The Four Stages

Just as there are four stages in the life of everyone—boyhood, youth, middle age and old-age—there are four stages in each person’s acquisition of jnana (knowledge of Supreme Being), contemporaneous with these stages. Jnana is the ripeness of the fruit, which is the consummation of a long process from the first appearance of the flower in the tree.

The first stage is the apprentice stage: being trained by parents, teachers, and elders. It is a stage when you are led, guided, regulated, warned, and reprimanded. The second stage is the junior craftsman stage: one is eager to establish happiness and justice in society, and eager to know the world and its worth and values. The third is the craftsman stage: pouring out energies to reform, reconstruct, and remake the human community. The fourth stage is the master stage: here there is realization that the world is redemption by human effort, that one can at best only save oneself in trying to reform the world, and that ultimately it is all His will, His handiwork, His world, and Himself.