Four Major Stages of Spiritual Unfolding

An Eternal Now SG

By: Ken Wilber (from One Taste)

Sunday, November 30

There are four major stages or phases of spiritual unfolding: belief, faith, direct experience, and permanent adaptation: you can believe in Spirit, you can have faith in Spirit, you can directly experience Spirit, you can become Spirit.

1. Belief is the earliest (and therefore, the most common) stage of spiritual orientation. Belief originates at the mental level, generally, since it requires images, symbols, and concepts. But the mind itself goes through several transitional phases in its own development—magic, mythic, rational, and vision-logic—and each of those is the basis of a type (and stage) of spiritual or religious belief.

Magic belief is egocentric, with subject and object often fused, thus marked by the notion that the individual self can dramatically affect the physical world and other people through mental wishes—voodoo and word magic being the most well-known examples. Mythic belief (which is usually sociocentric/ethnocentric, since different people have different myths that are mutually exclusive: if Jesus is the one and only savior of humankind, Krishna is kaput) invests its spiritual intuitions in one or more physically disembodied gods or goddesses, who have ultimate power over human actions. Rational belief—to the extent that reason chooses to believe at all—attempts to demythologize religion and portray God or the Goddess, not as an anthropomorphic deity, but as an ultimate Ground of Being. This rationalization reaches its zenith with vision-logic belief, where sciences such as systems theory are often used to explain this Ground of Being as a Great Holistic System, Gaia, Goddess, Eco-Spirit, the Web of Life, and so forth.

All of those are mental beliefs, usually accompanied by strong emotional sentiments or feelings; but they are not necessarily direct experiences of supramental spiritual realities. As such, they are merely forms of translation: they can be embraced without changing one's present level of consciousness in the least. But as those merely translative gestures begin to mature, and as direct emergence of the higher domains increasingly presses against the self, mere belief gives way to faith.

2. Faith begins, if at all, when belief loses its power to compel. Sooner or later, any mental belief—precisely because it is mental and not supramental or spiritual—will begin to lose its forcefulness. For example, the mental belief in spirit as the Web of Life will begin to pale in its power to persuade: no matter how much you keep believing in the Web of Life, you still feel like a separate, isolated ego, beset with hope and fear. You try to believe harder; it still doesn't work. Mere belief might have provided you with a type of translative meaning, but not with an actual transformation, and this slowly, painfully, becomes obvious. (It might even be worse if you are involved in magic or mythic beliefs, because not only do these not usually transform you, they often act as a regressive force in your awareness, moving you not toward, but away from, the transrational.)

Still, there is often a genuine, spiritual, transmental intuition behind the mental belief in Gaia or the Web of Life, namely, an intuition of the Oneness of Life. But this intuition cannot be fully realized as long as belief grips consciousness. For allbeliefs are ultimately divisive and dualistic—holistic beliefs are ultimately just as dualistic as analytic beliefs, because both make sense only in terms of their opposites. You are not supposed to think the All, you are supposed to be the All, and as long as you are clinging to beliefs about the All, it will never happen. Mere beliefs are cardboard nutrition for the soul, spiritually empty calories, and sooner or later they cease to fascinate and console.

But usually between letting go of belief, on the one hand, and finding direct experience, on the other, the person is carried only by faith. If the belief in Oneness can no longer offer much consolation, still the person has faith that Oneness is there, somehow, calling out to him or her. And they are right. Faith soldiers on when belief becomes unbelievable, for faith hears the faint but direct call of a higher reality—of Spirit, of God, of Goddess, of Oneness—a higher reality that, being beyond the mind, is beyond belief. Faith stands on the threshold of direct supramental, transrational experience. Lacking dogmatic beliefs, it has no sense of security; not yet having direct experience, it has no sense of certainty. Faith is thus a no-man's-land—a thousand questions, no answers—it possesses only a dogged determination to find its spiritual abode, and, pulled on by its own hidden intuition, it might eventually find direct experience.

3. Direct experience decisively answers the nagging questions inherent in faith. There are usually two phases of direct experience: peak experiences and plateau experiences.

Peak experiences are relatively brief, usually intense, often unbidden, and frequently life-changing. They are actually "peek experiences" into the transpersonal, supramental levels of one's own higher potentials. Psychic peak experiences are a glimpse into nature mysticism (gross-level oneness); subtle peak experiences are a glimpse into deity mysticism (subtle-level oneness); causal peak experiences are a glimpse into emptiness (causal-level oneness); and nondual peak experiences are a glimpse into One Taste. As Roger Walsh has pointed out, the higher the level of the peak experience, the rarer it is. (This is why most experiences of "cosmic consciousness" are actually just a glimpse of nature mysticism or gross-level oneness, the shallowest of the mystical realms. Many people mistake this for One Taste, unfortunately. This confusion, in my opinion, is epidemic among eco-theorists.)

Most people remain, understandably, at the stage of belief or faith (and usually magical or mythical at that). Occasionally, however, individuals will have a strong peak experience of a genuinely transpersonal realm, and it completely shatters them, often for the better, sometimes for the worse. But you can tell they aren't merely repeating a belief they read in a book, or giving merely translative chitchat: they have truly seen a higher realm, and they are never quite the same.

(This is not always a good thing. Someone at the concrete-literal mythic level, for example, can have a peak experience of, say, the subtle level, whereupon the authority of the subtle is injected into their concrete myths, and the result is a reborn fundamentalist: their particular mythic god-figure is the only figure that can save the entire world, and they will burn your body to save your soul. Someone at the vision-logic level can have a psychic-level peak experience, and then their "new ecoparadigm" is the only thing that can save the planet, and they will gladly march lock-step in eco-fascism to save you from yourself. Religious fanaticism of such ilk is almost impossible to dismantle, because it is an intense mixture of higher truth with lower structure. The higher truth is often a very genuine spiritual experience, a true "peek" experience of a higher domain; but precisely because it is a brief, temporary experience—and not an enduring, steady, clear awareness—it gets immediately snapped up and translated downward into the lower level, where it confers an almost unshakable legitimacy on even the ugliest of beliefs.)

Whereas peak experiences are usually of brief duration—a few minutes to a few hours—plateau experiences are more constant and enduring, verging on becoming a permanent adaptation. Whereas peak experiences can, and usually do, come spontaneously, in order to sustain them and turn them from a peak into a plateau—from a brief altered state into a more enduring trait—prolonged practice is required. Whereas almost anybody, at any time, at any age, can have a brief peak experience, I know of few bona fide cases of plateau experiences that did not involve years of sustained spiritual practice. Thus, whereas belief and faith are by far the most common types of spiritual orientation, and while peak experiences are rare but authentic spiritual experiences, from this point on in spiritual unfolding, we usually find only those who are involved in sustained, intense, prolonged, profound spiritual practice.

Plateau experiences, like peak experiences, can be of the psychic, subtle, causal, or nondual domains. I will give one example, taken from Zen, that covers all four. Typically, individuals practicing Zen meditation will start by counting the breaths, one to ten, repeatedly. When they can do that for half an hour without losing count, they might be assigned a koan (such as the syllable mu, which was my first koan). For the next three or four years, they will practice several hours each day, concentrating on the sound mu and attempting not to drop it (there is, simultaneously, an intense inquiry into "What is the meaning of mu?" or "Who is it that is concentrating on mu?"). Several times each year, they will attend seven-day sesshins or intense practice sessions, where they will be encouraged to practice throughout the day and into the night.

The first important plateau experience occurs when students can uninterruptedly hold on to mu for most of their waking hours. Mu has become such a part of consciousness, such a part of you—in fact, you become mu—that you can hold it in awareness, in an unbroken fashion, all day, literally. In other words, a type of witnessing awareness is now a constant capacity throughout the gross-waking state. Students are then told that if they truly want to penetrate mu, they must continue working on it even during their sleep. (When I first heard this, I thought it was a joke, a type of macho initiation humor, of the sort, "If you want to be part of the fighting First Infantry, mister, you have to eat three live snakes." I thought they were just trying to scare me; they were actually trying to help.) Another one or two years, and dedicated students do indeed continue a subtle concentration on mu right into the dream state. There is now a constant witnessing awareness even in the subtle-dream realm.³³ At this point, as students approach the causal unmanifest (or pure absorption), they are on the verge of the explosion known as satori, which is a breakthrough from the "frozen ice" of pure causal absorption to the Great Liberation of One Taste. At first, this One Taste is itself a peak experience, but it, too, will become, with further practice, a plateau experience, then a permanent adaptation.³⁴

4. Adaptation simply means a constant, permanent access to a given level of consciousness. Most of us have already adapted (or evolved) to matter, body, and mind (which is why you have access to all three of them virtually any time you want). And some of us have had peak experiences into the transpersonal levels (psychic, subtle, causal, or nondual). But with actual practice, we can evolve into plateau experiences of these higher realms, and these plateau experiences, with further practice, can become permanent adaptations: constant access to psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual occasions—constant access to nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and integral mysticism—all as easily available to consciousness as matter, body, and mind now are. And this is likewise evidenced in a constant consciousness (sahaja) through all three states—waking, dreaming (or savikalpa samadhi), and sleeping (or nirvikalpa samadhi). It then becomes obvious why "That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real." The Real must be present in all three states, including deep dreamless sleep, and pure Consciousness is the only thing that is present in all three. This Fact becomes perfectly obvious when you rest as pure, empty, formless Consciousness and "watch" all three states arise, abide, and pass, while you remain Unmoved, Unchanged, Unborn, released into the pure Emptiness that is all Form, the One Taste that is the radiant All.

* * *

Those are some of the major phases we tend to go through as we adapt to the higher levels of our own spiritual nature: belief (magic, mythic, rational, holistic); faith (which is an intuition, but not yet a direct experience, of the higher realms); peak experience (of the psychic, subtle, causal, or nondual—in no particular order, because peak experiences are usually one-time hits); plateau experience (of the psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual—almost always in that order, because competence at one stage is generally required for the next); and permanent adaptation (to the psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual, also in that order, for the same reason).

Several important points:

• You can be at a relatively high level of spiritual development and still be at a relatively low level in other lines (e.g., the deeper psychic can be progressing while the frontal is quite retarded). We all know people who are spiritually developed but still rather immature in sexual relations, emotional intimacy, physical health, and so on. Even if you have constant access to One Taste, that will not make your muscles grow stronger, will not necessarily get you that new job, won't get you the girl, and won't cure all your neuroses. You can still have deep pockets of shadow material that are not necessarily dug up as you advance into higher stages of spiritual practice or meditation (precisely because meditation is not, contra the popular view, primarily an uncovering technique; if it were, most of our meditation teachers wouldn't need psychotherapy, whereas most of them do, like everybody else. Meditation is not primarily uncovering the repressed unconscious, but allowing the emergence of higher domains—which usually leaves the lower, repressed domains still lower, and still repressed.)

So even as you advance in your own spiritual unfolding, consider combining it with a good psychotherapeutic practice, because spiritual practice, as a rule, will not adequately expose the psychodynamic unconscious. Nor will it appropriately exercise the physical body—so try weightlifting. Nor will it exercise the pranic body—trying adding t'ai chi ch'uan. Nor will it work with group or community dynamic, so add . . . Well, the point, of course, is to take upintegral practice as the only sound and balanced way to proceed with one's own higher development.

• This is especially important because the Person-Centered Civil Reli.gion (and the 415 Paradigm) is anchored predominantly in the stage of holistic belief. In order for most people to move beyond those mental translations, a genuine transformative practice is required. Integral practice is very likely the most effective. It emphasizes transformation not just in the I, but in all four quadrants—or the Big Three of I, we, and it—transformative practices in the self, with relationships and community, and with nature [see June 18], not merely as a change in type of belief but in level of consciousness. In short: exercise body, mind, soul, and spirit in self, culture, and nature.

• Even though I have described higher stages whose access usually takes at least five or six years of arduous practice (and whose highest stages often take thirty years or more), don't let that put you off if you are a beginner. Simply begin practice—five or six years will go by in a blink, but you will be reaping the abundant rewards. On the other hand, if you listen to those teachers who are selling nothing but beliefs (magic, mythic, rational, or holistic), you will be nothing but five or six years older. (Holistic beliefs are fine—and quite accurate—for the mental realm. But spirituality is about the transmental realm, the supramental realm, the superconscious realm, and no amount of mind translations will help you transcend the mind. And no amount of Person-Centered Civil Religion will deliver you from yourself.) Rather, you must take up a contemplative, transpersonal, supramental practice. So no matter how daunting practice seems, simply begin. As the old joke has it: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

• The fact is, a few bites into the elephant and you will already start gaining considerable benefits. You might begin, say, twenty minutes a day of centering prayer as taught by Father Thomas Keating. Many people report almost immediate effects—calming, opening, caring, listening: the heart melts a little bit, and so do you. Zikr for a half hour; vipassana for 40 minutes; yoga exercises twice a day, worked into your schedule; Tantric visualization; prayer of the heart; counting your breaths for 15 minutes each morning before you get out of bed. Any of those are fine; whatever works for you, just take the first few bites. . . .

• We need to be gentle with ourselves, it is true; but we also need to be firm. Treat yourself with real compassion, not idiot compassion, and therefore begin to challenge yourself, engage yourself, push yourself: begin to practice.

• As any of these practices start to take hold, you might find it appropriate to attend an intensive retreat for a few days each year. This will give you a chance to extend the little "peeks" of practice into the beginning plateaus of practice. The years will go by, yes, but you will be ripening along with them, slowly but surely transcending the lesser aspects of yourself and opening to the greater. There will come a day when you will look back on all that time as if it were just dream, because in fact it is a dream, from which you will soon awaken.

• The point is simple: If you are interested in genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher and begin practice. Without practice, you will never move beyond the phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences. You will never evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent realization. You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory of your own higher estate, a tourist in your own true Self.