Envision a "Soul Navigation System" - Part 3- PathFinder
"If the path be beautiful, let us not ask where it leads" - Anatole France
A seeker is standing outside his house under the lights of the rising sun, looking at the mountain peak. From the peak, he snatches away his focus and starts scanning the mountain, acknowledging the path that can take him up to the peak. What he did was what we refer to as a process of pathfinding. But when it comes to the journey desired by the soul, what does this peak look like? Let us try to scan the path by identifying the milestones and mapping them to recognize the geometry of the path.
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay
The Crucial Stages
Although we may refer to the intermediate destinations as crucial milestones, they should be treated as significant stages in life. You may ask, “What is the difference between them?”. The idea behind using the word “stage” is that a stage feels like a place where one is standing above the watchers, difficult to climb, but points to many achievements on the way to reaching the stage. Metaphorically, a milestone appears like a location on a map where, once reached, you only feel contentment. Due to these reasons, referring them to stages makes more sense. Carl Jung, the well-known philosopher, has recommended a path of individuation. The path of individuation focuses on self and becoming better. However, human evolution does not stop there. It continues with the path of oneness. It’s a cycle of knowing and then, after knowing, unknowing everything. We all start our journey as fools and end it as fools. Consider the following metaphorical diagram, and let us now look at those stages.
The Unawakened
This is the stage of life where we are under influence—the influence of the parents, the family, the neighborhood, and the society. It is our mindless involvement in cultivating ignorance (wishfully or not). We believe and get deceived by the reality itself. We spend our lives on matters that do not matter—the endless cycle of chasing something such as dreams, desires, lust, greed, egoistic fulfillment, conflicts, and false doctrines. This stage keeps us in lower vibrational frequencies that keep us under the law of the jungle. The soul compass guides us towards the stepping stone lessons. However, due to a lack of knowledge, we think of stones as blockers, and we divert. We correct the path towards comfort and feel the security till the same stone appears as a blocker. The unawakened can heal the wounds only at the surface level. At the end of these cyclic patterns, a transition starts. Let’s call it a breaking point.
The Self-Aware
At the breaking point, the soul becomes aware of the cycles. The soul starts craving for more knowledge. As the surface-level healing was not enough, the need for awareness about the wound, its cause, and going deep level for finding solutions is a natural urge. There is a lot of learning in this phase. It's like one gets bombarded with a ton of data, and the soul is learning how to process it. The end of the stage forces a soul to transition towards acceptance of the understanding. However, the soul is still searching for proof, because the mind deceives in believing what it can not rationally understand.
The Self-Accepted
The soul has to navigate the ups and downs of validating and filtering the information that no longer serves for deep-level healing and inner peace. One must acknowledge the negative polarity of the soul and slowly but gradually work towards the elimination of it. It’s also an acknowledgment of what a soul is worth. The onus on the soul is to learn about the presence of the darkness, acknowledging that it exists, remain still, but move towards the guiding light.
The Self-Respected
This is the stage of cultivating courage. Courage to create boundaries around the things that do not align with the soul’s higher purpose. These boundaries, when enforced, provide a sense of respect to the soul. One must learn in this stage not to feed any energy to darkness. A soul must shed all the layers of ego, live with integrity, and the divine wisdom of the consciousness. It won’t be wrong to say it is a stage of trial and error. Because most people fail at taming their ego. It is very hard to even recognize going beyond the identity.
The Self-Loved
In this stage, it’s time to learn the difference between becoming selfish and self-focused. It’s a stage of loving the self, just like one loves another soul. A soul must remember the worthiness of existence and nurture it, even if the soul does not desire the same. We must start experiencing the reflection of the divine. It requires us to have deep, unconditional compassion for ourselves. Imagine a love expressed by a mother, but not for the baby, for the mother herself. At the end of the stage, a soul is forced to think beyond themselves, but still, by taking care of themselves.
The One
At this point, the goal of the soul is to become one with self, the energies around, and with GOD. Of course, one may not become GOD, but one may become like a GOD. By this time, we learn that all things are interconnected. At the deepest level, every soul, object, thought, and energy is part of a single divine source. There is no true separation—what we think, say, or do to others, we ultimately do to ourselves.
One must move beyond the illusion of individuality and recognize the sacred unity of all existence. When we live in alignment with the Law of Oneness, we cultivate compassion, empathy, and love, knowing that every act of kindness or harm ripples through the whole. Understanding Oneness brings deep peace, because in truth, we are not alone. We are all expressions of the same divine consciousness, walking each other home.
What next?
No human history has mentioned anything about what happens next after achieving oneness. However, if we think logically, we humans are still capable of discovering ways to start moving towards the journey of the soul, not only at the individual level, but also at a collective level. The same stages also apply at the collective level, offering us millennial opportunities to anchor humanity towards peace, prosperity, and evolution for all. I am convinced that just like individual spiritual journeys, collective spiritual journeys have a tremendous potential for planetary healing as well as achieving tools for becoming super-humans, such as mind powers, space-time powers, energy and elemental control powers, super consciousness, and other divine powers.
Conclusion
We saw how we all can shape our life journey, going through various stages. We are a species of infinite potential. However, the current state of humanity has caged itself in an invisible prison. Being there in the prison, we all have accepted and started liking the prison. However, it’s just like for some people, trauma becomes medicine. In reality, it is not a medicine, it’s an addiction, a crime. It is up to us to spend our lives forever in the loop of misalignments and misjudgements, or liberate our souls to achieve greatness.
Envision a "Soul Navigation System" -Part 1
We humans have been on a journey for ages. We have used familiar landmarks, the sun, stars, and natural terrain for orientation, and even for sailing the seas. Later, we started using magnetic as well as gyrocompass, using the Earth's rotation to find true north. We invented radar, sonar, and an advanced inertial navigation system. A “GPS - Global Posi…
Envision a "Soul Navigation System" - Part 2- Soul Themes
In part 1, we started our journey of envisioning a “soul navigation system”. I encourage you to read it here if you somehow landed directly on this post. In this installment, we are focusing on themes of life. Themes of life are the manifestations of “
I really appreciated the way this piece explored the soul’s journey through distinct stages. The way you described the transitions
from self-awareness to self-love, and finally to oneness
felt very resonant and honest. The mountain metaphor and the mention of the collective path expanding beyond the individual were powerful.
One part stayed with me: “We all start our journey as fools and end it as fools.” It made me pause.
Because when I ask myself what I end up with, I’m not sure I can name it. Clarity? Maybe. Foolishness? Maybe not. But honestly… I don’t feel I’m standing fully in either. I don’t feel like I’ve arrived. It’s more like I’m always beginning again. Always in motion. And maybe that’s what makes it real
not needing to stand in a definition, but just being with it.
Thank you for opening a space that invites this kind of reflection.