In this video, I map my fifteen stages on the spiritual path on the three classic mystical phases of Purification, Illumination, and Union. I then reduce these three phases to the two phases of Purgation and Illumination.

Before exploring each of the fifteen stages, which are posted below, I point out in the video that the first stage is not actually a stage on the spiritual path. It’s the standpoint of people who either don’t know about the spiritual path or who reject it as an illusion. After rejecting the belief that the so-called real world of frenetic activity is the actual real world, I indicate the three main ways that people transition from the stage of Unawareness to the stage of Awakening, which is the second stage in my itinerary.

You’ll have to tune in to find out what these three ways are and how they relate to the two types of souls described by philosopher and psychologist William James.

Note: The image above was generated by Notebook LLM. AI didn’t write this lecture but—as at a magazine’s art department—it produced a helpful illustration based on my ideas.

Here is a updated and edited version of the transcript:

I was playing with some AI tools last night, and I see that AI agent could produce this video for me. I could maybe look 40 years younger, have a different voice, and have all the content generated for me based upon my files, YouTube videos, university lectures, and the books I’ve written. They could generate something quite plausible, but I’m not going to do that. I’m just going to sit here and talk to the camera. I just want to talk to you the way I would if you were taking a course from me, or if we were sitting together in an ashram, a university or a monastery talking about the spiritual life.

So, let’s take a look again at the fifteen stages of the spiritual spiritual path that I mentioned yesterday.

Fifteen Stages on the Spiritual Path

1. Unawareness: Living in “the Real World.”

2. Awakening: Seeing the Path.

3. Renunciation: Stepping onto the Way.

4. Rapture: Beginner’s Bliss.

5. Spiritual Presumption: The Drug of Spiritual Pride.

6. Sensory Purgation: A Well Run Dry.

7. Spiritual Standstill: Was it Only a Dream?

8. Radical Surrender: No Conditions.

9. Mystical Illumination: An Awakening Presence.

10. Mystical Effectiveness: Spirit without Boundaries.

11. Mystical Carelessness: Drifting Away.

12. Mystical Purgation: The Death of the Sacred.

13. Mystical Death: The Fire of Nothingness.

14. Mystical Awakening: The Fragrance of Nonduality.

15. Mystical Union: Remaining in the Presence.

With its fifteen stages, this appears to be a quite complicated map. We can simplify it by uncovering its underlying logic in light of the three stages of the spiritual path in traditional Catholic mystical theology and Neoplatonism that I mentioned last time. These include the stage of katharsis, or purgatio in Latin, which means “purification,” or “cleansing.” The second stage is illumination, or illuminatio in Latin and ellampsis in Greek. If you hear the English word lamp in ellampsis, that’s because lamp goes back to a Latin word lampas, which was taken directly from the Greek lampas (λαμπάς). The third stage is union, unio in Latin and henōsis in Greek, Henōsis carries the meaning of “unification.” The Greek word for the Supreme Ultimate Nondual Reality is to hen, or “the One. So henōsis means becoming one with what is ultimately Real. For even greater simplicity, I reduced these three stages to the two stages of purification and illumination. On this simpler approach, union can be seen as the perfection of illumination, which arises through purification. Purification is the process through which we move to final the final perfection of purification as union from everyday absorption in the so-called Real World, which many people take as ultimate reality. Attaining to union, or the standpoint of perfect enlightenment, occurs through intermittent periods of purification followed by seasons of illumination. The interplay of these two seasons of the spiritual life constitutes the rhythm of the spiritual life. In this and the next session, I want to run through the fifteen stages and relate them to the two phases of purification and illumination.

The first stage in this itinerary is named, “Unawareness,” or living in so-called Real World. Actually this isn’t a stage in the spiritual life; it’s just ordinary life lived without orientation to spiritual values or truths. Excluding this first stage as a spiritual standpoint, we can say that there are only fourteen stages on the spiritual path. But even if it’s not a step on the spiritual path, it’s still an important stage because it’s the standpoint of many people who grew up without spiritual formation. So, for many people, it’s the jumping-off point into the spiritual life.

I have lived in Germany for the last six years, and I’ve spent a lot time here over the almost three decades. Back in my early days here when I was starting to learn German, I often watched German TV movies to learn the language. These movies were pretty generic, with simple, predictable plots. Whenever they wanted to show that somebody was living a meaningful and authentic life and wasn’t passive and just letting life happen to them, they showed them as moving around quickly, traveling to this and that country, starting or ending relationships, having emotional outbursts, trying something adventurous like paragliding somewhere in South America. Their lives was full of incessant movement and action. For a lot of people, that’s their idea of being really alive and living in the real world as an external place providing constant stimulation. The more stimulations we have, and the more we’re able to creatively interact with them, to profit from them, and perhaps to monetize them, the more we’re living a real life in the real world. That’s the world that most of us have been educated to live in. That’s the world we’re supposed to take most seriously.

But the point of the spiritual life is that that’s just not true. That world is an illusion. It’s not that the world itself is a total illusion because we can also unfold spiritually in the world and unfold as human beings. The world allows us to experience life’s deeper realities through literature, art, religion, philosophy, relationships with others, and selfless service. The world itself is not māyā in the popular sense of its being a pure and pointless illusion like faces that we might trace in passing clouds. What is māyā, what is illusion, is when we think that the actual real world is the contrived world of hectic activity in which we’re trying to profit and monetize our experiences to the full and to get through the so-called bucket list before we pass from the scene.

Another false real world recently gripping much of humanity is AI-generated. Because of some projects I am working on, I was recently invited to participate in an intensive seven-day AI seminar to learn how to create AI agents to create videos, books, articles, answer emails, and run the tedious side of a business. The promise of AI is that it will free us from unglamorous work and free up a whole week out of each month. We can use the newly available freed-up time to go on exotic vacations, learn a new language, or, finally, hang glide on the Mediterranean coast. AI will allow us to live fuller lives while still being extremely productive! But we know how that works. For most people, if they have a regular job and if they can produce the same amount of work in four days that they used to do in five, well, that just means they’re going to start having an extra day of work squeezed into their usual work week. So instead of saving us time, AI is speeding everything up. We’re frenetically entering prompts into our AI agents and doubling the amount of illusion in our lives than was there before AI burst in us in late 2022.

In accord with the mystical traditions of the world, I want to affirm neither of these scenarios depicts the real world. The real world, the true world, is within, and the external world that many take as the real world is actually a mere shadow of a higher and subtler dimension of reality. Perhaps hints of the radiance of that higher reality will shine through the words in this presentation as you encounter them meditatively.

Unawareness, or living in the illusory real world, only becomes a station on the spiritual path when we first realize that we have to step away from that glittering mirage of false reality. Realizing that we have to step away from unconscious submersion on the artificial real worlds in which we have imprisoned ourselves is the first step on the spiritual path. This raises the question of how or why we would take this step. Because we have to see the spiritual path before we can step onto it, I call the second stage of my itinerary, “Awakening: Seeing the Path.” In order to awaken to the spiritual life, we have first discover that there’s a path that we can enter. This is probably the most difficult stage or transition point in whole itinerary because for many people, stepping out onto the path doesn’t occur unless one of two very different kinds of events occur.

The first event is probably the most common. This is when some difficulty comes into our lives. Every life has difficulties, and we cannot escape from them. But perhaps something happens in your life that brings you to an inner breaking point, to hitting bottom, to the recognition that things are just not going the way you thought they should go. And you feel at a loss as to what to do next. Based on how they were raised some people might think of praying. Or if they don’t have familiarity with prayer, they might release an existential cry from the heart for help or guidance. It might be more mute and inarticulate than that. It might be a sense that I’ve come to a dead end in my life, and I need a new pathway. I need an opening.

This is probably the most common way that people enter the spiritual path who haven’t been aware beforehand of having their own spiritual insights or inclinations. These existential crises are a doorway onto the spiritual path for many people because it reveals a deep truth about life that can never be effaced or erased by literary criticism, critical theory, social theory, physicalism, or science. The the truth is that if we cry out from the depths of our being for help and guidance, something happens. There’s always an answer. And the deepest spiritual truth in our human existence is that we can access divine wisdom and divine consciousness in an inarticulate way without knowing what we’re doing just by opening ourselves up, often through difficulties, to a higher perspective on our life.

In the Christian tradition, this moment of sudden change or transformation is known as conversion, or, in Greek, metanoia. In Hinduism’s Bhagavad-gītā, Krishna says that one of the reasons people turn to him is because of difficulties in their lives. That people find aid and guidance in these moments of crisis is the greatest evidence of the reality of the spiritual life. More than that, it’s the greatest evidence and proof that there is a God, a higher spiritual reality, and a spiritual underpinning to our lives, which we can tap into through prayer and meditation.

Besides this more usual way of stepping onto the spiritual path from the stage of unawareness there is a second way, one that is less common but far more more dramatic: the experience of a sudden awakening. In the New Testament, Saul had a life-altering encounter with a blinding light and the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus that transformed him into the Apostle Paul. The history of religions is filled with stories of obscure people who were tending their fields, or shepherding their flocks, or who disappeared in a river or a forest where they had an encounter with a divine presence. They emerged from these encounters as prophets, sages, yogis, and teachers of new revelations. Their sudden awakening revealed to them that there’s a higher reality than the physical world and that there’s a different path than that of mere restless activity and money-making.

The third way of awakening is more natural and harmonious, and usually goes unnoticed. This is the experience of people who were raised in a stable home grounded in a gentle religious tradition, where they were taught spiritual truths in a physically, mentally, and spiritually wholesome environment. Their spirituality is an unforced and spontaneous aspect of their activities as parents, spouses, employees, or business owners. They’re spontaneously spiritual, and they see everything in their lives as undergirded by God, Truth, Reality, Ishvara, or whatever name they give to ultimate spiritual reality. This third way is the least dramatic way of being on the spiritual path, but it might be the most common, especially in eras that were more well-ordered and regulated than our current era. These eras were regulated by stable but not harshly authoritarian institutions in which children were able to imbibe the basic teachings of religion along with a broad education in the humanities and the sciences.

This third division reminds me of the distinction between two kinds of souls drawn by William James well over a hundred years ago. William James doesn’t need an introduction to academic audiences in the English speaking world. His academic reputation was built on his textbooks on psychology and his philosophical writings. But he’s probably most remembered today for his classic book on mysticism, The Varieties of Religious Experience. This is a classic text in the study of mysticism, which is still valuable today. I think that it’s more valuable than many of the later critical responses that debunk his approach. I say that as a person who has written an academic book about mysticism and who has taught university courses and lectured about about mysticism for many years. I may be wrong, but that’s my judgment, and I still find it useful to begin any study of mysticism by calling upon James.

In the Varieties, James draws a vivid distinction what he calls the Healthy-Minded Soul and the Sick Soul. Immediately upon hearing about these different kinds of souls, people want to know what differentiates a sick soul from a healthy soul. Not only that, but almost immediately people might ask themselves, “Which one am I?” The history of religion is filled with stories of sick souls, people tormented by their upbringing, addictions, trauma, or difficult life circumstances, who through these difficult circumstances found their way to a startling spiritual awakening, which set their difficult lives right.

The sick souls get most of the attention in accounts of the religious life, but James also described the healthy souls. These well-rounded human beings are capable without much conscious effort of integrating a serviceable and workable spirituality into their lives. In my own life, I started out as a sick soul. But after many decades of spiritual practice, of trying to be a good human being, of dedicated work in my vocation, of learning through processes of purification to rectify my failings and my character flaws, and of attempting to live in a more humane, spiritual and ethical way, I have become a healthy soul. One of the great benefits of the spiritual path is that even if we start out as sick souls, we can become healthy souls. For people who have been healthy souls from the start, understanding the tumult that the sick souls go through might shake them out the complacency, narcissism, and self-satisfaction they may have left unpruned in their well-adjusted souls. These failings can unconsciously dull the spiritual insight that comes in great abundance to sick souls when they overcome the maladies that impel them from the false real world to awakening to the reality of the spiritual life.

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