The Seven Powers of Spiritual Evolution

The fourth stage emphasizes the consistent approach, full of aspiration, to an authentic spiritual path. During this stage the human being normally gradually discovers the barriers which impede true knowledge and learns progressively to dissolve these obstacles. The specific methods which are used in this stage vary depending on the chosen path. They can change at a given moment depending on the personal spiritual evolution and according to certain individual conditions. Yet, if the respective human being seeks to reach the ultimate spiritual stage, they must never stop their spiritual practice.

This will thus progressively extend on the entire everyday existence.

This stage lasts and is maintained practically unaltered in the following stages. The sixth stage refers to the attaining of non-duality. A competent spiritual master will help the human being to understand that almost all these phenomena are the same kind of illusion as dreams or usual physical universe. In all these experiences there still exists the real illusion of the separation between the subject and the perceived object, appearing sometimes even the risk of strengthening the perpetuation of this illusion of separation.

Complete dissolution of this phantasm leads progressively to the appearance of a holistic a-conceptual and ineffable experience. The initial stage of dualistic ignorance is passed into the true Divine Knowledge, to that state of impersonal presence in which we astonishingly realize that there no longer exists a certain someone who to know… Love for all human beings becomes the Divine Light and it is revealed to us what as being what it always was in reality, from the beginning without beginning…. The seventh stage marks spiritual liberation.

During the preceding stage the nature of the reality was observed under the form of some profound illuminating lightning, now the presence of God or true Knowledge is finally in place and it will remain constant and can never be lost. The relative-absolute dichotomy is now surpassed. There are no longer concepts and conditionings, but only a Supreme Space - Light, boundless and radiant. In the same time we stunningly discover that oceanic love and all-embracing Knowledge pass this body without being limited by it. We then realize that this was a primordial state which in reality existed in our being always, but it was permanently hidden because of our previous ignorance.

Now we realize that the veil has been completely dissolved. The fifth stage emphasizes emotional stability and profound inner peace. As the obstacles dissolve and are completely eliminated from the path of our consciousness, which here corresponds to the identification and control of the intimate origins of our feelings and destructive emotions, the mental agitation of the thoughts diminishes and a profound and euphoric peace enters into us. Clearly a labor of love and a needed antidote to recent attacks on religion.

The result is a wonderful synthesis of material leading to a compassionate and empowering conclusion about the future of humanity. A must-read for everyone who has considered the intersection between spirituality and the human person. Vaillant defends the love, hope, joy, compassion, awe, forgiveness, and faith that together form our naturally evolved spiritual essence—an essence enlivened by religion at its best, and distorted by religion at its worst. He draws on a lifetime of heralded literary, scientific, spiritual, and medical insight to write the one prescription that can dispel our shadows of confusion and help heal the world.

He is the author of Aging Well and The Natural History of Alcoholism , and his book, Adaptation to Life , is a classic text in the study of adult development. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support?

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In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself.

God, Hitchens writes, is not great. But man, according to George E. In Spiritual Evolution , Dr. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.

For thirty-five years, Dr. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr.

1. Forgetting or losing the connection to essential spiritual self.

Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Read more Read less.

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Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion. Here's how restrictions apply. Harmony; Reprint edition June 9, Language: Start reading Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith on your Kindle in under a minute. Don't have a Kindle? Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. Read reviews that mention positive emotions spiritual evolution adult development study of adult love joy religious and spiritual science and spirituality religion and spirituality vaillant chapter faith human brain scientific harvard personal view field important research.

Showing of 31 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. If you want to read just one good book about spirituality, I highly recommend George Valliant's Spiritual Evolution: A Scientific Defense of Faith. Vaillant is a research psychiatrist which means the book is crammed with neurobiology and directed Harvard's Study of Adult Development for 35 years.

7 Levels of Spirituality – Where Are You?

His conception of spirituality revolves around the eight positive emotions that involve human connection. He argues throughout that prosocial behavior is part and parcel of natural selection, that positive emotions both promote and follow prosocial behavior, and that this process occurs in the limbic and parasympathetic systems and the amygdala rather than in conscious, cognitive thought processes , and that humanity is moving from an evolutionary perspective in the direction of greater spiritual prosocial interaction.

Vaillant would argue that spirituality defies rational, cognitive description.