(Please excuse the email earlier today, which led to a dead end!)
In this episode, I offer an overview of the mystical path as I conceive it, beginning with what I call Beginner’s Bliss. This is a phase at the beginning of the awakened life where we may experience periods of spiritual happiness and ecstasy, known as “sensible consolation” in Catholic mystical theology.
Following Beginner’s Bliss is the Night of the Senses, which the first great experience of purgation. The beginning of this stage is marked by a sudden cessation of sensible consolations. The spiritual well runs dry, so to speak, leading the practitioner into the crucible of radical surrender to the divine. However, this transition eventually gives way to what St. Teresa of Avila called the Prayer of Quiet. Metaphorically, we can liken this subtle second awakening in the spiritual life to the first crocuses of spring poking through the winter snow.
Here is an edited transcript of the video:
Welcome to episode three in this series on my Substack, Burning Toward Transcendence. The title of this episode is “Fifteen Steps on the Spiritual Path.” For some people that sounds too formulaic, too rigid. The idea that there are multiple stages or steps on the spiritual path seems too abstract. They point out that the spiritual life is an individual and intimate experience, which can’t be reduced to a formula. Worse than reducing it to a formula, they continue, is to live it in accordance with a formula. When the spiritual life is practiced with dedication and seriousness, it grants us a personal sense of unity or oneness with a higher spiritual reality. This unique experience can’t be reduced to a formula. By outlining fifteen stages on the spiritual path, I don’t intend to force the spiritual life to fit within the contours of a conceptual scheme. If we get lost while driving, we can look at Google Maps to see where we are. But we wouldn’t think that the map is the road. The road’s outside, beyond the vehicle and the navigation system. We have to actually travel the road; the map can’t make the journey for us. A map is useful for orientation. It tells us where we are and how to get to our destination. It’s the same with spiritual maps. They’re useful for suggesting the steps on the itinerary that leads to divine union.
We have so much spiritual information today that it’s easy to get confused or overwhelmed by the jumble of available spiritual teachings in multiple printed and digital sources. Everyone who has anything to say about the spiritual life has a YouTube channel or a Substack. And I’m one of them. To this mass of information and advice, we now have to include the potential that AI has for becoming a spiritual teacher along with everything else that its does for us. (After I’m done with this video, I’m going to ask Claude and Gemini a few questions to see what kind of gurus they would make!) With all of these resources at our disposal in an era lacking strong institutional structures offering meaningful spiritual guidance, we can easily lose our way. We may not even find the way. That’s why I want to talk about my experience with stages and steps on the spiritual path.
As a helpful reminder, here is the list of the fifteen steps or stages. The titles evoke what for me were meaningful turning points in my own spiritual journey:
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.
The first stage, of unawareness, or living in “the Real World” is, as I pointed out in the last episode, not a stage on the path. Stage two is awakening, or seeing the path. Stage three is renunciation, or stepping onto the way. Number four is rapture, or beginner’s bliss. Number five is spiritual presumption, which is the drug of spiritual pride. Number six is, to use a more technical term coming out of the Catholic mystical tradition, sensory purgation, which I compare to a well that has gone dry. The seventh stage is spiritual standstill. This is the moment in the spiritual life when we suspect that it was an illusion, that it was fake, or that we had spiritual or emotional indigestion. Now we wonder if spiritual awakening was just a dream? Then comes the eighth stage, the step of radical surrender. This is a second major turning point in the life of a spiritual practitioner. Radical surrender occurs when we stop placing limits on the divine, God, truth, or Being. Instead of continuing to create the Divine in our own image or to use it to our advantage, we arrive at the first stage of spiritual maturity where we let what is ultimately most real be what it is and we conform ourselves to it rather than trying to conform it to ourselves.
Stage nine is mystical illumination, when we become aware of a subtle inner presence. Stage ten is mystical effectiveness. Spiritually advanced mystics are often highly effective people. They’re not only people who run away and sit in a cave somewhere. At the eleventh stage, we experience mystical carelessness, or drifting away from the spiritual life. This is a difficult moment later on in the spiritual life when we become too accustomed to our status as illumined persons, and we become eligible for a new season of purgation. The twelfth stage is mystical purgation, also known as the Night of the Spirit in Catholic mystical theology. I name this major turning point in the spiritual “the death of the sacred.” This is a serious, even dangerous, moment in the spiritual life. “Mystical death” and “the fire of nothingness” sound extreme, and this degree of the spiritual life is known only to the most generous and courageous mystical seekers. Stage fourteen is mystical awakening. Well, haven’t we already had an awakening if we’re on the path? But this is an awakening at a much deeper level, where we detect the fragrance of nonduality. Nonduality is a word that’s become more popular, and not just in alternative spiritual circles or among those who practice the nonduality of Advaita Vedanta. It has begun to infiltrate other religious and spiritual traditions, particularly some versions of progressive or mystical Christian theology. Stage fifteen is mystical union, or remaining in the presence.
That’s a quick overview of the fifteen stages, which I will now go through step by step, stage by stage. I want to give a general sense of the movement, of the flow, along the path. On the slide in the video, I code the fifteen stages with three colors. The first stage is coded in black, which signifies that it’s not actually a step on the path. I use purple and blue to indicate that the stages of the spiritual life can be reduced to two phases, which repeat continually like the seasons. Purple indicates seasons of purgation, purification, or cleansing. Blue refers to illumination. There is a continual interplay between the purificatory stages in the spiritual life and the illuminative stages. In the illuminative stages, coded here in blue, we gain a deeper sense, experience, knowledge, or insight into the fundamental spiritual reality of life. The purple stages refer to phases when we are bereft of illuminative experiences and insights. The purpose of these purgative stages is to prevent us from becoming addicted to pleasant spiritual sensations and experiences (or more problematically, of turning them into commodities or products that we can monetize).
One cause of the return of purgation is subtle spiritual pride. This develops in people who have gained a reputation for being spiritual and who become subtly attached to this reputation, relish it secretly, and revel in thinking of themselves as spiritual guides, as illumined persons whose words are nectar to others who want to go deeper into the spiritual life. When we’re proficient in our work of profession, we also feel a sense of confidence, perhaps pride, so I don’t want to reject having pride and confidence in what we do. In the spiritual life, though, this can lead to presumption, carelessness, and the sad, unfortunate downfalls that we sometimes see among spiritual teachers and spiritual leaders. If we become aware that we are succumbing to spiritual pride, trusting in our own powers, and taking for granted our spiritual reputation, we should examine ourselves in light of the examples set by the most eminent saints. Then we should gently undertake the penitential work of gently and judiciously pruning this baggage from our souls.
In the last few minutes of this talk, I want evoke a sense of how these fifteen stages might unfold. We first enter the path to divine union because of trauma, a sudden awakening, or in response to an intuition that we need to deepen what we’ve doing more by feel. At the beginning of the spiritual life, we’re often graced with extraordinary experiences, profound feelings of gratitude, deep insights, intutive understanding of scriptures and philosophical writings, and clarity about spiritual teachings that once were opaque to us. We may find ourselves able to speak ecstatically about our newfound path, and we may feel the need to convince everybody we know of its truth. If we had been intellectually unengaged before our awakening, we may now eagerly study ancient texts, read philosophy, and learn ancient languages so as to appreciate more deeply the religious tradition or spiritual path to which we have been awakened. Like beginner’s luck, this is beginner’s bliss, although it usually doesn’t last. This is a special grace and one to be cherished, but a common error at this point is that we may assume that we’ve arrived to the end of the spiritual path. We may suspect that we’ve become sages, gurus, and saints, and that only the slightest gauzy curtain of insubstantial unknowing separates us from ultimate enlightenment. Looking back at yourself ten or fifteen years later, you might find your beginner’s self to be amusing—if you’ve overcome it and haven’t succumbed to the beginner’s failings. But beginner’s bliss can also make some people spiritually arrogant who insist on the final truth of their own way and to become disrespectful of other people’s spiritual paths.
These failings need to be unlearned if we are to progress and not fall back into our old pre-awakening self. The way of unlearning is through sensory purgation, which is a term from the tradition descending from St. John of the Cross. I characterize this stage as being like a well that has gone dry. We suddenly find ourselves bereft of the consolations of beginner’s luck, or as they’re called in the Catholic tradition, “sensible consolations.” Vanished are the ecstatic sensations in the body that led us to sing or dance or jump for joy. Vanished also is the illumination of the mind, heart, and soul that led us to believe that we’re sages and prophets who have seen the truths of the ages. They vanish, sometimes in a flash, and we find ourselves wondering if our awakening had only been a dream, a fluke.
Sensory purgation is the first significant transition in the spiritual life after awakening. It moves us to ask ourselves why we’re on the spiritual path. What’s our purpose on this path? It’s a time for decisions. If we conclude that stepping onto the path was a wrong turn, we might go back to the life we were living before awakening. But someone who’s deeply committed to spiritual growth will find that going back is not an option. You realize that you can’t go back to being the way you were before. You can’t go back to that empty lifestyle. You might say to yourself, “I don’t know what happened to my spiritual illumination. It’s no longer there, but I can’t go back.”
This is the crucible in which we’re tested in sensory purgation. On its negative side, we see that we can’t go back and we can’t go forward. If we don’t go back, we’ve passed the test. On the positive side, by waiting in the stillness, silence, emptiness, and dryness of sensory purgation, we arrive at the second significant moment of surrender in the spiritual life. The first surrender was when we realized that we were on a wrong path and we turned to the divine, to God, to a higher reality. Many people, sadly, don’t progress beyond that point. The second surrender occurs when we relinquish our preconceptions about the divine and the spiritual life, disavow greed for spiritual attainments, and agree inwardly to continue to live for the Divine without conditioning it on special moments of insight and illumination. We stop placing conditions upon the divine when we surrender to the humbling realization that ultimate reality is not the same as our small ego-shaped reality.
To be true to the second surrender in this night of sensory purgation, the Night of the Senses, we must yield ourselves to be conformed to the Divine. This is a passive rather than an active process. I can’t forge forward in this night by praying more, contemplating more, or going on a pilgrimage. Paradoxically, to go forward I must give up overreliance on religious activity and spiritual practices because, in the dryness of this night, I find myself unable to perform the simplest religious acts and spiritual practices.
At some point in this season of dryness, of darkness, the fragrance of the divine life, a subtle sense of eternal and joyous life, permeates the soul. Rather than exciting our physical senses and making our body tremble and shake, this spiritual aroma suffuses the soul with an indescribably delicate and priceless perfume. It’s subtler than the aroma of lilacs and magnolias wafting over a field at the end of a long winter. This subtle second awakening, named the Prayer of Quiet by St. Teresa of Avila, intimates to us inwardly that we’re rooted in the divine ground of life.
It’s February where I am right now in Germany. Just today, when I was out walking, I saw crocuses poking through snow—a sure and beloved sign of spring. Crocuses pushing through snow is a physical metaphor for Teresa’s Prayer of Quiet, which arrives after the winter of purgation in which we’ve surrendered ego-shaped claims on the Divine, on God, and on the spiritual life. Resting in the stillness and darkness of sensory purgation suits the day on which I am speaking these words, which in the Catholic liturgical calendar is the first Sunday in Lent. Stripped of our spiritual goods in an inner Lent of purgation but remaining in a mood of surrender and non-grasping, we will soon reawaken—like the first flowers of the approaching spring—to a brighter season of spiritual illumination.
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