You cannot be in the valley and the on the mountaintop, you cannot study in the university and attend the kindergarten, you cannot participate in daytime and nighttime simultaneously. There is a period of preparation which follows the shedding of the defense and destruction of personality and that period of preparation is a kind of ordeal or testing for your ability to live in freedom. Until you have passed through these processes these stages of human growth, development, and multiple awakenings your spiritual practice may be pleasurable, relaxing, health-giving, and pleasant, but it is not the eternal sadhana, not the spiritual practice of true devotion to the sacred and the spiritual, to merging in oneness with the Divine Source.

My stages, as with my teachings as a whole, are not Truth. These teachings are a way, a method. If they work for you, then practice them. If they don't work for you, leave them. Today in particular you can always find another set of practices, philosophy and methodology. The one you follow will choose you and you will feel it's rightness for you. Your heart will engage, your soul will be stimulated. You will feel physically, mentally, and emotionally the great relief of being able to finally shed your anxieties and your worries about being saved, about becoming free through rising above fear. You will have an inner sense of knowing that it has already been done for you. Thus the true spiritual teaching is not one of search or seeking or striving or doing anything at all incrementally, progressively, or through levels of attainment. On the contrary, the true spiritual teaching is the wordless teaching of love and wisdom that is eternal, that doesn't merely speak of the eternal, but is at one with the eternal. You merge with the teacher, the teaching, and the arising of events in the material world and transcend them not physically, but spiritually, so that you become a living model of what it means for this world of duality to be shot through with transcendence. Those who choose the three-stage model of human awakening are tending toward this state, this condition-less state of perfect freedom, as a reflection of the Divine. Do not be interested in my model or anything else I have to say, if it doesn't invigorate you in soul and heart, if you don't sense Truth here. Try another way. Ultimately all ways lead to the Source, however they may go by very different terrain, very different routes.

If you look deeply, not merely in sound bites, short quotations, or accounts of what someone else has written about them, but if you look deeply into the methods and the teachings of spiritual teachers, there is a tremendous and rich diversity. Christ spoke and taught very differently to the Buddha. Ramakrishna was different in approach and advice to Sai Baba. Look at Sri Aurobindo, Ramana Maharshi, Swami Vivekananda, or Krishnanmurti. Very often the ideas contained in their teachings are contradictory, so that you couldn't possibly merge them or set them alongside each other as confluent. Today we can discover the path that suits us since as specific examples of collective humanity we are remarkably diverse, are we not?

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at [email protected].

Blog entry #180