Bliss, the dark night and the void are passing experiences
You may have looked up the stages of spiritual awakening because a lot has shifted for you lately. If so, you have met the same names over and over. First comes bliss. It is a stretch of joy that appears without warning. Then comes the dark night — a phrase the Spanish poet John of the Cross used more than four hundred years ago. He meant a long passage of inner darkness, when prayer goes dry and God is silent. Nowadays the phrase usually means a season of despair.
Some lists also add the void. The void is a flat, empty time. In it, very little seems to matter. Perhaps you are in one of these at the moment, and you know it first-hand.
These experiences do happen, and I take them seriously. Each of them ends. Bliss fades. Despair lifts one morning. Even the void passes, although from inside it can seem endless.
So let me answer your question. There are no stages of awakening. There are only experiences, and they pass. And through all of them, you are here, noticing.
Popular articles count anywhere from four to twelve phases
My answer goes against nearly everything written on the subject. Search for the stages online, and you will find dozens of articles. They rarely agree with each other. One counts four stages. Another has five, and a third settles on seven. The longest runs to twelve, and it sounds as certain as the shortest. One of them, from LonerWolf, a popular spiritual blog, lists ten stages and calls them loosely based on some old Zen pictures. I will come back to those pictures, because they tell a different story.
Apart from bliss, the dark night and the void, the names vary too. One video gives six: waking up, those three, groundedness and a life mission. Groundedness means feeling steady again. A life mission is work that matters to you. A seven-stage version closes with "embodiment", which means living the change every day.
Almost all the articles ask a question like "Which one are you in?" or "Where are you on your journey?" Both assume that you have not got there yet. Each sign of awakening describes someone still searching for it, and every stage is about that same person.
Most frameworks place the goal somewhere far away
However many stages they count, the lists all share a single shape. Awakening lies at the far end. You are somewhere before it, say at number two or three. There is always more to do. Reach one stage, and the list shows you another beyond it. And the last one stays out of reach.
The lists promise that you will arrive eventually, as long as you keep going. One article says most people spend years, sometimes decades, on the stages.
Following such a list turns today into a step towards some later time. A good morning suggests that stage five is near. A hard week warns that you have slipped back. You measure a peaceful hour by what it might mean for your progress. Even rest feels like one more task. Today is never the point, only a way to somewhere else.
Being told where you are eases your fear of failing
Why do these pages feel good to read, then? I think they soothe a fear. Perhaps you have practised for years and still notice no difference. You might start to wonder whether anything is happening at all. Maybe you are getting it wrong. Maybe you are failing. There is no shame in that worry. Anyone who has put so much into a practice wants to see that it is working.
Then a page tells you that you are in the dark night. Suddenly your confusion has a name and a place in the order. Your hardest months now count as progress. Seen that way, a bad season becomes bearable. It even seems temporary. That is what the label is for, and the relief it brings is genuine. I do not blame anyone for wanting it.
The relief has a price, though. You hand a stranger's chart the right to tell you where you stand, and the next stage always sounds better than this one.
Kakuan, a Zen teacher, says the seeker lacks nothing
Those Zen pictures came centuries before any of these pages. Kakuan, a Chinese teacher of the twelfth century, drew the most famous set of them, ten in all. They show a herdsman looking for his lost bull. In Zen, the bull stands for the seeker's own true nature. (Other translations make the bull an ox, which is why many know these as the ox-herding pictures.) For each picture, Kakuan wrote a short poem and a few lines of comment.
Nyogen Senzaki, a Japanese monk, and Paul Reps, an American writer, put Kakuan's words into English in a small book called Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. The titles of the pictures could almost be stages from one of those articles. The herdsman discovers the footprints. Then he spots the bull. He catches it, tames it and rides it home.
Yet the very first comment undoes the whole search: "The bull never has been lost. What need is there to search?" This old map opens by telling the seeker that nothing is missing.
Ten old pictures of a herdsman end in everyday life
After the ride home, the pictures keep going. In the seventh, the bull has disappeared. The herdsman is at peace on his own. Kakuan calls the eighth "Both Bull and Self Transcended". In it, the herdsman is gone too.
If the modern lists were right, this would be the summit. Instead, the last picture is "In the World". It shows the man among ordinary people, at ease, in ragged clothes. He has stopped looking, and he no longer needs to prove himself. Nobody watching him could guess at the long hunt behind him.
The old map saves daily life for the end. Whatever reward it offers is waiting there, among neighbours and strangers.
Someone a short way ahead helps more than any map
I have followed the modern maps myself, in twenty-five years of living with these questions. My seven books mark that trail so far. This year, one idea moved to the centre of my teaching. Only awareness is real. Every stage on every list is awareness appearing as something less. Bliss is that awareness in the form of joy, and the void is the same awareness in the form of emptiness. Your worst hours and your best are equally close to it.
That is why I will not hand you a map to the final stage. It would only send you away from where you are. Greek — my own language — has one word for my work: prodromos, the one who goes a few paces further on. A few paces is close enough to call back to you. From there I describe what I see, and you can check it for yourself. Think of me as a like-hearted friend and navigator for whatever you are going through.
You notice every mood while it lasts
Try something simple with me. Notice the mood you are in at this moment. It may be bright, flat or heavy. Whatever it is, you know that it is there. Knowing it takes no effort. Your awareness is the one thing in this post that you can test this minute, without believing me. Repeat the test with the next mood, and with the one after it. Try it tonight too, before you sleep.
Moods rise and fade, and they colour the world in their own ways. Awareness stays steady under all of them. It also takes in every thought and feeling. A spiritual awakening is what you are, with nothing added, and simply being aware is exactly what those words mean.
No chart can place you, then. A chart can only track what changes. The stages it names are all moments you notice. You, the one noticing, are at no stage at all.
No further step can increase anyone's awareness
No practice, retreat or teacher can add to your awareness. It lacks nothing. Joy and despair both leave it as it is.
None of this asks you to give up your practice. Meditate, pray or read, if it helps you, and enjoy it for its own sake. The final stage is only a line on a page. The present moment is where you actually live. Waiting for awakening puts your life on hold, and every stage on those charts adds another delay.
Let the charts be what they are: other people's accounts of their own moods. Leaf through them with curiosity, as you would a stranger's travel diary. Some of what they describe may even ring true.
Kakuan's herdsman finishes his story in a crowd, with an easy heart. Today you can be where he is, exactly as you are. Start by noticing your mood. There are no stages. There is you, aware, right here and now.