4 | Spiritual Emergence / Emergency: Transforming Through Faith Stages

Experience: Our old paradigm of reality no longer fits our experience

Form: Faith stage developmental shift

Medicine: Learning the art of surrender; finding appropriate community

Letting Go of Old Paradigms

Among the possessions I sacrificed during my descent was my solid faith in a materialistic universe. I had to see that this paradigm (that everything is fundamentally a physical process) no longer held my experience. I had outgrown it.

James Fowler’s Faith Model

I would assume that most, if not all, spiritual emergence/ies involve a crisis of faith. The previous faith may not be scientific materialism, but whatever it is will most likely be questioned, reevaluated, or deepened. One way to think about crises of faith is James Fowler’s model in his classic book Stages of Faith.

Fowler, a developmental psychologist at Candler School of Theology, proposes seven stages of human faith development:

• 0. Undifferentiated Faith

• 1. Intuitive-Projective Faith

• 2. Mythic-Literal Faith

• 3. Synthetic-Conventional Faith

• 4. Individuative-Reflective Faith

• 5. Conjunctive Faith

• 6. Universalizing Faith

Early Faith: Trust & Imagination

Fowler begins with Infancy and Undifferentiated Faith (Stage 0), which takes place from birth until around two years. This is a stage mainly about forming a sense of trust and safety of our environment. We may experience “our first pre-images of God… composed from our first experiences of mutuality.”20 We begin to form a rudimentary feeling of self and other, usually with the mother, the texture and tone of which will inform our faith development.

Intuitive-Projective faith describes ages two to six or seven, where a child “uses the new tools of speech and symbolic representation to organize her or his sensory experience into meaning units.”21 The child’s thinking is “fluid,” “magical,” “episodic,” and theirs is the “only available perspective.”22 This stage marks the beginning of imagination, and here “‘reality’ and fantasy interpenetrate.”23

Children in this stage become aware of taboos, and run the risk of being “possessed” by these taboos, manifesting as “unrestrained images of terror and destructiveness” in their imaginations.24 They begin to make stories and “precursors of conceptual abstractions are present,” such as one child saying that “God spreads all around the world in one day.” However, they can really only work within the framework of “concrete symbols and images.”25

Literal Thinking & Fairness

Most children then move into Mythic-Literal faith in early adolescence, where we want to figure everything out, becoming “young empiricists.”26 We begin to untangle fantasy from reality. We become able to use stories “to bind our experiences into meaning.”27

We become preoccupied with “fairness,” and cannot separate meaning from narrative, leading to a sense of literalism and anthropomorphism of characters, including the Divine.28 However, we can now take into account multiple perspectives, and the Divine can have its own subjectivity.

Social Identity & External Approval

According to Fowler, we then move into the third stage, Synthetic-Conventional faith, usually during adolescence. We become more self-conscious, and more social, searching for mirrors to help us navigate our burgeoning sense of self.29 We are able to see the story of our stories, and create a myth of the self. We are able to take on various perspectives, and imagine how we appear to others, creating “the new burden of ‘self-consciousness.’”30 Our authority is externally located, and our images and values remain in a tacit system, upon which we cannot reflect very much. We structure “the ultimate environment in interpersonal terms… images of unifying value and power derive from the extension of qualities experienced in personal relationships.”31

In other words, we start to care about what others think of us. In the extreme, we can internalize the beliefs and views from others to the point that we lose our autonomy. 

Fowler suggests that Stage 3 is the average faith development of many spiritual communities. This is quite an unfortunate situation. Communities that do not question or reflect upon their tacit assumptions and mythologies can stunt our spiritual development, keeping us in perpetual early-adolescent naïveté and desperation for interpersonal approval, which we may then translate as Divine approval.

Breaking Away Into Inner Authority

Luckily, many of us, upon “‘leaving home’ – emotionally or physically, or both”32 can question our ingrained belief systems. We enter the Individuative-Reflective faith (Stage 4), where our tacit belief systems become explicit, and we can disembed ourselves from our assumptive worldviews. We begin to locate authority internally, and we can see “social relations in systems terms”33 – for example, we may identify with “the oppressed,” rather than caring only about those proximal to us.

We begin to separate the signifier from the signified, the meaning from its symbol. We can see the principles behind stories and myths, and may no longer be interested in their specificity. In my experience, this can be an enlightening, empowering time, but it can also be a critical, nihilistic time, where much of life has lost its magic. 

Beyond Rational: A Crisis Point

I feel lucky to have grown up in what I would consider (on the whole) Stage 4 faith communities – Judaism and academia. I was never told to believe anything at face value; instead, I was encouraged to question assumptions and figure out my beliefs for myself through dialogical, conceptually rigorous methods.

However, I believe that I had been growing out of Stage 4 for some time before my spiritual crisis drove it home. I longed to regain the numinosity of life. I had been studying Reiki, shamanic traditions, and performance art at university, and found in these modes a freedom from the cold constraints of rationalism. Whatever else was going on with these modalities, the escape from the taskmaster of the left brain (or top-down brain, or whatever metaphor you prefer) in itself felt healing. I became disillusioned with the extremes of abstraction that used to excite me. I saw in many philosophically minded colleagues and professors an anxiety, dissociation, and neurosis that I longed to avoid. If theirs was wisdom, I didn’t want it. But it wasn’t wisdom; it was knowledge.

In our largely secular culture, we have transcended many of the constraints and oppressions of organized religion, perhaps moving as a culture from Stage 3 to Stage 4. But at what cost? We have largely replaced the organizing function of God/religion with other organizing principles, such as money and prestige, which may lead us to feeling superficial about our lives and dismissive of the larger picture of the earth and the other beings who inhabit it. The Grofs discuss this loss, saying:

More and more people seem to be realizing that true spirituality… is an extremely important and vital dimension of life. We might be paying a great price for having rejected and discarded a force that nourishes, empowers, and gives meaning to human life. On the individual level, the result seems to be an impoverished, unhappy, and unfulfilling way of life, as well as an increased number of emotional and psychosomatic problems. On the collective scale, the loss of spirituality might be a significant factor in the current dangerous global crisis that threatens the survival of humanity and of all life on this planet.34

Rebirth into Conjunctive Faith

Fortunately, the aloofness of Stage 4 is a necessary step towards a larger and more connected sense of being. Conjunctive Faith, Fowler’s Stage 5, is characterized by a movement “beyond the dichotomizing logic of Stage 4’s ‘either/or.’ It sees both (or many) sides of an issue simultaneously.”35 This faith stage is no longer frustrated by paradox and interrelation; it can hold conflicting ideas simultaneously.

Furthermore, “the known is invited to speak its own word in its own language.”36 Rather than aggressively analyzing the world, forcing our various conceptual overlays onto our experience, we become receptive to the external, and allow it to exist on its own terms, with less need for everything to fit into our ideological framework. Fowler refers to philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s “second naïveté” or “willed naïveté,”37 describing them as a: 

postcritical desire to resubmit to the initiative of the symbolic. It decides to do this, but it has to relearn how to do this. It carries forward the critical capacities and methods of the previous stage, but it no longer trusts them except as tool to avoid self-deception and to order truths encountered in other ways.38

Losing the Mind, Finding the Soul

It’s not that we abandon our conceptual abilities in Stage 5, but we no longer identify with them. We use them to our advantage, but remain aware of their limiting tendencies. Because we discern “the powerful residues of meaning that escape our strategies of reductive interpretation,”39 we are not content with what we feel we have grasped with the conceptual mind. Intuitively, we know there is more to existence. This stage is when “symbolic power is reunited with conceptual meanings.”40

This is the post-rational stage of re-accessing the personal and collective unconscious. There are skills we must relearn, such as awe, humility, and reverence. In these ways, Stage 5 is related to the first stages of spiritual development, which can render it a dangerous place to be, as we may feel that we are regressing or that we can no longer find the passion to engage in the discourses of our community.

A Life of Radical Love

There is one stage beyond Stage 5, Universalizing Faith, which involves expanding one’s faith into a “radical commitment to justice and love,”41 embodied by figures such as Mother Theresa and Martin Luther King, Jr. They understand “the absoluteness of the particular,”42 experiencing the ultimate as one with the relative. These people have touched selflessness in their love and understanding and have dedicated their lives to the well-being of others.

I would argue that all faith stage changes are rites of passage, and thus are ripe for spiritual emergence/y. However, entering Stage 5 may feel particularly perilous, because it involves a surrender of control and a disidentification with the conceptual mind, which may have become our adult sense of self. The process may seem to be taking us backwards. We may wonder if we’re losing our minds, and in a way, we are. Stage 5 can feel like a gap: it does not have the tangibility of Stage 3, the mental clarity of Stage 4, or the selfless joy of Stage 6. 

If we are in a primarily Stage 4 environment, such as a university, others may not be able to relate to what we’re going through, and may think that we are merely failing to live up to their (and our former) intellectual rigor. They may think we’ve burnt out, and perhaps we have.

Intellectual Burnout as a Turning Point

The lessons of faith stage development are, I believe, largely about learning the art of surrender and letting go.

Luckily, these skills, if we integrate them, will come in handy for the rest of our lives, and in helping others. They are the skills of dying, which we will use in each moment, each transition, and each lifetime.

The Call for Stage 5 Communities

I also think that those entering a new faith stage may need to find a new community. We may long for a Stage 5 community, both once we are there and as we struggle with understanding the changes we are going through.

For me, I found this at a Buddhist university, in a community of Buddhist practitioner-scholars. It’s not that everyone in the community is in Stage 5 all the time, but the ideals and the collective mythos are largely post-rational.

Opening the Doors to Stage 5

I have learned through this community that, of course, many faith traditions can help us reach Stage 5 (and 6), but these traditions may also be more secretive and elitist about who is allowed in on the Stage 5 conversations and practices.

This secrecy may be for beneficent and practical reasons, but I believe as more people seem to be entering post-rational stages (perhaps testified to by the numbers of Jews, Christians, and atheists flocking to Buddhist temples / mindfulness and Hindu ashrams / yoga, where post-rational practices and teachings are more accessible), other religions may have to start opening their Stage 5 doors.

Walking Each Other Home in Faith

I believe that it is not beneficial to remain in a community of lower faith stage development until we have thoroughly integrated the higher stage. In a community of similarly-staged individuals, we can find peers, teachers, and guides. We can find teachings and practices that are appropriate to what we are going through.

Then, in turn, we can be guides and supports for others.

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This is the fourth in a series of six posts on spiritual emergence/y. To follow the full journey, read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the Spiritual Emergence/y series.

Would you like to learn more about our approach to spiritual emergency?

20 James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 121.

21 Ibid., 123

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 129.

24 Ibid., 134.

25 Ibid., 129.

26 Ibid., 135.

27 Ibid., 136.

28 Ibid., 150.

29 Ibid., 151.

30 Ibid., 153.

31 Ibid., 172.

32 Ibid., 173.

33 Ibid., 180.

34 Grof, xiii.

35 Fowler, 185.

36 Ibid.

37 In Ricoeur’s model, we experience a First Naïveté – basically blind faith, taking religion at face value. According to Ricoeur, this type of belief is hard to maintain in today’s world, and so we move into the Critical Distance, a rational understanding of scripture or religion. It is possible to move beyond this stage, however, into a Second Naïveté, where we feel that "beyond the desert (rational stage) of criticism, we wish to be called again." Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 349.

38 Fowler, 187-8.

39 Ibid., 187.

40 Ibid., 197.

41 Ibid., 201.

42 Ibid., 207.

43 It seems to me that a practice such as Madhyamaka (a Mahāyāna Buddhist process of analysis) capitalizes on this phenomenon. Here, we use conceptual mind extensively in order to eventually transcend conceptual mind. Pushing the mind to its limits is one way to reach an experience of shunyata, or emptiness.

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Emma Sartwell, MDiv, CYT | Emma is a registered psychotherapist and adjunct professor at Naropa University, where she earned her Master of Divinity degree. She combines Somatic Experiencing, parts work, holistic healing, and mindfulness into her sessions, which focus on nervous system regulation, trauma integration, attachment patterning, inner critics and inner children, and ancestral healing. Her deepest joy is helping people feel more integrated, authentic, and connected.