Seeking the Spiritual Stages of the Soul

…until the wayfarer taketh leave of self, and traverseth these stages, he shall never reach to the ocean of nearness and union, nor drink of the peerless wine. – Baha’u’llah, The Seven Valleys, p. 4.

The scholars, philosophers and theorists who study human development have told us for decades that every seeker’s path, whatever its origin, leads to gradual stages of enlightenment, of expanded awareness, widened vision, greater identification with others, and a heightened sense of identity.

Each true spiritual path maps a way to traverse the great chain of being. You can look at this similarity as accidental or incidental, but charting each path’s journey side-by-side and comparing them reveals striking parallels, and only a few relatively minor divergences. All use the concept of nested realities, with growth proceeding from one stage to the next along a rising road of spiritual evolution. In fact, most of those paths, in their traditional forms, describe several specific stages of inner development.

In the oldest traditions, the Hindu Vedanta koshas (which means ‘sheaths of consciousness’) present five specific rungs on an ascending ladder of spiritual development. At the top of the ladder is Brahman, the Hindu name for ultimate spirit; and Ananda, which means bliss. On this path, the nature of being human encompasses both the inner and the outer aspects, the spiritual and the physical, and they combine in a ladder of development that functions as one holistic system.

In Yoga, as it applies to both Hindu and Buddhist practices, seven chakras, or levels of self, ascend from the most basic human impulses to the highest. The chakras play a major role in several Eastern spiritual traditions, teaching adherents how to attain deep levels of realization by moving through a sequence of developmental levels of awareness. The Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path fulfills a similar function, leading the believer toward self-awakening, wisdom and The Middle Path.

In the Jewish mystical tradition, the Kabbalah has ten stepped levels of realization, ending in Kether Elyon, the “supreme crown” of the Supreme Being. These ten levels of moral and spiritual development, called sefirot, represent ten virtuous attributes of the Creator, which continually sustain the physical universe and existence itself.

The Christian mystical hierarchies, especially those in the early Gnostic and Coptic Church’s traditions, describe a system of spiritual stages that proceed from natural law to mental rationality to Divine Logos. Utilizing between three and five specific phases of the soul’s inner development, these Christian mystical traditions focus on a spiritual transformation of the ego-based self, by following a path that produces more fully realized human beings and thus transcends the material world and approaches enlightenment, or gnosis.

In the mystical Islamic practice of the Sufis, the goal of all search focuses on a series of steps to transmute the lower self, the human ego, from its primal state to a higher one. The Sufi way emphasizes acquiring praiseworthy virtues and purifying the heart, and includes practices of prayer, meditation and the building of good character. The seven Sufi “stations” of the soul, known as maqaam in Arabic, embody all mystical knowledge and comprise a ladder of ascent for the spiritual life.

Almost every practice of human spiritual development contains one of these ladders of maturation.

In the Indian Mahayana Buddhist vijnanas, in Tibetan and Zen Buddhism, in Zoroastrian practices, in the teachings of the Sikhs and the Jains, in Taoism, and in many of the belief systems of the indigenous Central and North American peoples such as the Mayans, the Aztecs and the Hopis, you’ll find this pivotal concept of gradual, unfolding spiritual development along an ascending path of consciousness.

In the Baha’i teachings, the books The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys express a new and yet ancient path to spiritual growth and development that mirrors and unifies those earlier approaches.

The Baha’i concept of mystical experience and maturation theory revolves around the central idea of the perennial philosophy–that one single divine foundation, one unified religion, underpins and informs all spiritual search and inner knowledge. The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys, written by Baha’u’llah, both say that the shared purpose of all the world’s belief systems is to encourage every person to read the book of self and find a spiritual path. Only that conscious moral and spiritual development, the Baha’i writings say, can illumine and quicken the human soul:

Baha’u’llah has announced that no matter how far the world of humanity may advance in material civilization, it is nevertheless in need of spiritual virtues and the bounties of God. The spirit of man is not illumined and quickened through material sources. It is not resuscitated by investigating phenomena of the world of matter. The spirit of man is in need of the protection of the Holy Spirit. Just as he advances by progressive stages from the mere physical world of being into the intellectual realm, so must he develop upward in moral attributes and spiritual graces. – Abdu’l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity, p. 58.

These spiritual paths, so similar, congruent and unified, all urge us to widen and expand our inner reality. They ask us to take an adventurous journey of inner exploration, to find out who we really are, to know our true selves. They beckon us, as the great scholar of myth Joseph Campbell put it, to “the realm of the unknown,” toward self-discovery, self-understanding and self-transcendence.

In our next essay in this series, we’ll examine how and why contemporary thinkers in the fields of philosophy and psychology have used this pervasive idea of progressive stages of spiritual and moral advancement as the basis for their profound theories and beliefs.