Honourable companions,

If it may intelligently be said that spirituality is walking a path to a final, ultimate destination, and that on this path there are definite markers indicating progress, travel, and distance from the destination, what are they? Following the lead of others who have gone before (see note) and my own thought, here is a suggestion.

The original stage, before the spiritual life begins, is a stage of receptivity and passivity, and also innocence and imagination and play, which are often regarded as the qualities of the most spiritually mature. The innocence of the original state is subject to fear, exploitation, and destruction as it is exposed to suffering. The original state lacks consciousness, lacks knowledge of what one is passively receiving, and does not know that what one is receiving is a chimera. Thus it is a prison: a comfortable prison, and an invisible prison, but it is a prison nonetheless. This is the condition of childhood and early education. This is the condition of one whose word is "Yes", the affirmation of someone elsešs word.

The first stage, which I call "the springtime", is the stage of awareness of the chimerical nature of what was once received as real, true, and good. Here, we know that things are not what they seem, not what they ought to be, not what they were meant to be‹and that the chimera one lives in may have sinister designs. The first articulation of onešs own word happens here, and the word is the sacred "No", which is the word that negates the chimera, the will to tear down the fraudulent and cruel illusions, to obtain justice for those who have been harmed by them. The quest to find the actuality, the real, the true, the good, begins here. The trap at this stage, and which emerges occasionally in subsequent stages, is that one can make an occupation of negating the words of another, and thus never get to affirming anything.

The second is the stage of "high summer". A new joy is discovered and enjoyed, with the first tinklings of sound from outside the prison. The world opens up to the seeker in a way that had not happened before, and one discovers connexions and bonds with others which, as most seekers who achieve high summer perceive it, always existed but were never previously realised. Energetic bliss and ecstacy is found here. The music of the spheres begins to play through you. One discovers that the sacred "No" from the springtime was spoken towards that which had to be negated before anything new could grow, and so it is transformed into a sacred "Yes", the affirmation of the beautiful, the just, and the true. Most people never make it past this stage, because they like the feeling so much. But this stage still has its traps: one is the urge to tell everyone about it, which in its extreme extension becomes recruitment, evangelization; the other might be called a spiritual hedonism or addiction to the flow of bliss. This stage is rarely surpassed also because what follows after it is frightening.

The third stage, which comes after the encompassing of spiritual pleasure, is the encompassing of spiritual pain: the stage of "autumn". One becomes aware of the transience of things, and more sensitive to the suffering of others, by means of the same self-extending consciousness that brought untold happiness in the previous stage. Depression sets in, anger arises against the causes of the suffering, and we speak again the sacred "No", but this time not to the chimera, but to the Path itself, and to life. Hence Solomon cursed the hour that gave birth to him, and the Poet laments "all thatšs beautiful drifts away, like the waters", therefore he spits into the face of time. Often at this stage one is motivated to social action, to reach out to others and to the world, to help relieve the suffering that one encounters: and this is important and praiseworthy, but because it has a payoff that can become an attachment, a payoff in the form of reputation, honours, acclaim, and the like, so again people rarely surpass it. More often, people undertake social action as a full time occupation and regard it as a spiritual duty, which again is morally laudable but since it is still attached to effects and results, it risks a regression of maturity.

If we learn to eventually transform the second sacred "No" into a second sacred "Yes", a Yes that affirms the autumn, that affirms the transience and suffering of others, a Yes that refuses to ignore suffering but fully accepts it and takes ownership of it, then we are passed into the fourth stage, the stage of void and emptiness, the stage of "winter". The gulf between the real and the unreal is opened before you. The love which one abundantly gave to the world and which once loved the seeker back so intensely and so profoundly, even through the autumn when we cursed it, now ceases to respond at all, with either love or with barbs of pain. One gives, loves, hopes, prays, and offers all things that once came back from the world as more love, more hope, more prayer, and more gift, only now there is no echo, nothing responds; nothingness is the response. And this stage is the challenge, where the path ceases to lead by holding out sweets to reach for, or by offering sores on lepers for would-be saints to kiss. Now the path is teaching how to do onešs work for the sake of the work itself, not for the sake of effects or consequences. Now the path teaches how to love without interest in getting anything back for it, without attachment to a return. Now one learns to love for the sake of loving, now one begins to learn something really valuable. Now one begins to leave behind the self and all of its lavish desires. But this stage is hard, for it is here we doubt not the path but the seeker, here we doubt ourselves, here we doubt whether we are doing spirituality for the purpose we originally had.

What is beyond here, I do not know, for I have not traveled that far. I read in the accounts of the worlds greatest mystics that the stages I labeled as "spring" and "winter" are mere rehearsals for stages yet to come, which are far worse and far better: the Dark Night of the Soul, and then the final Great Marriage with the Beloved.

Cathbad
From the grove,
And in the season of samhain, 2001.

(Note: This loosely follows the parable of "the camel, the lion, and the child", in Nietzschešs book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.)