Why Seven?

This series has read six maps of the inner path. A castle of seven dwellings, through which the soul passes inward to the King at its centre. Seven valleys, across which a company of birds travels to find that their king is a mirror. Seven stages of knowledge, by which a disillusioned prince wakes from the dream of the world. Seven purifications, carried like a relay of chariots from virtue to the unconditioned. Seven factors of awakening, kept in balance by mindfulness. Seven levels of the soul, rising from life to the contemplation of truth.

This last essay asks three questions. Why seven? What do the maps share? And what do their differences mean: are these six drawings of one country, or of six?

Why seven?§

The first answer is symbolic. Seven was a sacred number in nearly every culture these maps come from. In the Bible, God makes the world in six days and rests on the seventh. The Qurʾān speaks of seven heavens, and the Prophet’s ascent passed through them. The ancients counted seven planets, seven days of the week. The Vedas speak of seven seers and seven rivers. To divide the path into seven was to say that it was complete, ordered, mirrored in the structure of the cosmos.

The Buddhist and Sufi traditions have their own sevens. Buddhist legend says that the newborn Buddha took seven steps, and that after his awakening he spent seven weeks near the tree where it happened, before he began to teach. Later Sufi teachers described the self (nafs) in seven stages, from the self that commands evil, through the self that blames itself and the self at peace, to the self made pure, borrowing their first names from the Qurʾān. The number carried meaning before any map was drawn with it.

The second answer is practical. Seven is a good number for a map. It is large enough to show real development, small enough to hold in mind. Seven stages allow a beginning, a turning point in the middle, and a culmination, with room on either side of the hinge for growth.

But the most interesting answer is that the number is less important than it looks, and the maps themselves say so. Teresa insists that each of her seven dwellings has many rooms. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha says that other teachers count many more stages, and that people stand at halves and quarters of these. Buddhaghosa inherited his seven purifications from the scriptures, and inside them counts nine insight knowledges and four paths. The seven factors of awakening are not stages at all. The number is a frame. What matters is what the frame holds.

The six maps at a glance§

It helps to have the six maps in view together before comparing them.

Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle: the dwellings of self-knowledge; of perseverance in the struggle; of the well-ordered life; of the prayer of quiet, where the supernatural begins; of the prayer of union; of the betrothal, with its raptures and trials; and of the spiritual marriage.

ʿAṭṭār, The Conference of the Birds: the valleys of the quest; of love; of insight into mystery; of detachment; of unity; of bewilderment; and of poverty and annihilation.

The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha: the wish for the good; inquiry; the thinning of the mind; the attainment of reality; non-attachment; the vanishing of objects; and the fourth state, beyond waking, dreaming and sleep.

Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification: the purifications of virtue; of mind; of view; by overcoming doubt; by knowledge of what is and is not the path; by knowledge of the way; and by knowledge and vision.

The Buddha, the factors of awakening: mindfulness; investigation; energy; joy; tranquillity; concentration; and equanimity.

Augustine, The Greatness of the Soul: the soul giving life; sensing; making; striving for virtue; at peace in itself; turning its gaze towards God; and contemplating truth.

Read as lists, they look very different. Read as journeys, as the earlier essays have tried to read them, they begin to rhyme.

Four movements§

Set side by side, the six maps fall into a shape that none of them states but all of them share. It can be described in four movements.

Ordering§

Every map begins by putting the life in order. Teresa’s first three dwellings are self-knowledge, perseverance and the well-ordered life. ʿAṭṭār’s first valley is the quest, in which everything must be given up. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha begins with the wish for the good and with inquiry. Buddhaghosa begins with virtue and the stilling of the mind. Augustine’s fourth level is virtue, the beginning of goodness. Even the seven factors begin with mindfulness, the basic ordering of attention. No map begins with ecstasy. Every one begins with something like conduct.

The hinge§

Every map has a turning point in the middle, where effort gives way to something received. For Teresa it is the fourth dwelling, where the supernatural begins and the basin fills from its own source. For the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha it is the fourth stage, where the real is reached. For Buddhaghosa it is the passage from concentration to insight, where the mind no longer only settles but sees. For Augustine it is the turn from the soul’s work on itself to its gaze towards God. ʿAṭṭār places it at love, where the quest catches fire. The seven factors place it at tranquillity, where the rousing factors give way to the calming ones. The names differ, but the event is recognizably one: the moment the traveller stops being only the one who acts.

Darkness§

Most maps describe a passage through darkness after the hinge. Teresa’s sixth dwelling is full of trials, desolation and the wound of love. ʿAṭṭār’s sixth valley is bewilderment, where the traveller no longer knows whether he exists. Buddhaghosa’s sixth purification passes through terror, danger and disenchantment, the snake in the fish trap. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is quieter about it, but its sixth stage dissolves the world of objects in which the self had lived. Only Augustine’s short map passes over this darkness, though his Confessions does not. The agreement here is remarkable. Traditions that disagree about almost everything agree that, after the first gifts, the way gets harder before it ends.

Union and return§

And every map ends in a peace it declines to describe, and in a return to the world. Teresa’s seventh dwelling is the spiritual marriage, and its fruit is good works. ʿAṭṭār’s birds are lost in the Sīmurgh and, after ages, given back to themselves. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s liberated sage goes back to his duties, steady in pleasure and pain. Buddhaghosa’s path ends in liberation and the arahant who lives on in the world without craving. Augustine’s seventh level is a dwelling place in truth. Even the seven factors end in equanimity, a balance from which right action becomes possible. No map ends in escape.

Three warnings they share§

Beyond the shape, the maps share three warnings, and these may be the most practically useful thing they teach together.

The first is not to mistake beautiful states for the goal. Teresa tests every vision by humility and love. ʿAṭṭār’s hoopoe mocks every bird that would stop at a pleasant place. Buddhaghosa devotes a whole purification to seeing through the ten imperfections of insight, the light and joy and peace that the meditator takes for arrival. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha says that liberation transcends even the knowledge of the stages. Every map says that the most dangerous moment is not the hardest but the most delightful.

The second is not to mistake the map for a ladder. Every map, in its own words, says that people move through it in different ways and at different speeds, and that the stages are a description, not a programme. Teresa says God gives as he wills. ʿAṭṭār says each goes by their own capacity. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha counts quarters of stages. Buddhaghosa allows the way of bare insight. A traveller who measures themselves anxiously against a map has turned it into an obstacle.

The third is that the test of progress is love and freedom, not experience. Teresa’s union of wills is proved by love of neighbour. The Yoga Vāsiṣṭha’s sage is marked by steadiness in pleasure and pain. Buddhaghosa’s paths are measured by the fetters they cut. Augustine’s virtue is a turning of love from lesser goods to the highest. However high the experience, the maps agree, it is worth only what it changes.

No one travels alone§

One more thing the maps share is easy to miss, because it is not one of their stages. Every one of them assumes a guide or a companion.

Teresa wrote for her nuns, under obedience to her confessors, and urged every soul in the castle to seek out learned and experienced counsel, above all in the sixth dwelling, where deception is most likely. ʿAṭṭār’s birds would never have set out without the hoopoe, and the poem is very largely his teaching. Rāma does not wake by himself; the whole Yoga Vāsiṣṭha is Vasiṣṭha’s instruction, and its second stage, inquiry, arises from the company of the wise. Buddhaghosa devotes pages to the choice of a teacher, the good friend who knows the meditator’s temperament and gives the right subject; and the Buddha, asked whether good friendship is half of the holy life, answered that it is the whole of it. Augustine drew his map in conversation with a friend, and his greatest ascent was made side by side with his mother.

This matters for how the maps are read. They were not written to be followed alone from a book. They were written within communities, by people who had guides, for people who would have them. A reader who takes them up today, in a Library like this one, is in a different position, and the maps themselves would counsel finding a teacher, a tradition and companions on the way.

Where they part§

The agreements are real. So are the differences, and it would be a disservice to the traditions to smooth them away.

They differ on what is found at the end. For Teresa it is God, three Persons, met in a marriage in which the soul remains a creature. For ʿAṭṭār it is the Sīmurgh, in whom the birds are lost and found, in language that strains towards identity. For the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha it is the one consciousness, which the seeker always was. For Buddhaghosa it is the unconditioned, of which almost nothing is said, and no self that attains it. For Augustine it is the vision of truth, which is God. These are not the same claim in different words. The question whether the end of the path is communion or identity, two joined or two that were never two, runs through the whole series, and the maps do not settle it.

They differ on what carries the traveller. For Teresa and Augustine, grace: the soul is drawn by a God who loves it first. For Buddhaghosa, training: the path is walked by effort and understanding, and there is no one to give it. ʿAṭṭār and the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha stand between, with a guide who must be followed and a discovery that cannot be forced. These are different accounts of what the traveller can do, and they shape how each map is walked.

And they differ in temper. Teresa writes as a lover, ʿAṭṭār as a poet, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭha as a teacher of a king, Buddhaghosa as a scholar of the mind, Augustine as a philosopher newly baptized. The maps are not only descriptions of a path. They are invitations in a particular voice, and a reader will hear some voices more clearly than others.

One country, or six?§

Readers of this Library will know the debate. In the twentieth century Aldous Huxley, in The Perennial Philosophy, argued that the mystics of every tradition describe the same reality and the same path, under different names. Evelyn Underhill, in Mysticism, drew a single map of the mystic way, in five stages from awakening through purgation, illumination and the dark night to union, and found it in Christian and non-Christian writers alike. William James found common marks in mystical states across traditions. Later scholars objected that there is no experience without interpretation, and that a Carmelite nun and a Theravāda monk, trained in different concepts, do not have the same experience and then describe it differently, but have different experiences.

The six maps in this series give evidence for both sides. The shared shape is striking: ordering, hinge, darkness, union and return, with the same three warnings, found in traditions that had little or no contact with one another. It is hard to believe it is a coincidence. But the differences at the end are just as real, and they are not differences of vocabulary alone.

Our own suggestion, offered as interpretation, is this. The shape the maps share is largely the shape of the traveller: of what happens to a human being who sets out, in any tradition, to order their life, still their mind, see through their illusions and give themselves to what is highest. That shape is human, and it is common. What the maps disagree about is the destination, and there the traditions speak from their own discoveries and their own commitments. To say they are all the same would be to stop listening to them. To say they have nothing in common would be to ignore what they so plainly share.

What to do with a map§

A map is for travelling. Every one of these traditions would say the same: the point of reading about the castle is to enter it, and the point of knowing the seven purifications is to purify. Reading all six maps can be a kind of tourism, interesting and harmless. But the traditions agree that the path is walked one step at a time, in one place, usually with one guide and within one tradition.

That does not make comparison useless. The maps illuminate one another. A Christian reader of Buddhaghosa may understand Teresa’s warnings about visions better; a Buddhist reader of Teresa may see that the hinge of the path can be described as grace. Every map, seen beside the others, looks less like a private language and more like a report from a country others have also visited.

But the maps also warn against collecting maps. The first stage of every one of them is the decision to set out. The thirty birds did not reach the Sīmurgh by comparing the routes of the thousands who stayed at home.