Theos-Talk Archives (October 2006 Message tt00207)

"There are four major stages of spiritual unfolding: belief, faith, 
direct experience, and permanent adaptation: you can believe in Spirit, 
you can have faith in Spirit, you can directly experience Spirit, you 
can become Spirit….Meditation is not primarily uncovering the repressed 
unconscious, but allowing the emergence of higher domains--which usually 
leaves the lower, repressed domains still lower, and still 
repressed….Well, the point, of course, is to take up integral practice 
as the only sound and balanced way to proceed….If you are interested in 
genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher 
and begin practice. Without practice, you will never move beyond the 
phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences. You will never 
evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent 
adaptation. You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory 
of your own higher estate, a tourist of your own true Self."

--Ken Wilber, One Taste
http://people.uncw.edu/maclennant/Vision/Quoteslines.htm