We have been on quite a journey with our faith and spirituality over the years. Like many others, we began firmly rooted in the dualistic certainties of Stage 1 religion. The claims and doctrines we were taught seemed straightforward and unassailable – this was truth, that was falsehood. The authorities and institutions providing these teachings commanded our trust and obedience. We felt secure in the simplicity of clearly defined rights and wrongs, saved and unsaved, blessed and cursed. There was comfort in the black and white thinking that organized the world into us vs. them.
However, this simplistic Stage 1 could not last forever. As we matured and our lives grew more complex, we found ourselves gravitating towards the promised solutions of Stage 2 pragmatism. Maybe the answers weren’t quite as clear cut, but at least there were step-by-step formulas being marketed for success, happiness, financial prosperity and more. A whole industry of spiritual coaches and programs emerged to meet our new needs. And we eagerly consumed it all – the books, seminars, curricula, viral videos promoting strategies for an optimized life and faith.
Yet even here, doubts began to creep in over time. Despite our earnest efforts, the guaranteed results too often failed to materialize. The motivational messages ringing with certainty one day would seem trite and hollow the next. The ever-changing recommendations from conflicting experts only added to our confusions. Layer upon layer of pragmatism could not mask the deeper mysteries that remained.
It was a true crisis of faith that shoved us through the doors of Perplexity into Stage 3. Maybe it was a shattering personal loss that no trite spiritual slogans could salve. Maybe it was being confronted with history’s injustices perpetrated by religious institutions we had blindly trusted. Or maybe it was simply studying our faith’s origins with open eyes for the first time and realizing how malleable and contingent so many of our “eternal truths” really were.
Whatever the cause, we found ourselves in spiritual free-fall. What had once seemed stable and permanent was now up for deconstruction. No claim was too sacred to be questioned, no authority figure beyond reproach. We became deeply suspicious of institutions and their cynical power plays wrapped in pious justifications. The slick marketing of Stage 2 now seemed profoundly dishonest and obscuring of realitity’s complexities. We craved authentic truth over palliative platitudes.
Stage 3 has been a wilderness that is both destabilizing and invigorating. On one hand, we have felt profoundly alone and unmoored without the comforting structures and certainties we had grown so accustomed to. Our trusted religious communities now strike us as shackles constraining the unfettered pursuit of truth. The constant challenging of outworn assumptions has been alienating at times, as we find ourselves unable to sincerely recite creeds and doctrines without endless caveats.
Yet we have also tasted what a liberation it is to be free from dogmas and indoctrinated narratives that could not withstand scrutiny. To follow questions with integrity rather than suppressing doubts is a bracing tonic for the soul. The spiritual path is no longer about defending foregone conclusions, but being always open to new learnings and perspectives. Our vision has been liberated from the blinders of “us vs them” thinking to honor the kernels of truth present in each human experience.
Yet the loneliness of this desertous Stage stings at times, but we have also found profound freedom in our nomadic journey through the dunes of Perplexity. Without the illusion of permanence and certainty, we can embrace the inherent flux and subjectivity of our experience. Each encounter, each new truth claims can be engaged freshly, neither instantly accepted nor reflexively rejected, but held gently for examination from every angle.
The path has not been easy – we have felt unrooted, disoriented, whiplashed by the tumult of deconstructing so many beliefs and assumptions we once held dear. More than once we have found ourselves longing for the naïve certitudes of Stage 1, or the success-oriented scaffolding of Stage 2’s pragmatism. But then we recall how those old ways also imprisoned us in partial truths, closing us off from deeper wisdom and connection.
In Stage 3, we have cultivated a hearty skepticism of all narratives, dogmas and structures that demands we ceaselessly Question with a capital Q. But this is not mere cynicism – it is in fact celebrating the great Mystery that underwrites existence. For if all were already known and decided from on high, what a small, stale wonder that would be! How much richer to embrace the holy uncertainty, to look upon even our most cherished beliefs as temporary, evolving, contingent.
This is not to say we are perpetually doubting everything or believing nothing at all. That itself would ossify into yet another rigid ideology. Rather, we hold the understandings that ground us lightly, gratefully, provisionally – open to continual interrogation and course correction as new encounters demand. What we enshrine today as sacred may tomorrow be refigured or even discarded when a more luminous wisdom presents itself. The shape of the divine, like the sacred scriptures and philosophies that attempt to articulate it, remains deliciously indefinite, always admitting of new inflections.
From this vantage, we can look back with measured appreciation on the spiritual guides and teachings that have helped sharpen our vision while also transcending their inevitable limitations. The mystics and sages of every tradition become traveling companions rather than conduits for ultimate truth. Their words and lives spark insight without fronting as comprehensive or finalistic. There are no definitive unmediated arrivals, only imperfect maps sketching the always receding horizon.
The road that led us through the borderlands of Stage 3 has been difficult but regenerative. We have been scorched, scoured, remade by the merciless sun and blasting winds of doubt. As familiar landscapes dissolved behind us, whole new vistas over existence’s chaonic fecundity emerged before our eyes. What manifests may seem perpetually in flux, but the generative Ground itself abides in mysterious constancy.
It can be nearly overwhelming at times, this boundless proliferation of perspectives with no unassailable meta-narrative to halt their unfolding fruitfulness. The old hunger for certainty has not been quenched but transfigured into a radically hospitable curiosity, delighting at each new terrain even while letting it too pass unobstructed. We have traded the illusion of arrival for an endless deepening journey into questions—accompanied by the profound peace of embracing what exceeds our comprehension.
This path has allowed us to cultivate a spacious humility, un-clinging to any single formulation of the sacred while drawing sustenance from the entire meadow of wisdom traditions.
From this spacious vantage, we can look back with a newly open-hearted perspective on the partial truths that previously confined us. The once-rigid claims of Stage 1 and Stage 2 now appear as primitive approximations, naturally arising from our spiritual adolescence but not meant to be enshrined as ultimate dogmas. We can honor their power to awaken and orient while also blessing their incompleteness, their inevitable disintegration under the searing light of our maturing discernment.
The Scriptures and teachings that may have previously felt like chains of doctrine now unveil new dimensions of liberating mystery. Those once mistaken for comprehensive maps describing the entirety of the spiritual landscape now illuminate as evocative poems gesturing toward greater vastness. Even as we may still cherish and study these wisdom texts, we hold them distinctly from the primordial, inexhaustible Reality toward which they point with reverent indirection.
From this freed and spacious heart-mind, we find ourselves able to commune with all people of good faith in ways that would have previously felt threatening. Where defensiveness and competitiveness once reigned, we now extend a profound hospitality. Those holding different beliefs are no longer perceived as adversaries in a zero-sum game of ideological supremacy, but as fellow sojourners sharing what wisdom they have been granted while remaining ever-open to learning more.
This openness flows from the recognition that any path is but one ephemeral trajectory through the sacred seamlessness of what radically Is. No traditions or disciplines, however revered, can offer more than a limited cultural translation of the single integrated whole that is ineffably presencing itself trans-locally through a billion billion kaleidoscopic facets. To sanctify one narrative above all others is to idolatrously privilege one refracting beam of light over the mysteries of its source.
And so we seek to lovingly embrace all the variegated humanly crystallizations of Spirit—the path of the Buddha and the way of Christ; the sacraments and ceremonies of every faith; the embodied, earth-cherishing wisdom of Indigenous traditionsand the high philosophical phenomenologies of the literati—all as scintillating shards of the same luminous jewel of isness. Each becalmed awareness and ecstatic utterance discloses an angle on the One, even as the One exceeds every disclosure.
This is the great adventure we have wholeheartedly assented to in Stage 3: a life of ceaseless not-knowing in service of ever-deepening communion with the open secret of present being. Having renounced the mirage of absolute certainty, we now live for radical aliveness, for drinking directly from the well of reality’s infinite transmission rather than clinging to stagnant, reified images of it.
Of course, this does not mean we have abandoned all discernment or dissolved into a mushy relativism. We continue to make earthy, embodied judgments about what serves the blossoming of life and what obstructs it. Holding perspectives lightly does not absolve us of the responsibility to courageously act on our deepest intuitions of justice, beauty and the flourishing of all beings.
But our commitment is always provisionally held, our convictions remaining open to revision in humble dialogue with the perpetually unfolding holy mystery.
It is a tender rootedness in ultimate unsettledness that Stage 3 has birthed within us. We have come to cherish the aporetic tensions, the generative paradoxes, the inexhaustible dynamism of existence itself always outstripping our capacities for conceptual capture. Any view that claimed final ultimacy would simply be one more idolatrous reduction of the infinite to the finite.
And so we live suspended in not-knowing, delighting in the endless play of perspectives, secure in our insecurity about absolute truths. The ceaseless questioning and self-deconstruction that Stage 3 demanded has revealed itself as the very air we breathe, the endless opening that allows for renewal. Having released our white-knuckled grip on certainty, we now move with a profound tranquility, able to withstand all ephemera precisely by not grasping at it.
In this way, the spiritual path reveals itself not as a series of achievements, but as a process of profound unlearning. The desert of doubt turns out to be the koan that blossoms our awakening to the always already present, to reality’s boundless presencing here and now, before and beyond all our ideas about it. The anguished loss of cherished beliefs cracks us open to drink directly from the wellsprings of isness in each instant, without ornament.
Such has been the wondrous dismantling and interminable unknowing that Stage 3 initiated within our being. And yet, even as we have deeply assimilated its lessons, even as Perplexity now courses through our veins as the elixir of life, we cannot help but intuit further depths calling us onward into ever nuevoluming self-transcendence and world-redisclosure. The path remains infinite, the journey always already underway into terrains of spirit we can scarcely imagine from our present shore. All that has died away in this shedding was merely husk, and even the luscious fruit of Not-Knowing we have consumed turns out to be but seed for a grander becoming beyond our wildest dreams.
SUMMARY
People often make lateral transfers between dogmatic Stage 1 and pragmatic Stage 2 religious communities when dissatisfied, without actually progressing to a deeper stage of faith. Progressing from Stage 2 to the perplexing Stage 3 usually requires a faith crisis where the promises and claims of Stage 2 are seen as inadequate. In Stage 3, people doubt and deconstruct religious institutions, authority figures, and truth claims while embracing relativism and a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” It is very difficult for stable Stage 3 communities to form and endure due to challenges around structure, authority, purpose, belonging, and pervasive suspicion, so many walk through Stage 3 alone or in temporary, loose affiliations. Seminary education often precipitates this crisis by exposing the messy history and unsettled questions behind religious doctrines and texts, creating a dilemma where seminary-trained ministers struggle to serve congregations unwilling to embrace Stage 3 perspectives. The spiritual path eventually requires a “descent” into unknowing, doubt and loss of certainty before any potential resurrection or renewal occurs. Stage 3 is seen as an invigorating yet alienating wilderness of deep questioning and commitment to honesty and truth.
KEY POINTS
- People often make “lateral transfers” between Stage 1 (dualistic) and Stage 2 (pragmatic) religious communities when dissatisfied, without actually progressing to a deeper stage of faith.
- Progressing from Stage 2 to Stage 3 (Perplexity) usually requires a faith crisis where the promises and claims of Stage 2 religion are seen as inadequate.
- In Stage 3, people doubt and deconstruct religious institutions, authority figures, and truth claims. They embrace relativism and operate with a “hermeneutic of suspicion.”
- It is very difficult for stable Stage 3 communities to form and endure due to challenges around structure, authority, purpose, belonging, and the pervasive suspicion.
- Many walk through Stage 3 alone or in temporary, loose affiliations rather than stable communities.
- Seminary education often precipitates a crisis by exposing the messy history and unsettled questions behind religious doctrines and texts.
- This creates a dilemma where seminary-trained ministers struggle to serve congregations unwilling to embrace Stage 3 perspectives.
- The spiritual path eventually requires a “descent” into unknowing, doubt and loss of certainty before any potential resurrection or renewal occurs.
- Stage 3 is seen as a wilderness of deep questioning and alienation that is nonetheless invigorating for its honesty and commitment to truth.
