Let me refer again to the Three Stages of Awakening. These descriptions are my attempt to provide an accurate, clarifying response to questions and bewilderment about the mysteries that human beings, men and women, seem to have in these confusing times. My short response or answer is that in transcending the limitations of your personality you embrace open-heartedness and compassionate life and, transcending even that elevation of heart, mind, and action, enter a preparatory period of ordeal and testing in order to begin your spiritual discipline or sadhana. The first stage of awakening is thus the stage of the hero, the adventurer, the Parsifal or human being in the relative world who conforms to the present mythology of call, adventure, and return.

Almost all people are presently in this stage of their growth and development.

Those few who have developed past the stage of psychological wholeness and personal transformation into the second stage of awakening are the human beings who know what it is like to fulfill the potential and some of the capacity of a human being. They have developed into the present stage of psycho-biological life and are free to meet the challenges of their adult lives, without being hampered by anachronistic behavior and attachments, by unresolved baggage and conditioning from the past, in particular natal, childhood, and early life experience. They develop in heart-centeredness, awareness, and wisdom and achieve the flowering of a human life in all its clarity, brightness, loving kindness, and compassion.

The Fourth Stage Of Human Awakening: Mahanamen

For those who are presently inclined toward spiritual life, sacred existence, and timeless wisdom, the preparation for sacred-spiritual life is indicated and it involves the complete relinquishment of human heart-centered existence, very much in the same way as the transformation between the first and the second stages of awakening required the sacrifice of the childhood ego-self.

Through grace, the individual who completes the primary sadhana of spiritual preparation enters into the spiritual life of devotion and surrender, without any obstacles between him or herself and the Divine in the form of the teacher, the teachings, the ceremonies, or the formless aspects of the Divine Source, as it plays in the world of form. He or she is without identity, ambition, and beyond search or seeking.

The culmination or assembled endeavor of my three stages of awakening constitute the fourth level of the spiritual autobiography, but the blossoming into the life of devotion and surrender constitute a fourth stage of awakening and this I have called Mahanamen. In the fourth stage, Mahanamen, the Divine Presence resides in every heart and this again relates to the first three levels of spiritual autobiography, the three major teachings of the three great adepts, and the three stages of awakening.

In the life of perpetual sadhana in our present existence which surpasses even death itself, the foundational ground of the Divine Person resides in the psycho-physical organism in the will center or the pelvis, the feet of the Divine Person stand in the physical heart-center or chest, and the Divine Heart-Mind appears energetically and symbolically above the physical organism altogether, but perceived by those who are awakened.

The physical and energetic heart center itself consists of three "centers." At the left side is the individual heart, experienced in the usual waking state of separation. On the right side is the universally conscious, heart-sense of spiritual awakening. In the center is the heart of wholeness of the psycho-physical organism which is the heart we refer to when we talk about rising into the heart chakra.

Thus, the left-hand side of the heart corresponds to individual identity and appearance in space-time, the central heart to the dreaming state or meeting of conscious and unconscious, and the right-hand side heart to the universal or supra-personal heart or awakened Self.

Mahanamen may appear in the world as the enlightened individual who has transcended individuality, in which the heart is saturated with the divine nectar and whose brightness distinguishes her or him from the human being who is in the process of search, seeking, or individual awakening.

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 #192