Brief Overview of Characteristics of the Five Stages of Consciousness

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The Practical Side of Heaven: Chapter Three, Part Four: Brief Overview of Characteristics of the Five Stages of Consciousness

Stage I is the instinctual, virtually pre-rational stage of human consciousness. It is desire for survival, for Life, not rationality, which pulses through our veins and provides the key for understanding this level of consciousness. Life itself marks our entry into Stage I.

The Relationship Between Morality & Rational Development

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The Practical Side of Heaven: Chapter Three, Part One: The Relationship Between Morality & Rational Development

Our psychic processes are made up, to a large extent, of reflection, doubts, experiments, all of which are almost completely foreign to the unconscious, instinctive mind of primitive man. It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the Danaan gift of civilization. It is just man’s turning away from instinct–his opposing himself to instinct–that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature, whereas consciousness can only seek culture or its denial.

Our human development has been commonly analyzed in terms of five stages. At each of these stages, a different human nature emerges. What is “natural” for us at Stage I is not “natural” when we are at Stage III, for example. And the converse is equally true:

The Practical Side of Heaven: Chapter Two, Part Fourteen: The Need for an Additional System of Logic

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Chapter Two, Part Fourteen: The Need for an Additional System of Logic

Those of us who make decisions in companies and industries like those mentioned above think of ourselves as good, “God-fearing” people. But does it really make sense to think that we can love God, if we do not love, or even care about, our neighbors? In his first letter, the apostle John expresses the relationship between loving God and loving our fellow man. “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And this commandment have we from him, That he who loveth God love his brother also.” (I John 4:20-21)

Martin Buber, in The Eclipse of God, describes what happens when we fail to love one another.