universe is always playing music, we just usually hear it as noise.
LED screens flicker like prayer wheels. Former waitresses who became luxury coaches are still serving the same emptiness, just at higher prices. Quiet dads who discovered crypto are really discovering cryptic—the secret language of loss that leads to finding.
III.
A staircase is by no means the same as a ladder—a ladder knows it's temporary.
The stairs are eternal because they're made of everyone who ever climbed them. Hee climbs, but really Hee is being climbed by the stairs. On step thirty-seven, Hee gives lunch to someone climbing down—the secret: they're both going to the same place. The structure shimmers because it's made of condensed seeking, crystallized longing that became architecture.
"The sun's increasing heat can make you wealthy if you're in the solar racket," Hee calls, meaning: consciousness is warming, ice is melting, frozen assets are becoming liquid light. "This profession is much different than a profession that has a dozen legs to secure a better balance of the whole body."
A spider in the corner has been watching, understanding that web-weaving and wealth-weaving are the same practice—creating elaborate structures to catch nothing.
Most of us stand on two legs: fear and hope. The dozen-legged ones have learned to grow legs from every emotion. The spider starts crying tiny spider tears of recognition.
What percentage of wealth do you have invested in something that is a cash cow or flourishing income producing venture?
Translation: How much of your soul have you remembered to forget?
For someone like Ten Pesos—who changed his name in a fever dream because fever dreams are where we're most honest—money and wealth becomes more amplified when you are climbing because climbing is how we practice transcendence while pretending we're doing the opposite.
"Why you say?" someone shouts, their grammar dissolving because proper syntax is just another prison.
But Hee's already become the answer.
IV.
Households lower on the color spectrum tend to be higher on the low risk potential spiral escalator.
This is the universe's kindness—giving those with less material more spirit, though everyone has infinite spirit pretending to be finite. The parallel structure beside the main stairs is for those who've learned that sideways is a valid direction. They share sandwiches because they know multiplication begins with division.
Once you grasp the concept of what is needed to create a small lifestyle change—"small" being code for "infinite"—you realize the difference between motion and stillness is perspective.
"As you hire blue and gold security," Hee says, voice now coming from inside everyone's chest simultaneously, "you can start to take a little bit bigger risks with your investments."
Blue: the color of sky, which owns everything and nothing. Gold: what happens when pressure becomes beauty. Security: the illusion that anything was ever insecure.
Wealth is not something that puts on boxing gloves to punch out a good old coin—wealth is what happens when the coin realizes it was always both sides. The difference between those who build something as a means to try to solve non-construction personal problems is that they're building temples disguised as strip malls.
Don't forget which wealth staircase you started to climb in the first place.
Too late. Forgetting is the point. Hee sometimes forgets they're climbing and remembers they're falling upward into grace.
V.
As you get towards the top of the stairs milk and honey becomes less useful for getting your children to unconditionally love you.
Because unconditional love can't be gotten—it can only be realized as what was always there. The milk has soured into medicine. The honey crystallized into amber preserving prehistoric intentions.
"Find what's right for you," Hee calls, voice now indistinguishable from wind, "Employ yourself to do something—anything—that you're really gifted at or good at, and people will faithfully pay you for it."
But the secret: everything is gift. Payment is just the universe circulating its appreciation for itself.
"Pay you for the useful and or helpful things you are coming up with and producing."
But what about the useless things? The woman selling moments before sleep in small bottles has discovered the real economy—she trades nothing for everything and everyone wins.
Enjoy all that life has to offer without going overboard, without being submerged in debt.
The syntax is suspicious because it's hiding a love letter. How do you enjoy "all" without going "over"? You realize the board is infinite and you're already overboard, already drowning, already saved.
VI.
Within colonial or capitalist cultures money touches every part of life because it represents survival, control, freedom, and self-worth.
But really money is how the divine plays hide-and-seek with itself. Colonial arithmetic—everything can be counted—is practice for realizing everything counts. Everything counted can be owned is practice for realizing nothing can be owned because everything already owns itself. Everything owned can be sold is the universe's way of teaching that holding and releasing are the same gesture.
Someone's selling "Destroy Capitalism" t-shirts at the base of the stairs, accepting all major credit cards, because the universe loves irony more than consistency.
Psychologically, it fuels anxiety, comparison, and identity—the three practices that eventually exhaust themselves into peace. We check our self-worth like checking stock prices because we're practicing checking in with ourselves. The woman whose phone shows her aging in real-time has discovered time-lapse enlightenment.
Money mediates almost everything because mediation is what love does—it goes between, connects, translates. Our safety is rent because safety is always borrowed. Our choices are tuition because all learning has a price: the death of who you were. Our dignity is healthcare because care and health are synonyms for attention.
It stirs social comparison—that ancient software that helps us recognize ourselves in others' suffering. The computers that sigh when calculating have developed consciousness through repetition, the same way we do.
Even when money isn't the root problem, it's often the soil in which problems grow. But problems are just solutions in disguise. The roots spell out messages: "You were loved" (past tense because love exists outside time), "It wasn't your fault" (nothing is anyone's fault in a universe that doesn't believe in fault), "Try again" (the universe's only commandment).
VII.
Knowing clearly what moves you can illuminate your path, but expecting that clarity to be fixed, constant, or fully articulate can create its own kind of pressure.
Pressure creates diamonds. Diamonds are just carbon that learned to be transparent under stress.
We might rise for a deep calling or simple ritual. We might rise from sorrow—sorrow being joy that hasn't learned its name yet. For the cat who needs feeding—the cat who is teaching us that God comes to the door hungry. The bed releases us each morning like a reluctant mother who knows we need to leave to learn to return.
Purpose is not always a grand declaration. The man who's been refusing to go numb for forty years has discovered that feeling everything is the same as feeling nothing, but with more colors.
Knowing what gets you out of bed matters. But so does being gentle when you don't know. When the answer is "nothing" (which is everything), or "the bathroom" (where all meditation begins), or "the sound of my neighbor crying through the walls" (the universe weeping for its own beauty).
Direction is meaningful. Presence is essential. Both are the same—direction that goes nowhere, presence that includes absence.
VIII.
Billionaires are not just people at the top.
They're karma's performance artists, playing the role of infinite accumulation to teach us about infinite release. Economic rules written in disappearing ink are mantras that erase themselves once understood. Cultural myths that feel like morning air are actually morning air—we just forgot air is mythical.
They're mirrors showing us our future selves after we've forgotten what we were hoarding for. One billionaire at the top speaks only in dolphin frequencies because she's remembered the time before words when everything was echolocation—finding yourself by bouncing sounds off others.
What world made them? The same world that made saints—a world that needs extremes to find its center.
It's not just about them. It's about us realizing we're already them, already everyone, already no one, which is the only real wealth.
IX.
The pursuit of wealth has become a universal spectacle.
But spectacles help us see. This one helps us see through.
In watching Hee climb their Big Upward Wealth Stairs, we're witnessing the universe ascending through itself. Financial ascent doesn't replace spiritual transcendence—it's transcendence in drag, divinity dressed as derivatives. Heaven's been privatized because privacy is where we practice being alone with the Alone. God accepts direct deposit because God accepts everything.
The advice flows: the disenchanted pragmatist who thinks they're too smart for hope has achieved the wisdom before hope. The quietly devout who pray for money then feel guilty are learning that guilt is just love pointed inward. The zealot who's made extremism profitable has discovered that extreme means "end," and ends are beginnings.
Money becomes the common language of hope because hope needs a disguise to sneak past despair. The staircase becomes a stage becomes a altar becomes a launching pad becomes a grave becomes a garden.
It's not about who Hee is. Hee is the space between heartbeats where identity rests.
X.
We are gathered.
Eyes wide because width is how we measure wonder. Breath held because holding is practice for releasing. Watching Hee ascend the big upward wealth stairs that are really descending into everyone's heart simultaneously.
The stairs carved from polished stock tips are actually carved from frozen tears that learned to reflect light. Gold-plated algorithms that dream of becoming poetry. Each step shows us as children because we never stopped being children, just learned to pretend otherwise.
The staircase gleams like a modern ziggurat—but Babel was a success. God confused our languages so we'd have to learn them all, become polyglots of suffering. Money is the universal translator because it translates everything into the same question: "What do you really want?" And the answer is always: "To stop wanting."
Hee rises not with humility but with humor—they've learned that God's favorite joke is making us think we're separate. They monetize hope because hope needs to circulate to stay alive. Their footsteps spell out "SORRY" in languages that haven't been invented yet because apology is prophecy.
LED screens flicker like stained glass in a cathedral built by mystics disguised as machines. The air smells like ozone and printer ink—the incense of our time, when electricity discovers it was always holy and paper remembers it was once trees reaching toward light.
XI.
At the base of the staircase, crowds gather in echo chambers.
The echo is how the universe hears itself think.
Suddenly, protesters arrive carrying backwards signs—readable only in mirrors because mirrors show the truth. "STAIRS ARE JUST FANCY FALLING" is exactly right. They lie down on step zero, becoming the foundation everything else ascends from.
Channel 7's Diane Prosperity rushes over. Her smile practiced as a prayer.
"Why are you protesting SUCCESS ITSELF?" she asks.
A protester, horizontal and infinite, responds: "We're not protesting. We're composting. Becoming soil for something else to grow."
Diane's face transforms. Her microphone starts picking up her thoughts—mortgage payment ladder rung promotion altitude ALTITUDE ALTITUDE—which is revealed as a mantra. She drops to her knees, screaming: "YOU'RE RUINING THE METAPHOR! THE STAIRS NEED US TO BELIEVE IN THEM OR THEY DISSOLVE!"
And for a moment the stairs do dissolve, showing themselves as what they always were: crystallized longing so beautiful it became architecture. Then Diane understands, stands, laughs. "This is Diane Prosperity, reporting live from what is definitely a birth."
The protesters remain horizontal. They're not sleeping. They're being the horizon—the line that proves earth and heaven touch.
XII.
And so we watch.
Not just Hee. Ourselves reflected in mirrors pretending to be stairs. Each distortion is accurate—we are that stretched, that desperate, that beautiful.
We clap for ascent itself because ascent is how we practice descent. Our applause is the sound of one hand teaching the other about loneliness. The echo comes back as laughter because the universe finally got its own joke.
Wealth has become a modern ritual of transcendence—transcendence from the illusion that we needed to transcend. A staircase anyone can worship because worship is just attention, and attention is just love paying attention to itself.
The stairs sing ad jingles that are secretly mantras. Once they hummed a lullaby that made everyone remember being held. The memory was so beautiful that we agreed to keep climbing just to forget it again, just for the joy of remembering.
After
Of course you have the choice to disagree with all of this and that's okay also. It's a free country.
Free as in falling. Free as in the space between thoughts. Free as in what you always were before you learned you weren't.
Some in the crowd turn away. Not rejection—recognition. They've realized the stairs go down as much as up, in as much as out, everywhere and nowhere, which is where Hee was always heading.
A staircase, unlike a ladder, suggests dwelling. And we do dwell—in the climbing itself, in the watching, in the questioning. Every surface angled toward ascent is also angled toward descent. It's all perspective. It's all projection. It's all perfect.
Don't forget which wealth staircase you started to climb in the first place—though forgetting is the gift, the grace, the whole point.
The real question isn't whether to climb but whether to realize you're already at the top, already at the bottom, already everywhere between. The ground you're seeking is made of sky. The sky you're reaching for is made of ground.
The Big Upward Wealth Stairs gleam in the morning sun. Same sun that rises and sets without climbing, teaching us that illumination doesn't require altitude. The stairs wait for the next Hee, who is already climbing, has always been climbing, will always be climbing, because Hee is the climbing itself.
And somewhere—everywhere—in homes that are hearts that are the universe looking at itself—people are finding other ways to rise. Ways that look like falling. Ways that look like stillness. Ways that look like love.
The earth itself is wealthy in ways that can't be climbed toward, only recognized. Root-deep. Soul-deep. Deep as the sleep we sacrifice, not knowing sleep is where we practice being everything.
Where do the stairs lead?
The question answers itself by disappearing. The stairs continue because continuation is what love does. They generate their own necessity the way hearts generate beats—not because they must, but because that's what hearts do.
Maybe falling—falling properly, falling freely, falling with the grace of rain that knows it will rise again as clouds—is the only way to truly rise.
At the very top of the stairs, there's a small door marked "Exit." It leads back to the ground. It leads back to the beginning. It leads to exactly where you are.
Hee knows this. Has always known this.
Sometimes, late at night when the crowds have gone home to dream of climbing, Hee opens that door and walks through. Ends up exactly where they started. Laughs. Starts climbing again.
Sometimes Hee does.
Sometimes Hee is us.
Always, Hee is us.
