In Michael Beckwith’s The Four Stages of Spiritual Growth, he outlines a roadmap for spiritual growth and development.
One of the great understandings that you can gain in your life is the fact that you are not a human being having spiritual experiences. You are in fact a spiritual being having a human experience.
We are all on a spiritual path whether you are conscious about it or not. We all have an inherent calling to connect with our highest self in some shape or form. For many its found in a temple or on a mountain top or even in a book.
A lot has been written about spiritual growth and even Carl Jung laid out an excellent map for the stages of life.
Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.
― Carl Gustav Jung
Michael Beckwith’s The Four Stages of Spiritual Growth help us understand how we evolve spiritually. When we know why something works, it works better.
The real value of understanding these four stages is that it can help us advance faster.
These stages are not clear cut steps up a ladder. We move back and forth as we progress and you rarely leave any stage behind completely. But, as you progress you will start living predominantly in one stage of spiritual growth.
Stage 1: Victim (To Me)
Stage 1 of the four stages of spiritual growth is the sate where you are a victim. This is the stage where life is happening to you and you feel completely out of control.
Your experience of life is one where you are being tossed around by events and circumstances and you feel (and believe) that life is happening to you.
This is where the majority of people live. The ideas that you have to fight for what you want and protect what you have stemmed from this stage of spiritual existence.
Too many people are living in a prison that they have themselves manufactured.
– Michael Beckwith
Living in this state is one where you feel like you can not change anything. Life or God or some greater power seems to be in control and you feel like it is deciding your fate.
Coincidentally, this is also the stage where religions are stuck, and as you will soon see this is actually the lowest stage of spirituality there is. Most religions teach that you are under the control of some God who gets to decide your fate.
This is partially why regions have been so successful at keeping people under their control. The very nature of religion is designed to prevent people from reaching higher states of spiritual growth.
Being a victim can lead to all sort of mental and emotional strain. That feeling of not being in charge of your own life and not having some sort of influence on your own destiny can break you down mentally and emotionally.
Stage 2: Manifester (By Me)
For many people, the pain of being in stage 1 and the emotional suffering of not being in control of their own lives get too much and they seek something higher.
Your higher self is always calling you to reach the next stage of spiritual consciousness. Not everybody heeds the call. Those who do advance.
When the right teacher shows up in your life and you have the epiphany and the insight that you can actually create your own life then you enter stage 2 of spiritual growth.
You start to understand how your mind works and how you can actually create your own life.
You are a co-creator in your life and by using your mind you can work with the universe to draw into your life the things and experiences that you desire.
You start to realize that you are not a victim and that you can in fact change any and everything about your life and your life experiences.
We see this so often. Almost every sports star or celebrity that reach massive success come from a background where they were a victim.
When you recognize this power in you, you can quickly turn your life around and start to manifest anything you place your energy and your attention on.
Much of this website is dedicated to these ideas. While manifesting is not easy, it is simple. By using your mind, harnessing the power of thought and learning to control your focus you can shift your vibration.
When you shift your vibration, you become attracted to something completely different than when you where a victim. Your energy and your attention is now on what you DO want instead of how awful life is and how unfair everything has been on you.
When you start to harness the power of your mind through focused thought, visualization, affirmation and meditation you can start to work with the law of attraction and bring anything into your life.
I Michael Beckwith’s The Four Stages of Spiritual Growth he outlines this stage as the one where you assume your own power and you awaken to the reality of life as a process of creation.
Stage 3: Channel (Through Me)
As a more manifest you can learn to attract anything into your life. Most people become very successful in the stage of being a manifester.
As you build your own success and manifest the life you think you want you soon reach a magical place in your life where you realize that life is happen for you.
When you see and experience the power of your own thought and how you can create your life and what you attract to yourself you build your own spiritual power.
You stop judging the world and different events and experiences and you realize that at some level life is always happening FOR you (and not to you).
Stop looking outside for help. You’re sourced and fuelled and funded by a renewable resource, which is within you. It never runs out. It is your Essence. It’s your life.
– Michael Beckwith
Having this greater connection with life and the universe you become more of a channel and you allow life to be expressed through you.
You become less concerned with accumulating things which is the main focus of the manifester.
You become more concerned with your life purpose and being fulfilled. Your focus shifts more towards the needs of your soul.
You surrender. You let go and you let God.
You trust and you know that life will unfold for you.
We also see this with a lot of super successful people. They reach a point where the success and accumulation is no longer fulfilling. Oprah Winfrey is a great example. At the hight of her illustrious career she “quit” to pursue a higher calling.
Her impact now is greater than ever before. She is following her soul’s calling and is no longer concerned with achievement and success – even though those things naturally follow as a result of living at that higher consciousness.
Stage 4: I’m It (As Me)
The highest of the four stages of spiritual growth by Michael Beckwith is the stage that great spiritual avatars spoke of. It is what many call “God-consciousness”.
It is a stage where you feel complete unity with God, with life and with the universe. You have very little concern for success and achievement.
You are no longer concerned with finding your purpose because you KNOW that the divine spark within you is who you really are.
In the lower stages of spiritual growth you may get a glimpse of the fact that you are one with God, but it is mostly an intellectually knowing.
In this stage where you realize that “I’m it” you know it and you live it.
The lives of great spiritual avatars illustrate this stage where the physical experiences of life leave them undeterred. When he was crucified, Jesus had no anger or any of the emotions that would consume most people at a lower level of consciousness.
Instead, he was willed with divine love. His reaction was one of forgiveness and love.
At this higher stage of spiritual development your life is characterized by Divine love. It is beyond the emotion of life that most people know. It is the very essence of life and the closest experience to God you can have as a human being.
There is no separation between you and God and you live your life not from your highest self but as your highest self.
Michael Beckwith: The Four Stages Of Spiritual Growth – Conclusion
These stages of spiritual growth is described as “higher” or “lower” but it is not a contest or some sort of achievement. It is simply stages that we all progress though.
Some progress though them in this lifetime while others need another 2 or three or even 10. Very few people in our lifetime is living at what Michael Beckwith calls the Stage 4 of spiritual growth.
Most people remain stuck in stage one which is everyday human consciousness. Life is a series of events and circumstances and you get swept along by the current. You have no power.
Those who have the epiphany and heed the calling of their higher self will advance to stage 2 where you learn how to manifest and how to be the conscious co-creator of your life and experience.
Many will remain in this stage for most of their life. It may bring “happiness” but it does not bring fulfillment.
To feel fulfilled and that you are actualizing your soul purpose, you need to progress to stage 3 where you surrender to something higher and greater. You allow yourself to be guided and your life takes on a whole new meaning that is in many ways why you came here in the first place.
Those who can live in stage 3 for long enough will eventually reach stage 4 which is the stage I think of as spiritual wisdom.
The question is not so much about where you are on this spiritual journey, but where are you heading?
You may aspire to live at stage 4 but there is a natural progression that we all have to go through.
These 4 stages by Dr. Michael Beckwith offers us a road map and gives us some really great guidance to see ourselves in our own journey towards living a life of complete fulfilment.
