Turner is pointing at something that descent traditions kept trying to say without quite managing to say it this plainly. The status ladder is not the obstacle to be overcome on the way to advancement — it is the very structure that has to be abandoned, at least provisionally, before any genuine transformation is possible. Liminality is the technical name for this abandonment: the neophyte in rites of passage is stripped of rank, name, clothing, even distinguishable shape, and in that stripping becomes available to a quality of experience that rank actively forecloses. You cannot be made new while you are still busy being someone.

What the formulation discloses is how thoroughly the logic of accumulation — more status, more recognition, more position — works against the soul's actual economy. The soul does not ascend by acquiring; it moves by being undone. This is not a paradox that resolves into a clever synthesis where you learn humility and then rise again. The ladder is still the ladder at the end; Turner is not offering a better climbing strategy. He is noting that the threshold lies beneath it, and the ones who have only ever climbed have not yet found the threshold.