The Seven Stages of Knowledge

Teresa’s map begins with prayer, ʿAṭṭār’s with longing. The map in this essay begins with something more ordinary and more modern: disillusion. A young man comes home from a journey and finds he can no longer care about anything. Wealth, youth, pleasure, power, the body itself, all seem to him hollow and passing. He stops eating. He sits silent. His father, the king, is alarmed, and the court sends for a sage.

The young man is Rāma, the prince who is the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa. The sage is Vasiṣṭha, the royal teacher. And the long conversation between them, which in its full form is one of the largest works of Indian philosophy, is the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha. Its teaching is that the world which Rāma despairs of is the projection of the mind, as a dream is the projection of the dreamer, and that liberation is to wake up. On the way it gives one of the clearest maps of the path in any tradition: seven grounds of ignorance and seven stages of knowledge.

A world made of mind§

To understand the stages, one has to understand what they lead out of. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha teaches that there is only one reality, pure consciousness, and that the world we experience is that consciousness imagining. The mind projects a world, as a dreamer projects a dream; it then believes in what it has projected, and suffers within it. The book makes this point less by argument than by story. Its pages are full of tales in which a person lives a whole life, with marriage, children, old age and grief, in what turns out to be a single moment of another person’s reverie, and wakes to find that no time has passed.

One of these stories is mentioned in the chapters on the stages, in passing, as if the reader knows it already: the dreaming of Lavaṇa, a king who under a magician’s spell lives for years as an outcaste in a moment of court time.¹1 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 117.19, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Dreaming in sleep is of many kinds, as known to one on his waking, who doubts their truth owing to their short-lived duration (as it was in the dreaming of Lavana).” Read in context The point of such stories is not that the world is unreal in the sense of being nothing. It is that the world has the reality of a dream: vivid, coherent, binding while it lasts, and not what it seems.

From this follows the book’s definition of knowledge and ignorance, given at the start of the chapters on the stages. In the shortest form, Vasiṣṭha says, knowledge and liberation are to remain in one’s own true nature (svarūpa); ignorance is to fall away from it into the sense of being a separate ego.²2 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 117.5, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Know this as the shortest lesson, that I will give thee of the definitions of true knowledge and ignorance; that, it is the remaining in one’s own true nature (swarúpa or suiform state), that constitutes his highest knowledge and liberation; and his divergence from it to the knowledge of his ego (egoism—ahanta), is the cause of his ignorance, and leads …” Read in context The rest of the teaching unpacks that sentence.

Seven grounds of ignorance§

Rāma asks his teacher what the stages of yoga are, and Vasiṣṭha surprises him by beginning with their opposite. There are, he says, seven grounds of ignorance as well as seven of knowledge, and they mix with one another in countless ways.³3 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 117.2, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Vasishtha replied:—They consist of the seven states of ignorance (ajnána-bhúmi), and as many of knowledge also; and these again diverge into many others, by their mutual intermixture. (Participating the natures of one another, and forming the mixed modes of states of truth and error).” Read in context To see the way out, one must first see the way in.

The seven grounds of ignorance are, strikingly, kinds of waking and dreaming. There are three kinds of waking: the seed-waking, the first stirring of the sense of a separate self in pure consciousness; ordinary waking, in which that self thinks “this is I” and “this is mine”; and the great waking, in which it is firmly convinced of who it is and what it owns. Then there are four kinds of dreaming: the waking dream, in which we take what is not real for real, like water in a mirage or castles built in the air; the dream of sleep; the dream remembered and trusted on waking; and deep sleep, a dark, inert state in which the impressions of past action lie waiting.⁴4 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 117.11, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “But this state of the pure and self-intelligent soul, is obscured by the various states of ignorance, whose grounds you will now hear me relate unto you. These are the three states of wakefulness or jágrat, known as the embryonic waking (or vijajágrat), the ordinary waking, and the intense waking called the mahajágrat. (i.e. the hypnotism or hybernation of the …” Read in context

The order is the reverse of what we might expect. We think of waking as clarity and sleep as obscurity. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha thinks of the great waking, the confident life of a person who knows exactly who they are and what they have earned, as one of the deepest forms of ignorance. Waking, it says, is only a long-continued dream.⁵5 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 117.26, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “A long continued waking dream is accounted as the waking state—jágrat, and it becomes diversified according to the diversity of its objects. (i.e. Waking is but a continued dreaming).” Read in context What we call being awake is the dream we have not yet woken from. The path is not from sleep to waking, but from this kind of waking to another.

Seven stages of knowledge§

The next chapter gives the seven stages of knowledge, and it begins with a disclaimer. Other teachers, Vasiṣṭha says, count many more stages of yoga, but these seven are enough for the highest good.⁶6 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.2, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Disputants are apt to hold out many more stages of Yoga meditation; but in my opinion these (septuple stages) are sufficient for the attainment of the chief good on ultimate liberation. (The disputants are the Patánjala Yoga philosophers, who maintain various modes of discipline, for attaining to particular perfections of consummation—Siddhi; but the main object of this Sástra is the …” Read in context He names them: the wish for the good (śubhecchā); inquiry (vicāraṇā); the thinning of the mind (tanumānasā); the attainment of reality (sattvāpatti); non-attachment (asaṃsakti); the non-perception of objects (padārthābhāvanā); and the fourth state (turyagā), beyond waking, dreaming and sleep.⁷7 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.5, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The grounds of knowledge comprise the desire of becoming good—subhechhá, and this good will is the first step. Then comes discretion or reasoning (vicháraná) the second, followed by purity of mind (tanu-manasa), which is the third grade to the gaining of knowledge.” Read in context Mitra’s translation gives the Sanskrit names with his English glosses, some of them unusual.

The first stage: the wish for the good§

The first stage is the most ordinary, and perhaps the most important. It is the wish for the good, arising from dispassion towards worldly things, and it takes the form of a thought: why am I sitting here, idle? I should study the scriptures, in the company of the wise.⁸8 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.8, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “First of all is the desire of goodness, springing from dispassionateness to worldly matters, and consisting in the thought, “why do I sit idle, I must know the Sástras in the company of good men.”” Read in context This is Rāma’s condition at the start of the book. The disillusion that seemed like illness is in fact the first ground of knowledge. The path begins not in ecstasy but in dissatisfaction honestly faced, which turns into a desire for something better.

The second stage: inquiry§

The second is inquiry (vicāra), which grows from keeping company with the wise, studying the scriptures, and steadily turning away from worldliness, and which shows itself in good conduct.⁹9 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.9, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The second is discretion, which arises from association with wise and good men, study of the Sástras, habitual aversion to worldliness, and consists in an inclination to good conduct, and the doing of all sorts of good acts.” Read in context Inquiry is a central word in the whole Yoga Vāsiṣṭha. It means asking, persistently and honestly, what is real: who am I, what is this world, where does suffering come from. Much later, Ramana Maharshi would make self-inquiry the whole of his teaching. Here it is the second step, and it is joined to conduct: the questions are not idle, and they change how one lives.

The third stage: the thinning of the mind§

The third is the thinning of the mind (tanumānasā): the mind, made subtle by the wish for the good and by inquiry, ceases to run after the objects of the senses.¹⁰10 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.10, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The third is the subduing of the mind, and restraining it from sensual enjoyments; and these are produced by the two former qualities of good will and discretion.” Read in context The Sanskrit image is of something becoming thin or slender. The mind is not destroyed or forced into silence; it is worn fine, as attachment loosens and inquiry takes away its false objects. This is the stage that other traditions would call concentration or recollection: the scattered mind gathers itself.

The fourth stage: reaching what is real§

The fourth is sattvāpatti, the attainment of reality or of pure being. Mitra renders it as self-reliance, resting in the divine spirit as the true refuge of the soul.¹¹11 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.11, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The fourth is self-reliance, and dependence upon the Divine spirit as the true refuge of this soul. This is attainable by means of the three qualities described above.” Read in context It is the turning point of this map, as the fourth dwelling is of Teresa’s. Through the first three stages the seeker has worked; now, the commentators say, the truth of the Self is directly known, and the seeker rests in it. Later Advaita writers, using these stages, count the fourth as the point at which knowledge dawns, and the remaining three as the deepening of a liberation already begun.

The fifth stage: non-attachment§

The fifth is asaṃsakti, non-attachment: freedom from involvement in worldly things and in the society of others, arising from the inward delight of the fourth stage.¹²12 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.12, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The fifth is worldly apathy, as it is shown by one’s detachment from all earthly concerns and society of men, by means of the former quadruple internal delight (which comes from above).” Read in context It is not that the person in this stage has renounced the world by effort. It is that the world no longer holds them. The joy that has come from within is greater than anything outside, and the bonds of desire fall away of themselves.

The sixth stage: the vanishing of objects§

The sixth is padārthābhāvanā, literally the non-perception of things: the mind no longer imagines objects, inner or outer, as separate realities.¹³13 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.14, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Then comes the powers of cogitation into the abstract meanings of things, as the sixth step to the attainment of true knowledge. It is fostered either by one’s own exertion, or guidance of others in search of truth.” Read in context Mitra calls it abstraction. In the terms of the book’s teaching, it is the stage at which the dream of a world of separate things has thinned so far that it no longer appears as solid. Things are still seen, but they are seen as appearances in consciousness, not as objects standing apart from it.

The seventh stage: the fourth state§

The seventh is turyagā, “gone to the fourth”. The fourth (turīya) is the old Upaniṣadic name for the state beyond the three of waking, dreaming and dreamless sleep: not a fourth state alongside them, but the awareness in which all three come and go. In this stage, Vasiṣṭha says, through long practice of the six before it, the seeker no longer perceives difference at all, and sees all things as the one.¹⁴14 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.15, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Continued habitude of these six qualifications and incognition of differences in religion, and the reducing of them all to the knowledge of one true God of nature, is called generalization. (Because all things in general, proceed from the one and are finally reduced in to the same).” Read in context This, he says, is the condition of one liberated while living; and beyond it is the state of the one who has left the body.¹⁵15 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.16, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “This universal generalization appertains to the nature of the living liberation of the man, who beholds all things in one and in the same light. Above this is the state of that glorious light, which is arrived by the disembodied soul.” Read in context

Liberated while living§

The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is above all a book about jīvanmukti, liberation in life, and its description of the person who has reached the seventh stage is one of its most important teachings. Such a person, Vasiṣṭha says, is not plunged in pleasure or in sorrow, but remains steady in both; they are free to do the duties of their station in society or to leave them aside.¹⁶16 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.18, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “The living liberated are not plunged in the waters of pleasure and sorrow, but remain sedate and unmoved in both states; they are at liberty either to do or slight to discharge the duties of their conditions and positions in society.” Read in context Roused from deep meditation, they go about their worldly tasks like someone who has woken from sleep. Absorbed in an inward joy, they take no delight in the delights of the world, as a person in deep sleep feels nothing of what goes on around them.

This is the book’s answer to Rāma’s despair. He was right that the world, taken as the self takes it, is empty. He was wrong to think that the remedy is to give it up. The liberated one lives in the world, and may rule a kingdom, as Rāma will; what has changed is not the world but the one who sees it. Like the Bhagavad Gītā, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha ends by sending its hero back to his duties, free.

Halves and quarters§

One more feature of the map deserves attention, because it is so unlike a ladder. Vasiṣṭha says that people stand in these stages in every possible way. Some have passed through all seven; some two or three; some have reached the seventh at once, as the sages Sanaka and Nārada did from birth.¹⁷17 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.25, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Some have passed all these stages, and others over two or three of them; some have passed the six grades, while a few have attained to their seventh state all at once (as the sages Sanaka, Nárada and other holy saints have done from their very birth).” Read in context Others have advanced only a quarter, or a half, or three quarters of a stage; some four and a half, some six and a half.¹⁸18 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.27, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “There are some that have advanced only a quarter or half or three fourths of a stage. Some have passed over four quarters and a half, and some six and a half.” Read in context

It is an almost comic precision, and it makes a serious point. The stages are not a single file in which everyone advances one step at a time. They are a description of the territory, and people are found all over it, at every point, by many routes. Teresa said the same of her castle, and ʿAṭṭār of his valleys: God gives as he wills; each traveller goes by their own road.

And the map itself is not the destination. Knowledge, Vasiṣṭha says, consists in knowing these seven stages; but liberation, which is the object of knowledge, goes beyond them.¹⁹19 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.3, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Knowledge is understanding, which consists in knowing these seven stages only; but liberation—mukti, which is the object of knowledge (jnána), transcends the acquaintance of these septuple stages.” Read in context Liberation is not an eighth stage to be reached by more effort. It is placed at the end of the seven, and comes without difficulty after them.²⁰20 Vālmīki (traditional), The Yoga-Vasishtha Maharamayana, chapter 118.7, translated by Vihari-Lala Mitra: “Liberation is placed at the end of these, and is attained without difficulty after them. Attend now to the definitions of these steps as I shall explain them unto you.” Read in context

What this map teaches§

Set beside the first two maps, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha shows something new. Teresa and ʿAṭṭār describe a journey towards a Beloved: a King at the centre of the castle, a Sīmurgh beyond the mountain. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha describes a waking up. There is no one to travel to, because there is nothing other than the one consciousness; there is only a dream to see through. Its seven stages are not stages of approach but stages of clarification, in which the false thins and the real is recognized.

Yet the shape of the three maps is strikingly alike. Each begins with a turning away from the world as it is ordinarily lived: Teresa’s soul in the outer courts, ʿAṭṭār’s birds making their excuses, Rāma in his despair. Each has a hinge in the middle, where effort gives way to something received: Teresa’s fourth dwelling, ʿAṭṭār’s valleys after love, the fourth stage here. Each ends beyond the self as it began, and each returns its traveller to the world. And all three insist that the map is not a ladder: people stand all over it, and the one who gives the map is not its owner.

There is also a real difference, which the series will come back to. For Teresa the soul and God remain two, joined in marriage. For ʿAṭṭār the birds and the Sīmurgh are, in the end, hard to tell apart. For the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha the seeker and the sought were never two; the separation was the dream. Whether these are three descriptions of one discovery, or three different discoveries, is the question of the last essay.

The next essay turns to Buddhism, and to the most systematic of all these maps: the seven purifications of Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification, where the path is described not as a journey or an awakening but as a training, as precise as a craft.