Storgic Love

As a biological psycho-physiological being, man is created and structured in a way that can be described in a cohesive doctrine. However, as a spiritual being leading a spiritual life, man is not only incomplete but has not even reached the stage of maturity. Man does not lead the spiritual life of which he is capable. And thus it is impossible to create a doctrine of the inner life of man by examining man as we know him.

Spiritual life differs from inner life in that it is prescribed ahead of time. Spiritual life is, first and foremost, growth, and thus the doctrine of spiritual life is always a doctrine of the future with regard to the present and a doctrine of the transfiguration of spiritual life. It cannot be otherwise.

Human life creates something that it did not contain before. Man is made and lives for work that he must perform in accordance with God’s Plan and grows towards what is prescribed for him. All the transfigurations of man, in our opinion, target not man himself and his well-being but the attainment of a new stage in the implementation of the Plan for him.

People tend to consider that the spiritual life boils down to the collectivespiritual life – collective, collegial and confessional life. They put their souls into it, serve it for millennia, and put their lives down for its tenets. They strive to develop only it, they are inspired by it, and they place their hopes on it. People believe that their own spiritual life is not a separate life but a specific life that differs from others yet is nevertheless part of the collective spiritual life. However, the latter, in our opinion, is life on only one of three sides of the inner world of man. In addition to living a spiritual life in the collective inner world, man has a spiritual life on the other side of his inner world –his private or personal spiritual life. Spiritual life on the third side –the side of the Encounter – is storgic spiritual life that arises in the love between a man and a woman. All three sides and lives have equal merit. None of them is more (or less) important and full-fledged than the others.

Collectivespiritual life has been developing for millennia and transforming for centuries. In contrast, the transfiguration of personal spiritual life takes place within a human lifetime during a historical period.

In the days of Seth and Enos, people lived exclusively personal inner and personal spiritual lives yet could not manage the inner freedom that came with such a lifestyle and defiled themselves and the Earth as a result. God had to send the Flood and bring man into the mode of unified collectivehuman soul. When people tried to build the Tower of Babylon “whose top may reach unto heaven,” God saw what “the sons of men had built” and that “nothingwhich they purpose to do will be impossiblefor them” (Gen. 11:6). He decided to divide the collectivehuman soul into a myriad of collective souls of different nations. From this time on, man has lived on two sides: collective inner and collective spiritual life, in which he lives together with others, and personal inner and personal spiritual life, which take place not in a community of souls but in a singular separate soul with its own forces and potentials.

Collectivespiritual life predominates in man. Personal spiritual life is not separated from collective spiritual life, is not set apart in people’s minds and is not accepted by people as independent spiritual life. People tend to approach their personal spiritual life exclusively from the standpoint of collective spiritual life and for its merit. It is as if the experience of personal spiritual life were valuable only when one could use it for the purposes of collectivespiritual life. Yet this is not so.

One should distinguish between personal spirituality and the spirituality of a spiritually united nation. The latter is accessible to all (to a greater or lesser extent) and appeals to every soul, which must simply integrate itself into the collectivesoul (something people willingly help each other to do). In contrast, it is impossible to teach someone to live his or her personal spiritual life. Personal spiritual life is elitist. Not everyone is capable of leading it. One can only help someone who is capable of leading it and wants to do so.

In the reservoir of collective spirituality, everything is ready for the life of everyone. A person must simply draw from thisreservoir to attain something that has been attained before him and will continue to be attained afterwards. Here everything depends on the capabilities of a given soul, its hard work, and the conditions accorded to it. Something is “born” in the soul as a result of its determined efforts. It is born (rather than simply being found), because it had not existed before and because it cannot be simply produced through a person’s efforts. The personally spiritual person must always be ready and stay in a working and “childbearing” state without knowing what will come of it.

Spiritual growth is neither the improvement of already existing qualities nor the perfection of the properties and abilities given to a soul nor the acquisition of new and additional qualities and talents. The main criterion and the main achievement of spiritual growth is the “augmentation of life,” the greater fullness of life, and a higher vitality and rationality than before.

Spiritual growth is one of the key fundamental motives of human life. The aim of personal spiritual life is to accelerate spiritual growth. The aim of collective spiritual life is to create, consolidate, and preserve what has been created before (no matter what level of creation was attained) and to stabilize it.

The collective soul develops in the historical perspective, carefully weighing its every step and recognizing its responsibility for changes. Personal spiritual life lacks foundations, centuries-old traditions, and the definiteness and authoritativeness that make collectivespiritual life so stable. The efforts of personal life tend to be unexpected, unpredictable and unfounded.

In the act of personal spiritual growth, a person becomes higher and deeper than he was before, finding (by himself) hereto unknown deep layers of life and reason. Such a leap to a higher level of spirituality, spiritual fullness and freedom leads to the transfiguration (and thus abolishment) of immobile and long-established inner life.

Inner peace is one of the main values of collectivespiritual life. Collective spiritual life strives for peace and considers peace of mind to be a blessing. For personal spiritual life, inner peace is at best respite and rest in the midst of growth pains rather than a goal, a blessing or a sign of the latter. Personal spiritual life needs struggle –struggle not with reality or for improving reality or, in general, in the domain where “reality” lies. This struggle takes place in the Kingdom of God that is “within us”.

Collectivespiritual life is largely directed towards the past, where the sources of tradition are found, and towards the future, where one’s hopes lie. Personal spiritual life arises exclusively at the present moment. The past concerns it only as a trace found in the present, and the future has no meaning, because the future does not give it the direction of motion. Personal spiritual life is inspired by the present rather than the future. It is directed into the present where the path-defining feeling of one’s predetermination and perfect expression calls it at the present instant.

In collectivespiritual life ideal states are attainable in principle (or even always) either through the extraordinary efforts of man or by divine grace. In contrast, personal spiritual life strives for an a priori unattainable Ideal that acts as the driving force of spiritual growth.

Personal spiritual life moves not from original to likeness or from likeness to likeness but towards what has never existed and will never exist but exists now in the feeling of envisaging oneself as one should be.

Life in the collective inner stream tends to go by feelings that are common to all and shuns doubt, ignorance and searching. The collectivesoul is a soul that is necessarily firm and firmly believing. Questioning is not intrinsic to collectivespiritual life and is even frowned upon.

In contrast, doubts, searching, mental anguish, and even indecisiveness and timidity are natural to personal spiritual life and make up its inner vitality. Questioning is one of the foundations of personal spiritual life. Questioning means taking an interest in life. It is the beginning of spiritual growth. A person who leads a personal spiritual life always leads a questioning life. Independence, self-reliance, and the striving to know oneself are the generic traits of personal spiritual life. Their dignity testifies to the dignity of the latter. In collectiveinner life, the dignity of each person is measured in comparison to other people.

The dignity of a person in personal spiritual life cannot be compared to others but lies in what he is with regard to his own self and to what he could have become: is he lower, equal or (very rarely) higher than himself?

Collectivespiritual life is made beautiful by self-sacrifice that is usually connected with feats or the ecstatic striving for them. The supreme act of personal spiritual life is self-renunciation yet not selfdenial, asceticism, the sacrifice of oneself or one’s own, the death of what you renounce or even the diminishment of strength. For self-renunciation in personal spiritual life, you do not have to mortify anything in yourself. In contrast to self-sacrifice, it is the result not of determined efforts but of long and intense spiritual growth.

The collective spiritual person feels himself responsible, above all, to Someone or someone above himself. The personal spiritual person recognizes, above all, his responsibility to himself, to someone in himself.

Personal spiritual life mostly manifests itself in struggle and surmounting. You can never attain a higher point of yourself just like that, without effort.

Personal spiritual life grows by overcoming “obstacles” that life places in large quantities in one’s way. For collectivespiritual life, it would better if there were no obstacles at all. The main ability in collective spiritual life is not to allow temptation to arise, not to let it enter you, and to shut the door of the soul before it.

Collectivespiritual life always strives to organize the life of person in a way that would serve its own interests. Personal spiritual life takes place in an existential field that is not organized in any special way. Personal spiritual life uses the sorrows of a life full of suffering and misfortune for self-revival and spiritual growth.

All obstacles, obstructions, barriers, traps and even calamities to be overcome are necessary for a person leading a personal spiritual life. His work draws on suffering that the collective spiritual person considers to be an evil.

In collectivespiritual life, the escape into other worlds or into a meta-human state of consciousness or life is considered to be the supreme achievement of an adept and is used as an attractive force and as evidence of the truth of a religious doctrine.

Personal spiritual life prohibits one from abandoning his post and going beyond the boundaries of human life. Otherwise, the obstacles necessary for spiritual growth would be eliminated, and personal spiritual life would lose its meaning.

Monotheistic religions teach that everything takes place according to God’s will and for the sake of man and his prosperity, bliss and salvation. From the personal spiritual standpoint, man is not God’s beloved child but God’s worker, His work and His instrument that strives not for his own prosperity but for the implementation of God’s supreme will.

It is important for a person to recognize the contradiction between personal and collective spiritual life in order to get his bearings in his inner life and understand the Sources of both.

Collectivespiritual religious feelings are inculcated and developed by Faith. Collective spiritual life is based on devotion and steadfastness that are inculcated by faith/fidelity. Religious doctrine is the stance of the CollectiveSoul on the main issues of life. From the standpoint of the collective soul, truth is what is declared to be such by religious doctrine or, at least, objectively proven.

In collectivespiritual life, the most important thing is not truth but fidelity –fidelity to Faith, collective spiritual tenets and the key elements of the worldview. Faith, no matter what it is, is always true insofar as it rejects the question of truth and falsehood and cannot be anything else other than true.

The concept of collective spiritual Faith has nothing to do with the concept of veracity in the personal spiritual sense and vice-versa.

In personal spiritual life, the question of fidelity to faith does not arise. The main question is the genuineness or non-genuineness of spiritual life and of spiritual hypocrisy or sincerity. An insincere person is not capable of personal spiritual life, just as a non-believer is incapable of collectivespiritual life.

Personal spiritual reason has its own revelations. Although they may be unoriginal in the history of human wisdom, they are new to a person. These revelations –the revelations of one’s own wisdom– arise from the heart’s ability to empathize, penetrate and fathom (first and foremost, with regard to one’s own inner life and the paths of its transformations).

A person who searches for truth with the help of his own wisdom does not grope in the dark. The person who relies on his own wisdom has a sense of truth and of the direction that leads to truth.

One’s own wisdom is particularly sensitive to all that true, important or unimportant, i.e., it has an intuition for deep thought. This is an essential condition for the functioning of one’s own wisdom.

One’s own wisdom always involves listening –either to one’s own soul or to another soul or to living souls in general (but not to things). One’s own wisdom only fathoms the animate and can act only where it senses a living soul. One’s own wisdom can fathom the soul of another person or of a dog, horse or even cockroach – but not the Universe and its laws. It does not see anything in the material world – it cannot and does not want to see it. The sphere of the inanimate is inaccessible to one’s own wisdom.

The vision of one’s own wisdom is a holistic form of perception of a living soul. One’s own wisdom deals not with parts but exclusively with the whole. One could say that it is incapable of dividing anything into parts. This does not mean that it immediately grasps something fully. Perceiving the holistic picture of spiritual life, one’s own wisdom interprets the self-explications of reason in a new way each time, hears them differently and produces new holistic pictures. No two interpretations are ever alike. However, they all bear the mark of the personal spirituality of their author.

Personal spiritual reason always seemsto perceive something: one thing today,and another tomorrow. The question of the empirical utility of one’s own wisdom is never posed. One’s own wisdom cannot be checked with the help of logic, either. It is extra-logical. The more sincerely a person expresses the work of his own reason, the more likely he is to make contradictory assertions. He who does not contradict himself is either untruthful in his thought or has not begun to think.

The extra-logical nature of one’s own wisdom is an undoubted blessing. It cannot be used by man for building machines. It is impossible to employ it in a utilitarian fashion. It is not suitable for that.

One cannot perpetrate evil in the world with one’s own wisdom, nor can it be used to evil ends.

Wisdom thinks in a living manner. As everything that is spiritually alive, it can grow freely, on its own, becoming increasingly perceptive and acquiring an ever greater maturity and depth.

One’s own wisdom does not need any proofs of truth: it recognizes truth and falsehood, distinguishes between what is important and what is not, and, most importantly, finds “its own truth,” whose veracity is shown by one’s own intuition for profound thought. One’s own wisdom is an instrument that the soul uses to recognize its own truth. One’s own truth is the personal reasonableness and wisdom of one’s heart.

A person finds his own truth not through proof, trust or a general conviction in its validity, as is the case for collective spiritual truth, but through its personal consistency, veracity and inner cogency.

“One’s own truth” is not something that has been objectively proven or scientifically accepted but the veracious solution of the basic questions of human life as such: its goals, meaning, posthumous fate, and values. One’s own truth gives personal answers to an individual person’s questions about life and death.

A person usually tries to gain an understanding for the purposes of his life: it is easier to live the latter when one understands it. One understands in order to live. Things are opposite in personal spiritual life: one lives to understand ever deeper, to increase the plenitude of wisdom within himself ever more, to fathom his own truth ever deeper, and to grow in spirit.

One’s own truth is the truth of one’s heart and especially one’s heartfelt attitude towards human life. A person can only divine his truth – not with his brain or intellect but with his wisdom.

The right idea, i.e., one’s own truth, is always the correctly divined idea.

The work of divining the way to truth is almost always automatic. One’s own wisdom keeps roaming, i.e., searching, supposing, penetrating, digressing and searching once again. However, as soon as it detects even the faintest sign of veracity, it immediately stops roaming. During this pause, one’s own wisdom behaves as it were following a scent in the anticipation of spiritual pleasure .

When a person is faced by the necessity of solving existential problems, he tries to grasp the totality of the situation in which he finds himself, takes a panoramic look at it, and asks, “What should I do? Where is the truth? What and whom can I trust? What is more (or less) important, valuable and necessary? What is the principal thing? What comes first and what second? What is good and what evil?

How should I live? What should be the general order of thought? What should I think about first and what next?” To all these questions a person, first and foremost, seeks ready answers within himself. One’s own wisdom is constantly in the process of recognizing, knowing and understanding from within itself –something similar to remembering what you already know. You recognize what you know with the help of your own wisdom through inner listening. The joy obtained from a discovery made by your own wisdom and from its very work is always the joy of recovering something that had been “lost” in the soul, as if something were resurrected in it, as if it were revived. I think,and therefore I revive. Anyone who has experienced this overwhelming joy at least once in his life has no doubt noticed that, no matter what was revealed to him at that moment, he felt love for everything and everyone. To recognize someone (yourself or the other in yourself), you need a particular inner sensitivity that stems from love. Not only action but also the transfer of wisdom is difficult or even impossible without love. And we should thank God for that!

Collectivespirituality inculcates a sense of duty and moral responsibility. Ethical tenets are rules established by the CollectiveSoul on its own territory. The moral sense is unfree,as it is based on what is accepted as an ethical norm by the CollectiveSoul at a given moment, what is declared praiseworthy or reprehensible, good or evil. Ethical tenets and morality are designed to restrain egoistic (i.e., antisocial) desires and intentions.

In contrast to collective spiritual life, personal spiritual life sets down no definite rules or commandments that must be followed. Everything depends on the level of a person’s moral spiritual sense at a given moment. This sense sets down a personal commandment within the person that is only binding at a given stage of his life.

The principle of non-action is good insofar as it makes action depend on the level of the spiritual sense that corresponds to the sensitivity of the moral sense and the moral will.

“An eye for an eye” is the principle of just retribution on which the morals of human society, including legal society, are based. The fifth commandment of the Sermon on the Mount that one should not employ violence to resist evil is usually considered to be an unattainable ideal of the moral law and a continuation of the law of just retribution raised to its highest level –to the ethical apex. Nevertheless, it is not moral idealism but the proclamation of a free moral sense that starts from the ethical law as such. The fifth commandment opposes moral freedom (the ideal of non-violence) to social commandments of the highest level (the ideal of justice).

In its elementary form, the free moral sense is known to morally sensitive people that detect and expose unobvious immorality when they react with inner anguish to a villainous or morally base act that is nevertheless not overtly prohibited ethically and that most people would consider to be morally acceptable (recall the hero of Tolstoy’s Resurrection) or a trifle not deserving moral indignation.

Moral precepts are based on social ethical considerations that one should not harm society or other individuals. “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want others to do unto you”.

The moral sense of personal spiritual life derives from the moral intuition of a soul and is directly based on the freedom of the personal moral sense: “Don’t do anything that would not correspond to your free moral sense, i.e., to your conscience –your conscience and not the conscience of another person or of everybody”.

The richness, fullness and dignity of the free moral sense (a person’s own conscience in his personal spiritual life) exclusively depend on the level of a soul’s moral spiritual consciousness. The personal conscience cares little for what ethical norms approve or disapprove.

The ethical consciousness is fluid and amenable. It can be tricked. In contrast, the free moral sense that is based on moral intuition cannot be tricked.

Personal spiritual life is illuminated by the free moral sense and moral intuition that expresses the active freedom of the soul rather than its ethical accountability. The free moral sense is never rigorous, as it is based not on immutable norms (as the collective spiritual moral consciousness) but on Sincerity and the Ideal. From this standpoint, too, Sincerity is an essential condition for full-fledged personal spiritual life. In the latter, Sincerity is an effective force that is just as powerful as reason. Honesty and sincerity are spontaneously suffused by the spirit during personal spiritual growth.

It would be wrong to say that the sense of one’s own truth and one’s own conscience is known to all or even to many. Indeed, one could hardly say that they are accessible to all or many. One’s own truth and one’s own conscience are the domain of a rare few that have a spiritual sense of truth and a moral spiritual sense.

One’s own truth is not a truth that has been proven or accepted according to a centuries-old tradition or by religious or scientific consent. Generally speaking, it is not an assertion but the revelation of a certain level of manifestation of the spiritual sense of the truthfulness of the soul of a given person. One’s own truth is procured by the intuition of profound thought and accepted on account of its veracity for the spiritual sense of truthfulness. One’s own truth is not knowledge but an element of the personal spiritual sense of truthfulness that corresponds to the level of manifestation of the spiritual sense of truthfulness in a person’s soul.

In the same way, one’s own conscience is the revelation of the soul’s free moral spiritual sense.

Illuminated by the rays of the spiritual sense of truthfulness and of the free moral spiritual sense,people leading a personal spiritual life tend to be guardians of their conscience or truth. Whe re do these rays come from?

The rays of the spiritual sense of truthfulness and of the free moral spiritual sense enter a person’s soul not from an impersonal or super-personal entity or from a collective Source but from a personal source. They act only in this person (and only through him) and in no other.

The beams of the spiritual sense of truthfulness and the moral spiritual sense do not illuminate the inner world of man as such but only of a person that is familiar with their closest source. Leo Tolstoy called it the “closest spiritual sun” or “one’s God”. We shall call it the personal seraph.

One’s own truth and one’s own conscience is not given to a person genetically, astrologically or in any other way. A person’s innate or acquired abilities may well cause a seraph to take interest in him, yet nobody and nothing can ever take the decision for the seraph or make a person’s personal spiritual life function.

One cannot appropriate what emanates from a seraph or acquire it by force or hard work. One can only manifest it in himself after receiving it from his own seraph.

A seraph participates in the vital movements of a person that leads a joint life with him and absorbs the seraph into himself to augment his fullness of life. A person can increasingly grasp his truth with his wisdom, because he bears his seraph. He who does not bear a seraph within him is incapable of this.

Every person with a personal spiritual life has a seraph of his own. The personally spiritual person and his seraph exist in a single system of life and living. The personally spiritual person is sent into worldly life by his seraph, and the same seraph accepts him back in a certain sense.

One can call the personal spiritual life of a person his seraphic life.

In contrast to the “foreign” truth that people usually go by, one’s own truth is the truth of seraphic life. Only a person who has his own truth can have ideas of his own.

In contrast to the “foreign” conscience that people usually assume, one’s own conscience is the conscience ofseraphic life.

The fuller and more vividly the spiritual sense of truthfulness of the seraph and his moral spiritual sense are manifested, the more vivid and powerful one’s own conscience and truth become. Moreover, one’s own truth and conscience are the sense/feeling of the seraph manifested in a person. The seraph senses himself in a person, and the person senses his seraph in his own truth and conscience, i.e., in his seraphic life.

To say that the spiritual sense of truthfulness enters a soul is the same as to say that the seraph enters and becomes me, and I become him.

One’s own truth and one’s own conscience become manifest in a person (and, in this sense, become his) when the seraph enters him.

The seraph feels and is aware of himself in a person as the latter’s own truth (procured by his own wisdom) and own conscience (procured by his free moral sense). When we speak about a person’s own truth and own conscience, we surmise the existence of a seraph in the person’s soul.

The seraph manifests himself in a person above all through the presence of the spiritual sense of truthfulness and the moral spiritual sense. Their fullness and worth depend on the level of the spiritual sense of the personal seraph.

One’s own truth and one’s own conscience is the sense/feeling of the life of one’s own God or one’s own seraph in a person’s soul.

The seraph gradually manifests his sense/feeling of life in the soul of a person living a seraphic life and, in this way, determines his vital movements. He expects something from the person.

In our understanding, the personal seraph is not a seraphim, a celestial angelic being or an archangel but a post-human being (or, more precisely, a post-human being with particular merit in comparison to other post-human beings) that is engendered through many human lives. From himself, he sends a person into life, gives him his particular purpose in life and the main parameters of his personal spiritual fate. The seraph makes the ascent together with the person.

A person gets his life mission from his seraph along with support for realizing it. Constituting a couple with his seraph, a person works for him, gives him from worldly life what the seraph needs for his existence, and raises him to a higher stage of his ascent. The seraph lives off the results of human life and directs it to a greater or lesser extent.

The entire second volume of The Emergence and Transfiguration of Man is devoted to the creation of the seraph (and cherub), his (their) role in the Plan, and different probl ems of interaction between man and the seraph.

The seraph does not “enter” a person or “leave” him in the common sense of the word. He always remains where he is – in the post-human world. Nevertheless, we will provisionally speak of the entry of the seraph into the personal spiritual life of man.

One’s own truth is not what people believe or what has been proven but a product of the determined effort of the personal spiritual consciousness. One’s own truth is born in the soul of a person together with the seraph. This “birth” takes place in the course of a person’ spiritual growth yet does not occur simply at his desire but together with the growth of his seraph.

It may seem at first sight that one’s own wisdom functions disconnectedly and without a guiding principle –simply at one’s whim. Yet this is not so. One’s own wisdom does not “blow where it pleases”. The discovery of one’s own truth, whether in small bits or large fragments, is a much more difficult task than the consecutive development of the intellect. One’s own truth has a rigid and mysterious order. The harmony of this order and this progress of one’s own truth is not set down by man or his laws but by the superhuman life of one’s seraph, which is beyond human comprehension.

One’s own truth emerges not in the process of cognition but in the process of the mutual personal spiritual life of man and his seraph. One’s own wisdom tries to understand a preceding thought not because a subsequent thought follows from it but because it is born later in the life of a seraph within a person.

Each movement of one’s own wisdom is based not on a preceding thought or on logic but on the level of manifestation of the spiritual consciousness of truth in the soul. One’s own truth can never emerge before the corresponding level has been attained. The life of the seraph is gradually manifested in the mosaic picture of wisdom. The harmony of this picture is determined by the history of the manifestation of the seraph in the inner world of man. This process is different for each person and his seraph.

However, no perception of one’s own truth can occur ahead of its time or take a place other than its own. One never knows what will be manifested first and what next and on what level. One’s own truth can never manifest itself prematurely. One cannot understand it even when it has already been divined yet still not supported by the corresponding level of spiritual consciousness in the soul. Unable to take root, it remains suspended in the air for the time being.

The personal seraph assigns a particular time for each fruit of a person’s own wisdom. One cannot get the seraph’s insight at will. Nevertheless, one must work hard in his personal spiritual life to prepare himself for each insight. For certain insights, one lacks the necessary distance of life.

How can one call and address his seraph and in what person?

One cannot do it in the first person as if he was addressing his Self with which the seraph, as a source of spiritual attraction, fuses. Nor in the second person as “you,” for the seraph does not have the likeness of a person nor is kindred to the latter’s “I”. Nor in the third person, which is used for an outsider or someone who is absent. To address the seraph, one needs to use a different person that would be neither first nor second nor third in a positive or negative form but would comprise all of them and, at the same time, be the expression of heartfelt emotion.

A person recognizes and experiences the seraph as the seed of his personal spiritual life and as his paternal primordial image.

From the grammatical standpoint, the “father” is such a “he” that contains the “I” along with an “I” that is fuller and more “holistic”: it is the “I” that engendered my “I” from himself. The son perceives his father and addresses him not in the first, second or third person. For the son, the father is in the fourth person. However, with regard to his biological father, a son strives sooner or later for selfdistinction in order to consolidate his autonomy. In seraphic life, with regard to his spiritual father, a person strives to consolidate his spiritual attraction to the “spiritual sun” of the father-seraph.

With regard to one’s seraph, it is possible to speak about the seraphic father or the seraphic fourth person – the person of the father.

Mankind is made up of two kinds (generations) of people. The first have seraphic fathers; the second do not. It is impossible to trigger the seraphic (personal spiritual) life of those who cannot lead it. They do not have different souls, but they simply live differently.

The seraphic person triggers the personal spiritual growth of the soul. Without a seraphic father, a person cannot become a pioneer in his acts of truthfulness, sincerity, and conscience. He experiences no need of moral improvement (in contrast to the improvement of his body, physique, psyche, and creative abilities). The very thought of moral improvement is unpleasant to such a person.

Without a seraphic father, a person can be smart, refined and even talented yet has nothing to say of his own. He does not have a hook by which a higher consciousness can lift him up. He is spiritually ungraspable.

Without the penetrative force of the seraphic father, you cannot tell yourself the truth about yourself.

People with a seraphic father –people of seraphic life –strive to absorb the stream of a higher consciousness of life. The age-old question of whether art can change people has the following answer: it can change people of seraphic life and of the seraphic father.

The inner world of people with a seraphic father can be compared to a flammable liquid, while the inner world of people without a seraphic father resembles water. A flame makes the former light up and burn brightly. The latter seethe and boil when heated yet also extinguish the fire that tries to kindle them.

Although a person without a seraphic father may be good, honest, kind and intelligent, he lacks higher intuitions, especially the mind’s intuition for deep thought, the mystic intuition and the intuition of “one’s own” – one’s own image of spirituality, one’s own world view, one’s own spiritual service, one’s own truth, one’s other Self, one’s own Collective Soul, and one’s own Path of Life.

Personal spiritual (seraphic) life is lead not by a person alone but by the person-and-seraph. The seraph enters into human life, and the depth of his penetration changes in the course of a person’s Path of Ascent.

All religious and moral doctrines take a certain higher state of the soul as a model and teach people how to attain it. This may be a certain state of sanctity, righteousness, enlightenment, faith, obedience, and so on. The merit of a person within a religious community, i.e., within a collective spiritual framework, is determined by the stage that he has reached on the path to the chosen state of perfection. The higher the level, the worthier the person. However, this is not the case in the doctrine of personal spiritual life.

“According to this doctrine,” writes Tolstoy, “no state can be higher or lower than another. According to this doctrine, every state is only one and, in itself, unimportant step on the path to unattainable perfection and thus is not a higher or lower stage of life. According to this doctrine, the augmentation of life is only the acceleration of movementtowards perfection… For this reason, this doctrine has no rules that must be observed. When a person at a lower stage moves towards perfection, he begins to live more morally, becomes better and better fulfils the doctrine than a person who is at a much higher stage of morality yet does not moves towards perfection”^*).

It goes without saying that no collective spiritual life can be built on such foundations.

“According to this doctrine, the greater or lesser well-being of man depends not on the stage of perfection that he attains but on the greater or lesser acceleration of his movement,”^*) i.e., on the acceleration of spiritual growth. In personal spiritual life, the most important thing is the speed of spiritual growth that strives not for something “big” or any other static state but for something “ever bigger” or the acceleration of motion, for only the acceleration of spiritual growth gives a person the “augmentation of life”.

Dynamic spiritual processes are important both for collective and personal spiritual life. However, in personal spiritual life,only they count.

Seraphic (personal spiritual) life is the process of ever greater vitality and spiritual growth – the ever greater manifestation of one’s own truth, one’s own conscience and spiritual Sincerity. If this process is lacking, seraphic life is also absent.

From the tactical standpoint, personal spiritual growth can be directed at the ideal state of unattainable perfection that is set down by the commandments of the Sermon of the Mount, say. However, setting such a target does not, in itself, assure incessant acceleration of spiritual growth and inner self-perfection. The principle of the acceleration of spiritual growth (which accords the greatest plenitude of life) can be realized if a person at all stages of life strives not towards the absolute summit of seraphic life but to a particular critical point, after which he enters a new and qualitatively different stage of seraphic life where spiritual growth acquires new content and direction. Only this is capable of assuring the process of the constant and greatest possible acceleration of spiritual growth.

Seraphic life is a sort of ascent. The further a person ascends, the more seraphic life renews his entire inner life and gives it a new and higher quality.

There are different periods and stages of seraphic life. Each age of seraphic life is preceded and followed by critical points that can be considered both as the conclusion of intrauterine development and as the manifestation of what had been given and the transfiguration of what had existed, i.e., as moments of birth. Seraphic life is a consecutive series of births. This series constitutes the ascending Path of personal spiritual life. The most immediate meaning of personal spiritual life lies in implementing one’s own path. The entire Path of Ascent leads from birth to birth and through births. On this Path, something may fall by the wayside, yet nothing dies: everything keeps reviving. In other words, what takes place is the opposite of death.

Everyone experiences spurts of growth and various upheavals and transformations in life. However, these spurts do not lie on the Path, if they do not lead a person to expand and deepen himself or to rise to the next point on the Path. The Path of seraphic life is a Path of Ascent for the simple reason that each stage of spiritual development on the Path contains an ascending movement towards the next birth on the Path, the next Path stage and the spiritual growth that corresponds to it.

Seraphic life is based on spiritual growth. Each period of seraphic life is marked by its own spiritual growth (or type of growth). This growth leads to the next spurt of life on the Path towards a new level of vitality and reason and a new trajectory of motion on the Path, i.e., to the next birth on the Path.

As such, the idea of spiritual ascent through a given series of path points will evoke objections only among people that reject the very notion of the Path. Others may only be troubled by the thought of the existence of a normative schedule on the Path of Ascent.

Human life is marked by different possibilities, impossibilities and limits. There is a standard span of human corporal life. If we assume that this span is not the result of chance but is set down from above with a view to allowing one to attain the highest possible and most appropriate result of path ascent during his allocated lifetime, then this alone implies the necessity of making an optimal Path schedule according to the ages of human life.

For a person to traverse the Path during a single lifetime, he must not only move incessantly, constantly accelerating his spiritual growth,but also manage to reach the end of the Path within the lifespan that is biologically accorded to him. To this end, his spiritual life must be as energetic as possible, and the Path itself greatly compressed and defined ahead of time, i.e., marked out with milestones according to age stages and periods. Lingering too long on one of the sections of the Path threatens to disrupt the Path ascent.

Although each person with a seraphic father has his own itinerary fate, there is a unique proper Path of Ascentfor all people of seraphic life. Otherwise, a person’s lifetime would be too short to traverse the Path to the end.

Sometimes (though not in every century) there appear giddying phenomena of spiritual life that do not follow the schedule of the Path. The Path of Ascent does not lead to them, however.

The graph of Path ascent leads to the hypothetical spiritual summit of a person’s entire life. It does not lead there in any old way but follows the narrative of the Path that has special meaning. The Path is a narrative rather than simply a traversal of Path points. Without a Path narrative, Path points become unimportant and can be bypassed, destroying the very idea of the Path.

The Path narrative is given to a person from above. However, it is not God that sets down and marks out the Path of Ascent. The plan of the graph of Path ascent – its stages, milestones, turns and acclivities –gradually and invisibly takes shape in mankind itself. Yesterday, it still lacked something that it has today or will have tomorrow. However, when something appears, it stays for good.

The individual graph of Path traversal of the personal spiritual life of each person is based on the normative Path that exists at a given moment of development of mankind. In this sense, the normative Path is a fixed Path that must be traversed. It must be ascended from one age to another by every itinerant person, i.e., any person that is capable of traversing the Path and has a seraphic father.

Вторая критическая точка = Second Critical Point.

Главный перевал пути = Main Path Col.

Точка светлого откровения = Point of Bright Revelation.

Точка темного откровения = Point of Dark Revelation.

Первая критическая точкаПути = First Critical Point on the Path.

Второй пик чистоты= Second Summit of Purity.

Личностное рождение = Personality Birth.

Низина Пути = Lowest Path Point.

Первыйпик чистоты= First Summit of Purity.

Душевное рождение = Inner Birth.

Подъемвзвода духовнойжизни = Acclivity of the Triggering of Spiritual Life.

Уступ чистилища = Ledge of Purgatory.

Личностныйподъем= Personality Acclivity.

Сторгический уступ = Storgic Ledge.

Подъем пробуждения = Acclivity of Awakening.

Плато Пути = Plateau of the Path.

The human life-consciousness takes a special attitude towards old age as the result and evaluation criterion of one’s entire life. Why not enjoy life, even if you had to spend your last years in misery? However, something in us protests against such an approach. Something tells people that their last years may well be more important than all the rest. These years incorporate childhood, youth and maturity; they present simultaneously all the years of one’s life and show them all in a holistic picture that manifests itself in the soul of a person parting with life. If a person was good at 20, good at 35 yet bad at 60, his entire life went down the drain. It is as if he had never been good. Apparently somewhere between the ages of 35 and 60, he was too sluggish or simply incapable of reaching the next stage of the Path of Life.Nor did he manage to stay at the stage of spirituality that he had attained. He began to descend as a result.

Life as we know it is not itinerant or Path-centered. It lies on the wayside of the Path rather than on the Path itself. In this sense, the Path is not reality. Thus it is impossible to study the Path by studying real life. For the overwhelming majority of people, the Path of Ascent is a dream or fantasy of sorts – in any case, something that has no practical relation to life and takes no interest in the latter. Worldly wisdom (even at its best) has no need for the doctrine of the Path of Ascent. It make s use of what lies on the wayside of this doctrine and needs nothing more. The practical value of the central thought of the doctrine of the Path is lost for it. This occurs not because this thought is too lofty and inaccessible to worldly wisdom but because it takes a different basic attitude towards human life.

All the principles and recommendations of the doctrine of the Path of Ascent are meaningful only for a person that has at least passed through its initial stages and is capable of continuing the ascent. Such people are few in any place and at any time. Others will hardly take an interest in the doctrine of the Path. Even the itinerant person is never flattered by the doctrine of the Path in view of its elitist nature. Every one of us sooner or later comes off the Path or stops ascending on it. Thus the doctrine of the Path can be edifying in one way or another but never popular. It inevitably condemns everyone. Who is willing to listen to and accept such a sentence?

The Path of Ascent is an axis along which the whole of human life from birth to death is arranged. A person on the Path does not live from one moment to the next but from one Path stage to another. He is aware of the Path within himself and increasingly assumes mystical responsi bility for his entire life.

The Path of Ascent introduces a special scale of values for the human personality that distinguishes people on the basis of the stage of personal spiritual life that they have attained on the Path.

The knowledge of the Path of Ascent is essential to a person leading a personal spiritual life just as the knowledge of the number system is essential for understanding the world of numbers and mathematical notions. Every point of the Path is an indicator of what can and should be attained at any given age; it determines the normative state of personal spiritual life during a given period and sets a direction for further spiritual development. Taking the Path as a guide, one gets a better sense of direction in his spiritual life and in all the other movements of his inner world. Theoretically speaking, everyone can compare himself with the proper place corresponding to his age on the ascent graph. Yet, truth be told, this can usually be done only in hindsight.

One of the conventions of the graph of the Path of Ascent is its chronological division into sevenyear (or, more precisely, fourteen-year) periods. If we plotted the ascent graph on an axis showing the changing individual corporal time in which a person lives in his unique real life, the graph of the Path would look different.

The graph of the ascent of personal spiritual life shows changes in the acceleration of spiritual growth during a person’s lifetime. This is why it goes upwards almost everywhere.

The ascent graph consists of acclivities and ledges on the Path. In a period of afflux (accelerating growth), the graph is convex, becomes increasingly steep and approaches the vertical. In a period of reflux, it is concave, becomes increasingly flat and approaches the horizontal.

The spiritual growth of a person on the Path lasts all life long. However, the acceleration of spiritual growth increases on the acclivities of the Path and stays the same or falls on the ledges. A person lives more fully on acclivities than on ledges, becoming ever more “alive” and increasingly augmenting and intensifying the spiritual life within himself.

A person must constantly follow the Path –during periods of both afflux and reflux. However, he tends to go upwards during periods of afflux and to preserve himself during periods of reflux.

Each ledge and each acclivity on the graph of the Path corresponds to a particular plenitude of spiritual life and a particular state of personal spiritual life.

The graph of the Path goes in waves. Each afflux on the Path (acclivity) gives way to a reflux (ledge). A person can go to the side or fall off from any of the acclivities and ledges, stopping his ascent. There are numerous roads leading off the Path as well as numerous inner states that correspond to them. Nevertheless, there are only seven possible states on the Path itself –on the four acclivities and the three ledges.

On the wave of inner birth, the itinerant person experiences the state of the acclivity of the triggering of spiritual life (13-17 years old), at the start of which the inner birth takes place (14 years old),and the state of the ledge of “foreign life” or the ledge of “purgatory” (17-26 years old).

The wave of personality birth includes the state of the personality acclivity (26-31) and the state of the ledge of “one’s own life” (31-37).

On the wave of the Awakening, one first passes through the great acclivity of the Awakening (38-42) that brings the soul through the points of dark and bright revelations to the ledge of the plateau of the Path (42-48).

The Path of Ascent contains the mysterious Critical Points of life. They include the Zero Critical Pointfrom two-and-a-half to three years of age, the First Critical Point at the age of 36-37 and the Second Critical Point at the age of 50.

We should also mention the point of the eighteenth birthday (which may well become a Critical Point),during which a ban is put on ascending to the personality birth.

One cannot expect too much from a line drawn on paper. It is merely a breathing chart of the ascent of the Path that shows its affluxes and refluxes. Everyone leading a personal spiritual life has his own rhythm of respiration of the soul and his unique graph of Path ascent. If we take a close look at people’s lives (on a day-to-day or even year-to-year basis), the similarity between a day or a year in the life of two different people is not always evident. However, in a larger perspective (say ,a decade), one finds more similarities in the Path graphs. Everyone has his own biography and his own depth of respiration, which changes his graph of the Path of Ascent yet not its overall appearance.

At the point of inner birth, the line of the Path rises steeply before attaining its greatest speed at the first summit of purity. Spiritual reflux begins at the age of 16. This is the deepest and longest reflux on the Path of Ascent. In it, the triggering of personal spiritual life ends, and the purgatory of the Path of Life begins.

At the age of 23, spiritual growth ceases altogether, and the line of ascent becomes horizontal for the first and only time. At the lowest point of the Path, the process of the negative acceleration of growth may be more or less active. Here, at the lowest point of the Path of Ascent, the soul is put to the most difficult itinerant test. Most of those who enter this Path declivity fail to come out of it.

Immediately after the lowest point of the concavity of life at the age of 25 or so, spiritual growth resumes. It is slow at first and then accelerates so rapidly that the human soul marks its personality birth at the age of 28 on a steep acclivity. This afflux continues during the first half of the period of “one’s own life”. The slope of the ascent graph tends to decline between 30 and 32 years of age. The soul reaches the First Critical Point of life (36-37 years old) in a state of reflux. The speed of growth on the refluxes of the Path is fairly high: the Path-guiding forces do not want to destroy us.

The middle of life –the region of the graph around the First Critical Point of the Path – recalls in its flow the quiet period of the plateau of the Path. There are no other such sections on the ascent graph. They form two ledges of sorts between which the sheer wall of the Awakening lies. Pleasant and peaceful, both ledges tempt one to stay there. If we consider the concavity of the Path to be the first ledge, then the ascent graph has three ledges or steps separated by steep acclivities. One easily sees this three-step profile of the Path on the graph before the Second Critical Point.

Before the Second Critical Point, a person is either living on the first, second or third ledge of the Path or ascending from one ledge to another.

The work on shifting the Path from the second ledge to the third should be resolved at the First Critical Point and begun at the age of 38 or so.

By the age of 40-45, a man suddenly realizes that his life has begun to descend. In the doctrine of the Path, we call this point the main col of life. Now a man begins to feel himself to be mortal and transient for the first time. On the main col, something clicks in the soul, switching the life consciousness from “going into life” to “descending from life”. Until this time, falling and rising, he kept going into life. From this moment on, he begins to descend from life physically as well as inwardly.

The afflux of the Awakening is very steep and attains its peak at the age of 40 at the point of the dark revelation of life. At this point, we raise the line of the Path vertically and bend it towards the plateau of the Path, where growth continues at a constant rate. There is no afflux or reflux here, and thus the plateau is represented by a straight slanted line with a constant slope. No matter how long this line is, it always comes to an end.

For many years, I tried in vain to understand the ascent trajectory after the Second Critical Point. Apparently, I failed not only on account of my poor vision but also because this part of the ascent graph does not exist yet: it has not emerged, formed, or been mapped out. We will continue the ascent graph of the Path of spiritual life with a dotted line.

Antagonism is essential for personal spiritual growth. “The light shines in the darkness”. There must be “darkness” on a person’s Path. One could say that the Path becomes covered with manure through which the sown seed grows. The work of the Path of Ascent involves first and foremost overcoming obstacles created by inner desires, enticements and temptations. A lot of baits and traps lie in wait for a person walking down the Path, while evil and hostile forces try to stop his ascent. So many new and diverse forces, obstacles and traps appear with each step that it is hard to imagine how anyone can stay on the Path for long.

The Path is covered with obstacles that hinder a person’s progress and ascent and that can take a lifetime to overcome. Overcoming an obstacle signifies the augmentation of the energy of spiritual growth and the maturation of something new and important in the soul.

Temptations, enticements, false notions of wellbeing, and inner and corporal desires obstruct a person’s access to the Path and hinder and stop his ascent yet also make him work more actively and, even more importantly, freely. For example, friction and gravitation are necessary for the work of takeoff and flight: without them, it would be easy to break away and take off, yet no work would be needed for it. Every obstacle on the Path corresponds to a force of spiritual growth that one exerts to overcome it.

For most of his time on the Path, a person finds himself in an inner pothole of some sort, either sitting in it or falling into it or getting out of it. As soon as he gets out of one pothole, he immediately falls into the next. He falls in and gets out, goes from one trap to another, gets out and falls back in, gets out again and climbs down or falls into the next. However, his goal is not to go from one inner pothole to the next. A person travels down the Path rather than performing feats. Each day in the life of an itinerant person is a series of ascents and descents, temptations and disillusionments. His entire spiritual biography is made up of such stumbling, falling, rising, winning and losing. These working operations take up every year of his and every period and stage of his ascent of the Path of Life .

We shall repeat over and over again that one does not walk down the Path but ascends it, overcoming obstacles. An itinerant person must do itinerant work –the work of fraying his way – rather than simply walking down the Path. The burdens on different parts of the Path may be easier or more difficult for different people. The itinerant person may easily pass through a section or even period of the Path without encountering any serious obstacle at all. The Path is individual in the sense that everyone has his own itinerant life work cut out for him along with his own working section of the Path and his own pothole (or potholes) in which it is more comfortable, pleasant or practical for him to sit or from which it is particularly difficult for him to get out. In addition, everyone has his own special temptation that is cut out and particularly necessary for him. Thus the merit of personal spiritual life can be only evaluated on the basis of a holistic picture of the entire Path of Life. It should be kept in mind that overtaking or falling behind the normative Path schedule can be the result of specific particularities of one’s itinerant fate rather than shortcomings of his spiritual work.

At each of the three Critical Points, the fate of the subsequent Path ascent is determined.

At the Zero Critical Point (at about three years of age), the main parameters of a person’s launch into life are selected. It is as if someone took a look at the little person and here, at the Zero Critical Point (and not at conception or birth), determined his status and decided whether he is capable of ascending the Path.

Note that these decisions are not taken by people and are made early on – before the child is capable of receiving powerful spiritual influences from without and of falling under their power.

At the Zero Critical Point, the upper limit and highest possible level of a person’s ascent, his ultimate capacities, and his greatest possible consciousness of life and its goodness –in a word, his personal spiritual level –are determined. A person will never surpass this level, and, anyway, the task of human life is not to jump over your own head but to realize yourself fully and reach the highest point that is accessible to you. This is a person’s task in life, and it is not often implemented.

The inner birth is the birth of the soul into autonomous life. Only now does the soul begin to lead its own (i.e., seraphic) life. It is the inner birth that opens up the personal spiritual side of the inner world of man.

During inner birth, a youth acquires not only the awareness of his inner separatedness and particularity but experiences the need for the first time to look inside himself and follow his own inner voice.

In newly emerging personal spiritual life, not everything is determined and accessible to human understanding. The inner birth, which puts a person on the Path of Ascent,is mystical in the sense that, afterit, one begins to make out his seraph in the distance.

The perspective of the Path opens up during the inner birth when one’s seraph is only hinting that it will enter the higher soul, which, in turn, is getting ready to accommodate him. During the inner birth, the seraph announces himself to the higher soul from afar and beckons it. He is not visible himself.

In the prologue to the Path of Ascent, a person sees a “phantom” of the seraph that he should subsequently accommodate, preserve and nurture. The seraph gives the autonomously existing soul new properties and qualities. These include, first and foremost, the spiritual need for experiencing the Ideal and for being engrossed by it as well as the capacity for the intense creation of ideals in the soul. Acquiring insight, the souls sees with it the Ideal that serves as a measure of all that exists on Earth and that determines all the values and tasks of life. This includes both the capacity of spiritual growth and the need for it – i.e., the attainment of a greater plenitude of life of the higher soul. It also includes the alternating experience of the sacred and the vile, augmented by the sensation of inner nakedness, vulnerability and defenselessness. It furthermore includes a new consciousness of inner freedom that does not yet know how to express itself in action and that seeks self-expression in independent inner activity and inner substance.

This is also a new spiritual need for Sincerity, which is not so much the quality of inner openness, frankness, straightforwardness or the lack of hypocrisy as the power of spiritual purity, which can overcome all possible hindrances to inner development, soothe spiritual suffering and make a person capable of surpassing himself when necessary.

Acquiring the autonomy of personal spiritual life, the soul acquires the freedom of mutual life with another higher soul. However, this freedom cannot, for the moment, be realized in what we call storgic love. The soul of a youth is not mature enough for storgic love. However, it cannot wait, either, and so begins to participate in the amorous passions of the philic soul. At this time, storgic freedom is realized in fully adult, strong (often lasting a lifetime) and responsible friendship that can occur alongside youthful love and is often higher than it.

During the inner birth and for some time after, Light emanates from the seraph (or, more precisely, from the place where the seraph is), directing a person’s gaze to the highest and ultimate point of the Path of Ascent. The search for one’s spiritual summit begins with the inner birth under the influence of the seraph’s phantom. The seraph’s phantom enables a person to get a presentiment and preview of the possibility of taking a look at his inner life from within –from a certain higher standpoint that is not accessible for the time being yet may eventually become so. The sources of many major thoughts and profound revelations of maturity lie here during the period of inner birth when they were still a pure vision of the phantom of the seraph.

During inner birth, a person acquires the intuition of what he should be. Although this intuition is weak for the time being, it already begins to exert an influence on the volitions of the soul. After the inner birth, an itinerant person knows that he has a highest point and that must search for it and find it. This requires spiritual growth and embarking upon and ascending the Path of Life. A young person that has undergone inner birth strives for self-development and for “making his own self”.

During the period of inner birth, the seraph supports the autonomous existence of the highest soul. The seraph is already capable of guiding the soul (though not directly) on the Path of Ascent. This guidance takes the form of the itinerant intuition that warns one of the danger of leaving the Path. It is impossible to go high up on the Path without this intuition (and without the intuition of what one should be). The need that one experiences during this period of life for the spiritual force of Sincerity stems from the distant presence of the seraph and his demands on the soul.

The phantom of the seraph also contributes to the targeted triggering of the mechanism of spiritual life and sows something in a person that should subsequently grow into “one’s own truth,” “one’s own spiritual life,” and ultimately one’s own special task at the highest stages of the Path of Life.

Every person that undergoes inner birth can make it up the acclivity of personality birth. The extent to which this occurs depends on what takes place during the fourteen-year period between inner birth and personality birth. During these years, a person must, first of all, trigger his spiritual life and, secondly, pass through the itinerant ordeals. Both are necessary to prove that he is capable of accommodating the seraph within him and to prepare for his arrival.

After the inner birth, the graph of ascent continues to go steeply upwards until the first summit of purity (at 16-17 years of age). A young man is given a period of two years or so to gather strength in order to begin the work of triggering the mechanism of his spiritual life from the attained height. After the inner birth, spiritual purity provides the detonator and lifting power for subsequent ascent on the Path.

The graph of ascent on the declivity after the first summit of purity is shown schematically. There may be deep crevasses in any of its sections. However, the spiritual force gathered on the first summit of purity usually suffices for the next few years to lift a young man from the bottom of the deep abyss into which he sometimes falls. These may be the only years of their kind in a person’s life.

The third period of the Path – the period of ideals –is the prologue to the Path of Life. Its inner content consists of dreams and future (though not present) actions. In the state of triggered spiritual life, the itinerant person continues to search for “his own Ideal” and, first and foremost, the Ideal of his own self or of his perfectly expressed self. Such creation of ideals is inspired by and founded on the spiritual intuition (suggested by the seraph’s phantom) of one’s proper and perfect self. However, such creation is short-lived: it appears and vanishes once again, as if it had gone around the corner or sunk below the horizon. The distant influence of the seraph on the personal spiritual life of the third seven - year period on the Path of Ascent is felt only at its beginning, where the mechanism of seraphic life is triggered and launched.

After the summit of purity is passed and especially during the period of purgatory, the phantom of the seraph grows dimmer. The spiritual sparks that had come out like fireworks just a short while earlier begin to die out by the age of 19-20, and the young man enters a different period, where it shall become clear whether he had been spiritually triggered to the required extent earlier, even if this mechanism was repeatedly foiled subsequently.

At the beginning of the fourth seven-year period of life, a man, despite his seeming selfconfidence, is a being that is greatly confused and poorly controllable from within. His reason and wisdom have not yet emerged at this time, while his ideals have been extinguished. Willy-nilly,he looks at everything from the standpoint of other people.

During this period, his consciousness is easily inspired by “convictions,” “theories” and “ideas” that replace the functions of seeing himself as he should be and of warning himself about his nonconformity to the Path. At the same time, a person is apt to frequently change ideological systems, albeit the latter often continue to influence him in accordance with the passing mental and emotional epidemics of the environment in which he lives. We call the fourth period of the Path the period of “foreign life”.

During the period of “foreign life,” the itinerant person is principally unable to find “his own” people and things. He rushes about, rejecting different movements that inspire him one after the other. As a result of the efforts of the period of “foreign life,” every innerly born person can either find the right direction for his personality birth or squander his entire supply of spiritual energy in the chaos of everyday life, finding a calm place in life for himself and letting it go at that.

Innerly born people have to make their way through the rubble of purgatory, which seems to have been piled up on purpose. Most of them get stuck there.

During the fourth seven-year period of the Path, the itinerant person undergoes path tests of the true value and strength of his itinerant forces and possibilities. As a result of such tests, only what the higher soul truly has and what it can truly do remain in personal spiritual and seraphic life. The rest must disappear to the necessary extent over time.

The transition period of “foreign life” is also necessary for a person to purge himself. This is the period of purgatory. During this period, a person is tossed around by the waves: the waves of different desires and temptations keep running over him in an unsystematic and disorderly fashion. The spiritually triggered person is purged in the fire of pathlessness on the way to his personality birth. Everything that does not function properly should be taken out of service without delay. Every new thing that is introduced should be first subjected to a road test in unfavorable conditions.

Every person has a key and special temptation in life. In the strategic aims of Path ascent, this key obstacle and temptation should be removed at the very beginning during the road tests of purgatory. The main obstacle on the Path is not a bad personality trait or something that is poorly sown, defective or ancestral, obstructing the ascent. Rather it is a core temptation that, from the standpoint of, say, personal or public good, may not be particularly harmful or evil but is nevertheless a decisive and insurmountable barrier on one’s personal Path of Ascent. A person striving to live a seraphic life must identify his core temptation early on and either eliminate it completely or at least sap its strength sufficiently to prevent it from controlling him.

The entry to purgatory is always a collapse, whether gradually as in a landslide or suddenly at a single go. The collapse at the beginning of the fourth seven-year period of the Path leads to the lowest point of the Path of Life that is situated at the age of 23-25 years on the ascent graph. This lowland of life is not a monstrosity but the apex of selfish autonomous movement in the itinerant traversal of life.

The acclivity of personality birth begins from the lowest point of the Path.

The phantom of one’s seraph appears from the post-human world during inner birth. The spiritual life of man is launched from this world during inner birth. During personality birth, the seraph enters the person from the same world, and the entire personal spiritual life is now supported by his presence in the soul.

On the acclivity of personality birth, a person becomes increasingly aware of what is foreign to him in all that he had absorbed during the years of purgatory. He recognizes the “foreign” not by its intrinsic essence but in its impropriety to himself. The period of “foreign life” passes, and the period of “his own life” begins, where he has to decide what is his and what is not his or not appropriate to him. These are the years of shifting life stances when a lot of things collapse, change or are created anew. The itinerant person senses the necessity of becoming himself and looks for his own development trajectory of inner life that would be proper to him alone.

On the ledge of purgatory, the itinerant person mistakes the “foreign” for “his own”. He searches for “his own interest” and tries to go by this interest in life. However, he does not know what it means to live his own inner life, to build “his own world” and, even less, to live in it and go by “his own truth” – to acquire and guard the consciousness of his own spirituality.

Only with such a consciousness does a person become capable of recognizing a kindred style of spirituality in the souls of other people. People that have undergone personality birth are rare and, for this reason, often solitary. In his spiritual solitude, a person that has undergone personality birth looks for people with the same style of spirituality, wants to communicate with them, and finds (or, more precisely, divines) them: they are most often people that have died long ago or live far away and about whom one reads in books. This keen consciousness of spiritual kinship in inner life is the primary and mostreliable indicator that personality birth has taken place.

The person that has undergone personality birth is a responsible person. Personality birth always presupposes service. For such a person,“his own life” means, first and foremost, “his own service” – not on account of some idea or the call of time but of what he has found within himself and of the profound inner need that he has recognized. Ideal service is another important indicator that personality birth has taken place.

After personality birth, one begins to hear an inner voice that warns him about the vanity of life. This voice must be gratified to make it less painful. It can be drowned out by intense and successful activity, career-making, the accumulation of wealth, the simple excitement of life or the struggle for freedom, fairness, environmental protection and so on and so forth.

Personality birth is accompanied by the conscious or unconscious fear of leading an empty or worthless life. One of the main life motives after personality birth is not to live meaninglessly, fruitlessly or in vain.

During the period of “one’s own life,” the two different aspects of the inner world come into equilibrium. At this stage of the Path of Life, personal spiritual life and collective spiritual life do not exclude one another and, indeed, are often in harmony. A certain collectivespiritual life may be very congenial and precious to a person that stands on the Path of Ascent in his personal spiritual life. However, it sometimes occurs that a higher soul that has been weakened and devastated in purgatory is unable to make it to the top of the acclivity of personality birth on which it embarks and becomes immersed in a passing current of collective spiritual life, on which it ascends the acclivity of personality birth.

Soon after personality birth, one enters a phase of equilibrium and reconciliation that is particularly necessary for storge. Storge is the striving to intertwine one’s soul with the soul of another person so that the latter ceases to be “another person” or “another Self” and becomes “one’s other Self” with whom one lives as a single whole. Storgic love means to make yourself the other person and to make the other person yourself –to turn “one’s Self” and the “other Self” into two aspects of a single being. The simplest illustration of storge is the myth about the existence of two souls as halves that are sent into the world in order to unite in love.

During the period of “his own life,” a person adjoins everything to himself. Everything in his inner world is balanced for storgic affairs. The person that has undergone personality birth feels the irresistible desire to continue his inner life together with another person –in storge with his other Self. One’s deep personal world is created on the waves of storgic realization. It is difficult to continue on the Path of Ascent without creating storgic relations and intertwinements.

Personality birth on the Path is followed by the acclivity of the second summit of purity . Here the Light of the Consciousness of Ideals is kindled once again. This light sometimes burns brighter at the age of thirty during the second summit of purity than it did during the first summit of purity in one’s youth. All the spiritual forces of Sincerity, Truthfulness and Ideals that a person felt in himself during the acclivity of the triggering of spiritual life reappear in him on the personality acclivity. The second summit of purity is not so much for triggering or winding up personal spiritual life as for storgic affairs.

To lead one’s own inner and spiritual life means to live in accordance with one’s spirituality and to lead one’s special storgic life. This includes one’s special moral principles, one’s experience of good, the sensitivity to one’s own conscience (and not to a conscience borrowed from others), and a particular compassion for certain types of misfortunes of others. This also includes one’s own choice of activity of the heart corresponding to one’s personality, one’s own task in storgic relations and, finally, one’s own storgic love that is directed towards the person that the soul waits for and that it senses ahead of time intertwined with itself.

Love on the acclivity of personality birth –the love of personality birth –is a unique state of life in which the storgic relationship is implemented on its own and where the person does not have to make any efforts. It suffices to recognize “one’s other Self” and not be mistaken.

“One’s own life” is the identification and augmentation of the characteristic traits of one’s style of spirituality and one’s intuition for the kindred conjugate soul that is needed to create a new mutual spirituality. Indeed, a key goal of “one’s own life” is to implement storgic life.

A person never forms amonolithic whole better than during the period of “his own life” on the storgic ledge of the Path graph. A spiritual personality conscious of its own self builds itself a fortified abode that it must still make its own – and do it together in a storgic relationship with its “other Self”.

The storgic period on the Path lasts for only 8-10 years from 27/28 to 38/39 years of age. The time of “one’s own life” before the First Critical Point is optimal for storgic affairs. Storge is apparently very important for taking the decision at the First Critical Point. Storgic failure or non-realization is one of the main reasons for coming off the Path at the First Critical Point. This does not exclude further ascent on the Path. However, it will be a solitary Path of Ascent that cannot always be traversed by the soul on account of its insufficient qualities.

At the First Critical Point (36/37 years old), one takes note of what has been attained and gets permission to embark upon the next stage of seraphic life. The majority of people that have undergone “personality birth” do not get such permission: upon completing “their own life” they take the road of spiritual quiescence followed by an outbreak of passions between the ages of 40 and 50 and then slow or rapid decline.

The question of who takes decisions here (and how and why) is discussed in our big book. It suffices to say that external life circumstances play virtually no role during the traversal of the First Critical Point.

At both the First and the Second Critical Points, a person begins to think about what meaning he will subsequently give to his life. At the Second Critical Point, he thinks about the meaning that he will give to the remainder of his life, making the ultimate choice of his life’s meaning. At the First Critical Point, he thinks about the meaning of his subsequent life. Here, too, the replacement of one meaning (that preceded the First Critical Point) by another serves as evidence of the traversal of the First Critical Point only if the first meaning is abandoned on account of its insufficient spirituality rather than its mere superfluity.

If a person traverses the First Critical Point, his inner life begins to develop faster and faster, foreshadowing the Awakening.

The fifth seven-year period of life is not a period when the seraph takes active control of human life. He continues to stay behind the scenes, being present (and indicating his presence) yet not working.

After personality birth, a person gets the opportunity for the first time to go down the Path in the presence of the seraph yet does not know the latter or its needs for the time being. This nonmanifest (or even “secret”) presence of the seraph can be detected either from its mediated impact on the work of the inner world or in hindsight when its work becomes sufficiently manifest.

The seraph after personality birth is not yet a creator but a censor that, at best, corrects inner work so as to prevent one from straying. Such partial manifestation of one’s own seraph suffices for the needs of the fifth seven-year period of the Path of Ascent. At this time, the seraph has not yet ultimately decided to enter the human soul yet is already willing to participate in its life. The question of whether he will participate or not is decided at the First Critical Point, whose successful traversal leads to the presence and working participation of a person’s own seraph in his life.

People of seraphic life or itinerant people are the gold reserves of mankind. However, these reserves are not used very effectively. If many of those who were allotted inner birth subsequently went through personality birth and the First Critical Point, this alone would considerably change the whole moral and spiritual climate of human life on Earth.

Just as human life is grows out of and is based on organic and animal life, so innerly born people grow out of the mass of innerly unborn and one-stage people. This mass inevitably surrounds a person ascending the Path, who must survive in this environment not only spiritually but also physically . It is no surprise that the majority of innerly born people come off the Path soon after inner birth. Nevertheless, they have a different state of life than one-stage people. Their souls have been initiated into autonomous life and summoned to lead a personal spiritual life yet have not been sufficiently triggered for it and slumber in a semi-conscious state.

The life of a one-stage person is shaped by his psycho-physiological character and the collective inner and outer circumstances in which he finds himself. His flesh traces out the temporal axis of the ascent graph, yet spiritual ascent is absent.

Despite all the differences of characters and destinies, the one-stage person remains in his own unchanging spiritual state to the end of his life. It is the state of life consciousness of an innerly unborn person that has not become acquainted with his seraphic father and the seraphic life of the soul.

Seeing immorality, the one-stage person reacts with indignation yet without the heartfelt pain of the free moral sense. Nor does he take a real interest in Truth. A new truth does not stagger his soul, move it, or leave a mark on it. By himself he cannot recognize what is true, distinguish between truth and falsehood, single out what is important among a mass of secondary details or pose profound questions to himself, not to speak of finding answers to them. He is an unusual character controlled by the Collective Soul. He has a special style of spirituality, yet this style is not his own but stems from the CollectiveSoul or some other unity of which he is part. The Collective Soul is the refuge of all one-stage people.

The innerly unborn person may be talented or even gifted. He may have a wonderful memory, extensive knowledge, a thirst for learning, a keen mind, a wide intellectual horizon, and a wealth of ideas, most of which are not his own. All that he learns and knows, all that he thinks about, and his entire panorama and direction of thought is determined by the Collective Soul or the cultural needs of the time or arises at the demand or in the interests of other people. Despite his notable innate mental capacity, it makes no difference to his soul what to think about and where to direct its mental gaze.

Seraphic life is elitist from the very beginning of the Path. An abyss lies between an innerly born person and an innerly unborn person. The latter remains a one-stage person for his entire life, while the former, no matter what befalls him subsequently on the Path, enters a new stage of personal spiritual life and becomes a two-stage person, whom he remains to the end of his days.

For a person that has undergone personality birth and continues on the Path of Ascent, the striving for peace of mind is tantamount to suicide. If there are no prospects of further ascent on the Path, the person after passing the First Critical Point enters the state of a stably growing two-stage person and continues to lead such a life until his death. He does not transform himself qualitatively anymore but only keeps repeating himself ever more subtly and adroitly. This is a dead end.

A person always enters the personality dead-end alley with great enthusiasm, luxuriously blooms like a barren flower, and entrains others after him. Many people choose to emulate the personalities of colorful people going down dead-end alleys and blooming in a fashion that particularly suits their milieu or age. In every generation,luxuriously blooming individuals come to the foreground, fighting between themselves and attracting crowds of imitators that identify with them and adopt their style of feeling and self-expression. They shape public life, set the overall tone, and define the direction of inner development of a generation.

Some two-stage people do not acquire a personality, do not undergo Path trials, and do not attain personality birth. Other two-stage people undergo personality birth. Only the latter are capable of full-fledged creative work, including art.

At the age of 60 or so, two-stage people become the leaders of society. People usually take an interest in what they do and say. In the decades remaining after the First Critical Point, the two-stage person is successful and therefore sincerely believes that he has attained the summit of life and, in particular, spiritual life. Two-stage people become outstanding professionals in science, art or politics earlier than one-stage people. Over the years, they become leaders in their chosen fields of activity. They make discoveries in their respective fields and determine the development of society wholly or in part. However, they are unfamiliar with revelations about life and do not believe in them. Their spiritual life changes little with time. From the spiritual standpoint, two-stage people do not surpass the age of 25 or, at most, 35. The mark of this age always remains on them.

The second stage of the Path ends at the First Critical Point.

Those who do not pass the First Critical Point lose the life inspiration with which they lived after inner and personality birth. People that pass the First Critical Point never lose the inspiration of life in itself.

The First Critical Point can be followed by stabilization in the autonomous traversal of two-stage life and by the tranquillization of inner life without any subsequent Path acclivities or trials. Alternatively, the person can enter the third stage of the Path and become a three-stage person.

One should distinguish between three-stage people traversing the second stage of the Path of Ascent and two-stage people for whom nothing is decided at the First Critical Point (and could not possibly be decided).

The two-stage man that enters the fifth decade of life is caught in a mental tornado that is comparable in its spiritual destructiveness to the hurricane of purgatory. For the three -stage man, thisis the favorable time of the plateau of the Path – a period of peaceful earthly life and personal efflorescence.

The constant and continuous acceleration of spiritual growth is a measure of the quality of seraphic life and its principal itinerant principle. The height attained by a person during all of his preceding life is not so important here; it is more important to see that growth continues and from what state of life it continues.

To determine the spiritual merit of a person, one must see what stage of the Path he is on, whether this stage corresponds to his age, and whether he is behind or on the normative Path schedule. Just as important are his further prospects of life on the Path, which are determined by the parameters of his personalspiritual growth towards the next birth on the Path. How productive is his progress with regard to the Path? This is undoubtedly decided by the acceleration of spiritual growth that determines the plenitude of a person’s spiritual life at any given moment. If a reflux occurs on the Path at some point, the speed of spiritual growth becomes smaller here than on an acclivity and its acceleration is also smaller. When the reflux gives way to an afflux on the Path, we see a different picture in which the acceleration of spiritual growth becomes greater. Spiritual growth with its characteristic speed and acceleration has its own strategic and tactical aim at each point of the Path. At one point, acceleration must be sufficient to pass through Path birth; at another point, it must assure further ascent after the summit of purity; at a third, it aims to preserve what has been acquired and attained on the preceding acclivity or to pass through Path trials; and, at a fourth, it is directed at staying on the Path at al l costs.

Spiritual growth should accelerate at all moments of seraphic life. However, how it accelerates and with what aims and at what rate depends on the Path moment.

Every Path birth can be delayed. However, critical points arrive at the appointed time , and the decisions taken there cannot be revoked. If a person does not enter the third stage of life in the year of the First Critical Point, he will never become a three-stage person. If a person does not change his trajectory at the age of 50 at the Second Critical Point, he will remain a three-stage person to the end of his life.

The time interval between the Zero Critical Point (at the age of three) and inner birth amounts to 11 years (and what critical years they are!). This period is subject to all kinds of accidents that can foil inner birth. Only a few years separate the First Critical Point and the Awakening, and something catastrophic for the Path can hardly take place in the inner world during this period. Who successfully passes the First Critical Point shall, without a doubt, attain the acclivity of the Awakening.

In one-stage and two-stage Path traversal, a crisis takes place at the age of 40, while a person on the Path of Ascent reaches the acclivity of the Awakening during the same time. This is one of the supreme acclivities of all human life and determines it to a great extent.

The acclivity of the Awakening is the steepest part of the Path on which one experiences the greatest acceleration of spiritual growth. This acceleration is necessary for a person to be able to ascend a high and sheer cliff, take a look around him and at himself, and try to understand what has happened and is happening to him: where has he ended up in life and how is he living? This is a time of insights and profound thoughts that determine the person’s subsequent inner and spiritual life. For the first time, a person truly understands the vanity of his life and the lives of other people.

At the First Critical Point, among the many ends sticking out of the ball of life threads and themes of a person’s further spiritual development, he easily finds the end of a small thread that he must pull in order to fulfill his future predestination. On the acclivity of the Awakening, this thread is pulled out so far that it becomes a personal guiding thread and cannot be lost anymore in the ball of countless life themes.

The Awakening makes the impression of a personal revolution –a revolution of a person’s entire being and an inner upheaval after which he can no longer be the same as before.

The acclivity of the Awakening is a shattering event through which a person acquires a spiritual personality. A person on the acclivity of the Awakening becomes sufficiently mature to pose profound questions to Life, people and God – questions that are posed earnestly rather than for the sake of curiosity or conversation and that are asked in the name of one’s spiritual personality. He becomes mature enough for profound personal questions and personal spiritual experiences. And his questioning is not ignored.

One-stage people do not have an intuition for deep thought. This intuition grows as one ascends the Path. Although a two-stage person may be an outstanding scholar or artist or even a teacher of life for others, he is incapable of delving into real life issues or understanding them. This intuition fully works only in three-stage people.

If you are not a three-stage person, you will never be able to say what is wise and what is shallow. Only the third stage of the Path gives wise men to mankind.

The two-stage person can only repeat what he has heard, even if he expounds it in a new way. In contrast, three-stage people can say something new to people.

People do not get the capacity of insight before the acclivity of the Awakening. Insight is not a gift but a property of three-stage life. In itself, Awakening is the opening of one’s eyes or insight. From this moment on, the capacity of insight may become increasingly manifest.

When a question is posed on the plateau of the Path, there is always an answer. This answer is not always perfect or definitive or expresses the universal Truth or even has the same depth as the question. This answer can subsequently change, deepen, become more precise or even be annulled on several occasions. However, it does not remain in limbo. A question is posed, and an answer is given, and this answer lies on the way to a true answer to one’s question and to one’s own truth and thus to Truth as such.

A man of substance is not born. A person has to attain the age of substantiality. Before the age of 40 and the acclivity of the Awakening, one can guess yet not know for sure whether a person is substantial or not – even if he is extremely gifted and intelligent.

Human substance is a sign of the presence of the seraph in man. One-stage people are never substantial. Two-stage people can be substantial when they have the potential for further ascent. Threestage individuals are men of substance.

A three-stage person has a special nerve for experiencing life. His soul trembles when he comes into contact with life. It is constantly in a working state and ready for shudders, revelations and insights – for everything that can move it. The mind and feelings of a three-stage person are always ready to delve into what moves and attracts them. The three-stage person is constantly in a state of total mobilization that only increases with each passing year.

A three-stage person is haunted by his seraph. The latter’s presence is so apparent and substantial that the three-stage person is no longer the master of his spiritual life, despite the fact that he performs his spiritual labor himself. The spiritual growth of a three-stage person may sometimes slow down yet never stops altogether. If you are wise, you cannot become shallow or shallower. Although a three-stage person may fall off into a pit, he remains a three-stage person that cannot revert to a two-stage existence or burn out, contrary to what often happens to a two-stage person.

During Awakening, the personal seraph not only enters a person and “rooms in” into the soul but also immerses his mind in earthly life.

In the brightness of the revelation that proceeds from the seraph, the three -stage person sees the Darkness of life. The first working act of the personal seraph in man is this dark revelation on the acclivity of the Awakening.

With age, many people begin to perceive the dark side of human life, see life in its true colors and without illusions and ultimately become shrewd and resilient. During the Awakening, the three - stage person rises above ordinary human reason and feeling and sees what other people do not see and sense. The dark revelations of the three-stage person are mystical and tragic and address the mystery of Evil and its power in the human world. He sees the Darkness of life in a new way and searches for (and sometimes finds) his own view of Evil and his own personal theme of uncovering it. At this age, Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, while Tolstoy realized the evil of subjection for the first time.

At the third stage, one feels the profound urge to live in the presence of the seraphic father within himself at each moment, to invoke him in himself, to listen to him and to gain insight with his help. This broadens the horizon of man’s vision, including his mystical horizon. This leads most often to a “bright revelation”.

In the bright revelation, a person with his mystical presentiments penetrates into the depths of his soul for the first time and understands for the first time that someone truly exists in his depths – someone who is not his soul as such and in whom his soul can only participate. Before the bright revelation, this fact could only have been the object of contemplation, imagination or mystical intuition. Only now does this participation become apparent through revelation. As a result of such revelation, a person becomes aware of his responsibility to the being that lives in him. After the bright revelation, spiritual life becomes fraught with responsibility.

The three-stage person cannot help but feel that he is responsible. This is his torment and his preoccupation and drives his need for self-knowledge. He is a spiritually responsible person that knows that his soul must work and be vigilant. His soul is always experiencing pain, whether through re ason or feeling or religious consciousness or the sense of responsibility to the lofty and personal being that lives within it.

The three-stage person is a generator of new ideas, revelations, and insights that have universal significance. However, people do not believe or treasure the three-stage person and are indifferent to the values of his life and soul. In contrast to the two-stage person, the three-stage person rarely appears in our life. You cannot make out three-stage people in today’s overcrowded, hectic and disassociated world. You can live your life without ever meeting a three-stage person. To tell the truth, only a threestage person can identify a three-stage person in the crowd and understand him.

The anxieties on the acclivity of the Awakening are followed by a period of calm. Attaining the plateau of the Path at the age of 45, a three-stage person, despite his sense of responsibility, feels stable and content with what he is and what is within him. This is a wonderful time for creation! Those who experience it think that this steady, continual and profound flow of life will go on forever.

At this point, basking in the plenitude of his inner forces, a man unwittingly passes through what we have called the main col of human life. The tide of human life first swells, gaining in height and power, and then ebbs, breaks and flows back, leaving something behind. The heart of the matter lies in the “before” and the “after”.

Before attaining the main col, a person kept going up into life without seeing death behind the mountains. Now he crosses the col and begins to descend the mountain, goes down from life and sees death before himself, becoming conscious of his real mortality, its lawful and directly apparent inevitability, and the finitude of his lifespan, whose end looms in the distance.

The entire Path is determined by three Critical Points. Their dates are rigidly fixed on the age axis of the ascent graph. They assure the regularity of all the other points on the Path.

At the age of fifty or so, most people decide once and for all how they will spend the rest of their lives. This is a person’s own decision or his own evasion from making a decision. However, what is decided at the Second Critical Point is not an individual decision.

At the Second Critical Point, the final goal of the Path of Ascent is set, and the direction of the prescribed trajectory becomes manifest. This decision is taken at such a high level that a person cannot influence it in any way.

Anyone who fails to pass through the First Critical Point (which acts as a filter that either blocks or allows further progress on the Path) shall remain a two-stage person, although he could have become a three-stage person and continued on the Path. After passing the Second Critical Point, he may well remain a three-stage person. This is neither defeat nor departure from the Path but one of the possibilities of further spiritual development. He who passes through the Awakening remains an itinerant person to the end of his days.

At the Second Critical Point, it is not decided whether a person remains on the Path or leaves it. At the Second Critical Point, a task is given to (and not removed from) a person. The Second Critical Point is a crossroads at which the direction of subsequent spiritual development is prescribed rather than a departure from the Path or a defeat stemming from failures on it.

A three-stage person per se has an extremely rich ascending life with no age limits and with its own non-normative stages of ascent. The three-stage person can continue to live for decades after the Second Critical Point,developing in the same direction and gradually acquiring wisdom, maturity, insight and the knowledge of life and attaining his own summit of seraphic life through a steady and unremitting ascent. This is a legitimate and productive process of the ever greater manifestation of what already exists.

The First Critical Point brings the seraph into active work without determining where, why and with what purpose he shall move. At the Second Critical Point, a person undergoes a test of his readiness for the fourth stage of the Path and the new stretch of spiritual life that (in contrast to the normative stages of the Path) we shall call the free path of life.

The Second Critical Point on the ascent graph is noteworthy insofar as it divides the entire trajectory of personal spiritual ascent into a marked (normative) and an unmarked (free) part. Before the Second Critical Point, there are at least seven normative age points on the ascent curve. On the free section, there is not a single point of the kind. Indeed, the ascent graph ceases to exist as such.

The traversal of the Second Critical Point opens the possibility of entering the free path yet does not bring a person onto it. No matter what goals the free path shall have, they must be planned and prepared before the Second Critical Point. The fifty-year-long itinerant seraphic life is reviewed by someone, who then decides (on grounds that are not known in each individual case) whether the person shall follow a free life path or not.

The momentum of bright revelation should suffice not only for a full-fledged three-stage life but also for the launch onto the free path of life.

During the fifth decade of life, the itinerant man runs up against numerous temptations that he has not seen before and that can kill him. All the cataclysms stemming from the emerging consciousness of one’s mortality must be overcome before one reaches the Second Critical Point so as not to threaten or disfigure subsequent seraphic life.

To enter the free path of life, a person must make his own sacrifice. He must make this sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice. Possible sacrifices include abandoning the fruit of one’s creative work, giving up a late love for a young woman, leaving one’s family, rejecting one’s property, slipping into poverty and vagabondage, mortifying one’s flesh,and other major ascetic efforts that are signs of the victory over one’s own Self for the sake of what lies ahead.

After the personality birth, a person experiences the life successes that are his due on account of his destiny and talents. Continuing to develop himself and his talents, he makes a name for himself and casts the foundations of his position in society, in his work, and in his professional and confessional community. People that have undergone personality birth and subsequently made it up the acclivity of the Awakening live an even fuller, more successful and happier life as personalities. During this period, the seraph enriches the person and his creative will with the depths of self-awareness and selfsensation.

Attaining the lofty heights of personal spiritual life after the Second Critical Point accords neither fame nor recognition. In contrast, it often evokes people’s antagonism. People of the free path are rarely the spiritual (or cultural) leaders of society.

A seraph cannot control a person if the latter does not first perform an act of self-renunciation for the seraph’s sake. To enter upon the highest levels of the Path, a person must have a certain level of self-renunciation –the renunciation of the very personality that had just manifested itself to others with such power and grandeur. The tumultuous personalization of the personality that begins after personality birth and all the creative results and achievements connected herewith firmly bind a person to the normative life path and do not let him enter the free path ahead. This is his personalistic obstacle on the Path.

The personalistic obstacle should be understood not in the sense that it is created by a personalistically rooted essence (personality) but in the sense that this obstacle should be overcome for the special personalization of the Personality on the free path of life. A person of the free path is mystically and innerly selfless, does not seek his own advantage, and does not beseech God to grant him any boon.

A man of the free path is not an incorporeal spirit. His flesh, the psychological attacks of other people, and all sorts of temptations provoke and carry him away. There are times when he lies to himself or falls under the spell of self-life that he had seemingly already overcome. When this takes place, the seraph punishes him –yet not in the same way as he had punished him before.

Whereas the seraph torments a two or three-stage person and puts pressure on his conscience, gives him the sensation that he has desecrated his own spiritual purity, haunts him with moral nightmares or summons him to self-sacrifice, repentance or denunciation with the help of wisdom, the seraph of a free path person seems to hide from him, keep his distance, close himself up to him, and abandon him. The light from the world of the seraph is obscured, an eclipse or “death during life” sets in, and a person feels queasy and frightened. During this dark period, the seraph seems to withdraw from the person’s life.

The eclipse of “one’s God” in oneself is one of the most difficult and desperate states of the inner world of man. A highly spiritual person is overcome by the horror of his own loss of spirituality and by spiritual suffering in view of the fact that nothing and nobody remain within his depths… Although the person had already been acquainted with such spiritual suffering before, he knew how to mask it within himself. Now he can no longer do it on the free path. The seraph makes use of spiritual horror to show that it is inadmissible to stop the ascent and drives the person ever further and higher on the free path.

On the free path of life, a person is marked by the total independence of thought –“his own thought”. Taken together, his own thoughts manifest “his own truth” – the truth of his entire seraphic life. “His own thought” is stacked on “his own truth,” gradually accumulating, growing and attaining a level at which it becomes a general idea or, more precisely, the “general theme of seraphic life”.

A person’s “own theme” brings together everything that has taken place in his spiritual life and on his life path. “His own theme” defines the personalistic personality of a free path person and thus manifests his highest purpose.

A person attains “his own spiritual theme” already during the third stage of the Path. The free path is the path of one’s own spiritual theme. A person that engendered his own spiritual theme and developed it sufficiently has performed the work of seraphic life.

The free path person is a “thematically successful” person. This is one of the legitimate results of the seraphic life of a person as such.

A person that has passed the Second Critical Point is initiated into mysteries from which he had still been excluded during the third stage. Nevertheless, these mysteries are not laid bare before him in sudden revelation or communicated to him as a secret but glimmer indistinctly, irresistibly attracting him and not letting him go. This may be a sort of sensation or vision. However, this sensation or vision has a will of its own that makes a person go to constant and protracted efforts to reveal what is indistinctly present in it. The voluntary revelation is not a given but something that one must work on. It gives a free path person the irresistible desire to seek. The rest depends on whether the person’s willpower and efforts prove sufficient under the time pressure of his remaining lifespan. This time pressure is so great that any self-indulgence or evasion can resultin failure –in the non-performance of what had been assigned at the Second Critical Point.

A person that enters the free path differs from a three-stage person insofar as he receives a special personal task and cannot help but implement it. He is given a special purpose and direction of ascent on the free path in accordance with his assigned trans-personalistic goals.

The free path has a myriad of roads that bifurcate not by chance (not because things turn out that way) but in accordance with the purpose that is assigned on the basis of the traversed normative Path of Life. The summit of the Path of Seraphic Life properly speaking lies on the free path of life .

The free path is the work of the seraph through man rather than the work of man with the help and participation of the seraph in himself, as on the third stage of the Path. On the free path, the seraph works through the soul rather that in the soul.

The task of a free path person may have nothing to do with human affairs on Earth. Such a person works not for the human world but for implementing the Plan for man.

A free path person does not have parapsychic abilities, does not heal, is not endowed with personal hypnotic and charismatic power, does not know how to inspire people and does not want to do so. He is both far from and near collective inner life yet seldom plays a major role in it during his lifetime. Even after his death, his heritage (even if it inspires interest) is usually transformed beyond recognition.

There are two types of Second Critical Points. One establishes a free path person. The other launches a person onto the high path.

The free path person and the high path person are selected ahead of time. Beginning with the personality birth (or, perhaps, even earlier), one sees a noticeable tendency of path ascent towards either the free or the high path. All the same, one can enter either of them only at the Second Critical Point.

The Path of Ascent as such leads to the entrance to the high path through the third stage of the Path and the Second Critical Point.

All spiritual matters require action and effort. In particular, the entry to the high path requires work – in any case, it is not accorded in a heavenly lottery.

On the Path of Ascent of personal spiritual life, there are barriers before the entrance to the high path. It takes a lot of willpower to overcome them. However, this is not the sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice or the ascetic efforts that one had made just before the Second Critical Point or the overcoming of the personalistic hindrance and the main temptation of life. There is something unintelligible about the extreme effort preceding the entry to the high path and about its very necessity: this is suffering for its own sake on account of the sins of one’s ancestors that one must assume and bear. It may be the suffering of reason overcoming the main temptation of life or the moral torment that is so natural during the repetition of one’s life (cf. Part 14 of the big book) or the suffering of the sick body or the pain of losing somebody or something or different types of persecution. In any case, inner suffering must occur here. A person goes through torment to engender his new spiritual burden. He who approaches the high path must be ready to bear this suffering of spiritual generations.

There is no single high path for the different people traversing it. People of the high path are so unlike each other that they do not appear to be each other’s successors and seem to be people with different spiritual lives. They may differ in their assertion of truth and understanding of life.

The highest maturity of seraphic life is attained on the high path. The entry onto the high path requires the attainment of the highest level of spiritual consciousness. The spiritual experiences on the high path attain the greatest possible vividness and universality. They include supreme experiences of the Ideal and supreme experiences of conscience and the supreme depth and productivity of different types of spiritual life.

By himself, the one-stage person is incapable of perceiving truth. The two-stage person can perceive it. The three-stage person is capable of engendering his own truth and tries to do so. The free path person not only profoundly transforms already discovered layers of truth, just as the three-stage person, but also opens up new layers. The high path person acquires a consciousness of life that is not characteristic of a person on Earth ^*).

The high path person has the highest substantiality.

The summit of the high path attracts a person not just by its mysteriousness; as a spiritual Sun, it has its own force of gravitation and attraction. It is impossible to ignore this force – even at the risk of seeing something that does not exist on this summit.

The two and especially three-stage person feels an inner need of looking in the direction of these summits (if not actually seeing them). Without a doubt, such a gaze is necessary and productive for a person. It is impossible to get one’s bearings sufficiently in human life without comparing the latter with the unfathomable summit at the end of the Path. One cannot make a full-fledged doctrine of man and his assigned life work unless one starts from the summit, the finish and the end.

Of course, a seraph that enters the free path changes the sensation and consciousness of life of a person yet nevertheless remains the same as he was during the person’s personality birth –only a lot more vivid and distinct. However, things are different on the high path.

On the high path of life, the seraph himself strives to enter the highest state –the state of the life of the Persona.

Both the free and the high paths are traversed by a seraph. However, the free path does not lead to the next Path birth, while the high path leads to the Edenic birth, as a result of which the seraph, immersed in human life, becomes a Persona that surpasses the limits of the world of the seraph and enters into super-seraphic (Edenic) life. We are unable to describe it in detail it in this book, however.

The Path of Ascent of personal spiritual life leads to the Edenic birth or the attainment of the state of life of the Persona. Edenic birth is the birth of the Persona from the seraphic embryo. The seraph is the intrauterine state of the Persona.

The free path person is a unique phenomenon of the spiritual life of mankind. The Edenic birth or the birth of the Persona is a metahuman phenomenon. A new super-human quality and a new superhuman merit appear in the Edenic birth. Something necessarily changes in the human world with each birth of a spiritual Persona.

Each Edenic birth is a tremendous event for all mankind and the entire seraphic world.

To understand who is born in the Edenic birth and what is the Persona, one must understand man, his afterlife and the process of its creation in man, and the ultimate result of the transfiguration of man. All of this (and a lot more) is discussed in my three-volume work entitled The Emergence and Transfiguration of Man.