If you've ever looked into the subject of spirituality in any depth, you'll know just how many different perspectives there are out there. On the one hand you have mainstream religions, on the other smaller 'religions', and on the third psychologists and therapists with vastly differing points of view, all claiming to be right. It is a confusing and complex area to study.

As luck would have it there is a relatively new branch of psychology, called Transpersonal Psychology, which has compared all of these models. This started as the work of an American academic, Ken Wilber and is very comprehensive. Wilber came up with a model of spirituality that encompasses all of the major models and provides comparisons between them. In this article, I'll describe to you the basics of Wilber's model as an introduction to the subject of spirituality. If you want to read more about this then read his excellent and very readable book 'No Boundary'. For a more academic description of the model you can read 'Integral Psychology'.

In simple terms, 'spirituality' is a feeling of connection to all other things. This is sometimes phrased as being connected to 'God', a supreme being and sometimes to everything being a single entity. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of the spiritual path is to realise that everything is one and reach a state of 'unity consciousness'. Unity consciousness is described with names like Nirvana and Samadhi.

Wilber's model consists of a number of stages of personal development to reach the goal of 'Unity Consciousness'. These are 'levels of consciousness' where we are consciously aware of different aspects of our environment. He advises that it is best to progress through these stages in order to truly realise most of your self. Different people start at different levels of consciousness. Similarly approaches to spiritual development tend to have starting assumptions as to what level its followers are at when they start. Finding an approach appropriate to your starting level is key to success. At all levels of personal development, you retain access to the skills of the prior levels. For example, even though you have an integrated ego, you can take on a persona for certain social situations, its just that you are now free to make choices about when to use it, and when to be authentically yourself.

Most people, when beginning the journey of personal development, find themselves at the level of consciousness where they have a conscious 'persona' and an unconscious 'shadow', to use the Jungian terms (though every branch of therapy has its own words). This is often referred to as Neurosis (or in extreme cases, Psychosis).

This happens to everyone - we all grow up in an environment where we have to compromise our childhood wants to meet the expectations of our parents, peers and society in general. One of the most obvious examples of this is that girls are expected to behave in one way, and boys in a different way. Inevitably any trait, for example aggression or showing emotion, which does not fit that culturally determined model will be repressed. When the child represses it, it does not vanish, it is moved into unconsciousness, the shadow, where it occasionally springs forth at just the right moments to sabotage your life. There are many mechanisms for repression. The most common is the tightening of the muscles - as an example, remember the last time you held back tears, to hold them back you have to constrict the muscles in your throat. If you do it often enough, the muscles take on a permanent tension and affect your posture and the way you move.

What is left over is the persona. The persona is the narrow set of desirable qualities that you have left yourself. There will be aspects of you persona related to your gender, to your career, to your social class, to a role as a mother or father, as a child. In fact there will be aspects of your persona for every role in life that you have taken. One of the common symptoms of the shadow is that undesired qualities are projected onto other people. Since the individual denies ownership of the 'bad' qualities, they are seen to exist within other people. Hence, your own desire for something may be projected as your obligation to someone else to do that. Failure to admit to yourself that it's your own desire that drives you, leads to obligation, and obligations usually lead to conflict.

The task then at this first level of personal development is to integrate the shadow and your persona to form a complete and authentic ego - accept all of the things that you have historically pushed into your persona - allow yourself to accept that sometimes you are bored, angry or whatever. To identify what needs to be accepted, you may need some sort of external help, a role often taken by psychotherapy in recent years. There are other alternatives, though a good place to start for yourself is to notice that your shadow wants the opposite of what you consciously want. If you hate something, accept that part of the shadow likes it. As you do this you'll begin to realize that you control your own states and world, and that life becomes a case of what I can do, rather than what other people do to me, and that is the first step of liberation. As for the past - the best thing about it is that it's over!!!!

This second stage of personal development is about re-integrating the mind and the body. For most people, they will have mentally split off their body from their ego at an early age. This may have been because of the body's role in expressing emotion, and subsequently repressing it. It may have been because of a fear of death. It may have been because of pain. Nevertheless, you might ask yourself if you are truly in touch with your body.

The splitting off of the body means that we tend to treat it like a slave, not with the respect it deserves. Naturally the body fights back, usually in the form of injury or illness.

As we mentioned in the previous section, the body is also a mechanism for repressing unwanted emotion through muscle tension. If that happens frequently enough it becomes a regular tension, with one set of muscles trying to show emotion, and a second set pulling in the opposite direction trying to suppress that emotion. Stalemate results and lots of energy gets used in the process.

As you dissolve these muscular blocks, you'll begin to feel more alive, more in touch with the involuntary processes and emotions that run your body moment by moment. As you become integrated with your body you'll be more aware of its needs, and as they are fulfilled you'll feel happier and be healthier and more balanced in your life, and increasingly able to live in the moment, rather than the past and future that is the playing field of the ego. Also you'll begin to notice the flow of 'life force energy' through your body, an important element in later stages of development. At this point, you're on the edge of the transpersonal.

At this point in our personal development we begin to enter the realms of what Wilber terms the 'Transpersonal'. This is based on an assumption that deep inside our mind-body is a link to a consciousness that is much wider than merely ourselves.

When one enters the transpersonal realm, you begin to understand that there is something more than your emotions, feelings body and mind. Indeed with practice you begin to see all of these as you might a dog or a cat, or something else external to your body. At such a point you see yourself as all things - that all things are intimately connected. Since you are all things and not merely your body, you also begin to glimpse that there is a certain part of you that is immortal - not your body or mind, but your soul. People who reach this phase of personal development lose their fear of death.

This may seem to be not easy to understand. If you imagine that you suddenly moved to a new country, had an accident and forgot everything about your previous life, then would you still be you? There is something beyond memories, body, social connections and mind that uniquely makes you 'I'. That in turn, is deeply connected to all other 'I's.

Much of the communication with the transpersonal unconscious occurs in the form of symbols. The most obvious example of this is when we dream, albeit relates to meditation too. These symbols, or archetypes, are common across all people, and include shapes such as pentagrams, images such as angels and demons, and objects such as candles. These symbols seem to be programmed into our minds and are believed to have a fairly consistent meaning for all people, rooted in the evolution of the mind.

There are many practical benefits of this phase of development beyond happiness. It is often reported that as you begin to be more connected to everything around you, you may begin to intuit things about them. You become more sensitive to their feelings, may begin to be able to read their thoughts, and begin to intuit things about the past and the future. In short, the realm of psychic phenomenon is entered.

There are two major aspects to developing this level of consciousness. The first is what is known as 'witness meditation', which is the idea that you stand back from your body-mind and watch your emotions, thoughts and feelings as they occur, and understand that you are more than these. Continued practice leads to the transpersonal states. The second aspect is the utilization of the archetypes of the mind to establish a communication channel with the transpersonal unconscious. It will often be linked with some sort of meditation or trance work, and may be linked to the phenomenon of 'Kundalini awakening' (This is the yoga version, albeit it exists in other traditions under different names).

Unity consciousness is the highest spiritual level of consciousness and the point where we, instead of observing the connectedness of all things, become all things. Unity consciousness is about being in a state where we are present in the moment, and only that, and that we accept all things that happen in that moment. There is an inherent resistance to unity. The irony is that trying to be in unity, means that we have to imagine a world where we are in unity, which in turn prevents us from being in the moment, which is required to be in unity. Hence, any move to reach unity consciousness is resistance. Once this is realized, unity consciousness will happen.

The path to Unity Consciousness is one of meditation.

Ian Gregory, 2004