Undifferentiated
Experience.
This represents an awareness of spiritual positives and negatives in normal life without clearly differentiating between them. When we become discontent at this level, we can go up higher or dig deeper. To go higher, we begin to employ the concept of spiritual law to help us choose what is good. This spiritual choice begins the cycle and moves us to the next step.
If spiritual law seems too severe or we are not ready to let go a sense of the mystical, any spiritual efforts at this level will usually exalt a sense of wholeness that includes latent random or capricious discords. Before accepting spiritual law, there are no ground rules to reliably distinguish between good and evil, and that produces mixed results. The practitioner at this level is stuck with revering a sense of causation that includes indifference or hostility to our well being. This level may embrace a primitive sense of wholeness found in nature worship, paganism, astrology, and their kindred. While endeavors in this area may seem to feel "spiritual" to their adherents, they offer no clear connection to unalloyed goodness. The chapter on "Levels of Spiritual Action" has two paragraphs that discuss this early phase of the spiritual cycle. The chapter "What About Evil?" talks about theories on the origin of evil as would be seen here.
Return to complete cycle picture.
Return to web map.