From knowledge to mental liberation, stage 6

From the mineral-man to the spiritual-man – Five stages of identification

It is said that inner progress is a very hard discipline, an elitist path. This is true; otherwise Initiates would crowd roads, temples and markets.
They don’t, therefore, to say it with a metaphor, the ascent of the initiatory mountain is not easy. To progress means to undergo a constant selection that promotes abilities and rejects limits. The stages of growth are made of identifications with several states of conscience and mental conditions.
Five stages of identification
Sphere of physical identity

The mineral-man was identified with the material body that he wasn’t conscious of.

The animal-man is identified with the physical body welcoming its needs and organizing its instincts without the mediation of inhibitory impulses.

The mental-man is identified with his tastes, developing lines of reasoning limited to the personal sphere. He associates with people who are in tune with his egocentrism, and together they create a sum of many egocentrisms. If he loses control of his emotion the latter regress to the stage of animal man and he is guided by impulses.

The psychic-man is the middle way, where the mind joins the conscience, attracted by realities other than individual ones. This involves a double identification: the first with the contents of the personality which has now been overcome, the second with the presence of subtle thoughts, to which he reacts by multiplying the efforts to widen his perceptions.
Sphere of the subtle identity
The psychic-man breaks the boundaries of what he thought to be his identity; he lets himself being dragged by the abstract conscience, which he perceives but doesn’t understand. This opening towards the ‘non-finite’ makes the subtle thoughts, which he is starting to use, tangible. It is the stage of creative inspirations, which guide him into a mental dimension where physical senses are powerless. At the same time the subtle senses widen, increasing the activity of the physical identity.
The contact with the contents of the subtle dimension becomes usual and his consciousness dims the contact with heavy aspects of the physical dimension. This is the moment of detachment from the material aspect and the conscience starts transcending it.
This turns man into an ideal ‘pontonier’ between the physical and metaphysical sphere. He can become a guide, namely ‘a ferryman of wayfarers, whom he carries from one side to the other’.
The spiritual-man is conscious of every adjacent level but he is not identified with any of them. In actual fact his soul identifies with him, using his mind to reveal itself. If the psychic man is ‘inside the light’, the spiritual man is the light itself. He is not enlightened any more, but a man who enlightens. He is a Master.
The spiritual-man can separate from the matter or he can become Servant of the Humankind, following a project that is not of man but for Man.
In the previous stage he had already lost the concomitance with the idea of death because the latter concerns the body and the physical personality, not the subtle conscience. The spiritual man is by now linked to a project without breaks or boundaries; he doesn’t know anything but life, its flow and its changing into cyclic and transitory phenomena.
Here the evolutional plane of the soul ends and that of the spirit starts.

by Athos A. Altomonte