Scott Peck's “Four Stages of Spiritual Growth”

By Dale Short

Some new ideas make a light bulb go on in a corner of your brain, illuminating some
small part of the world in a way it hasn’t looked to you, before.

Other new ideas are like a claw hammer smacking the side of a Rubik’s Cube: scattering
all the little tiles of your brain into a new configuration, permanently changing the way
you analyze the world around you.

The “Four Stages of Spiritual Growth” concept, from psychiatrist and author Scott Peck,
was a Rubik’s Cube type of moment for me.

Peck explains the idea about halfway through his 1987 book The Different Drum:
Community Making and Peace, and I remember re-reading that chapter over and over
because it seemed to answer so many questions I had about human behavior. Finally I
put a yellow sticky-note to mark the section, and I’ve thumbed it so many times over the
years that the yellow note has turned mostly gray.

Peck arrived at the concept after years of seeing a puzzling phenomenon in his private
psychiatry practice. As he describes it in The Different Drum:

“If people who were religious came to me in pain and trouble, they frequently left
therapy as atheists, agnostics, or at least skeptics. On the other hand, if atheists,
agnostics, or skeptics came to me in pain or difficulty and became fully engaged [in
therapy], they frequently left it as deeply religious people.

“Same therapy, same therapist, successful but utterly different outcomes from a religious
point of view. It didn’t compute—until I realized that we are not all in the same place
spiritually.”

The place we are in, Peck theorized, is one where we’re perpetually bouncing around in
four distinct categories of spiritual involvement, that he assigns these shorthand names:

Stage I: Chaotic, antisocial

Stage II: Formal, institutional
Stage III: Skeptic, individual
Stage IV: Mystic, communal

Nearly all young children and about 20 percent of adults are at Stage I, Peck estimated.
Recognizing no higher authority outside their own will, they are “essentially
manipulative and self-serving. They really don’t give a hoot about anyone else.”

Depending on their individual personalities and environments, these adults with their
inner chaos tend toward one of two main fates. They either get in trouble with the law or
alternately, as Peck writes (with no small degree of prescience):

“Some may be quite disciplined in the service of expediency and their own ambition,
and so may rise to positions of considerable prestige and power, even to become
presidents or influential preachers.”

When these chaotic lives hit rock bottom, many people commit suicide. But many more
of them undergo what mainstream religion calls “conversion,” or being “saved.” Their
reasoning at the time, Peck suggests, boils down to something like this:

“Anything is preferable to this chaos. I’m willing to do anything to liberate myself from
this chaos, even to submit myself to an institution for my governance.”

Other Stage I souls desperate for governance find it in the strict regimentation of the
prison system or in the military, and can function well for years or decades as long as
someone other than themselves makes the big decisions about the primary direction of
their lives. Likewise, many persist for a lifetime in Stage II as faithful church members,
often with occasional spells of what fundamentalists call “backsliding”: reverting for
brief periods into sin and chaos, only to be “saved” again.

Many others find the intellectual yoke of Stage II increasingly cumbersome—eventually

asking themselves, in the words of Peck, “Who needs this fuddy-duddy old Church with
its silly superstitions?”

At that point they make the break to Stage III: skeptic, individual. It’s worth noting, I
think, that the group of people most strongly reviled by the Religious Right in recent
decades as enemies of Christianity, the “secular humanists,” fall under this category. But
if Peck’s description of them is accurate, secular humanists are getting an unfair rap:

“Although frequently ‘nonbelievers,’ people in Stage III are generally more spiritually
developed than many content to remain in Stage II. Although individualistic, they are
not the least bit antisocial. To the contrary, they are often deeply involved in and
committed to social causes. They make up their own minds about things, and are no
more likely to believe everything they read in the paper than they are to believe that it is
necessary to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior (as opposed to Buddha or Mao or
Socrates) in order to be saved.

“They make loving, intensely dedicated parents. As skeptics they are often scientists,
and as such are highly submitted to principle. Indeed, what we call the scientific method
is a collection of conventions and procedures that have been designed to combat our
extraordinary capacity to deceive ourselves. Advanced Stage III men and women are
active truth seekers.”

But if we seek truth for long enough, Peck says, we gradually find that the truth is more
complicated, often even contradictory, than we could ever have imagined in the
beginning of our quest. We find, not “truth,” but “truths,” and occasionally glimpse the
“Big Picture” only to realize that it’s too magnificent and mysterious for even the
greatest human minds to fully comprehend.

It’s at that point, if we persevere into the mystery, that we ironically find ourselves
dumped back into the pesky business of religion again—but with a big difference.

“Mystics acknowledge the enormity of the unknown,” Peck writes, “but rather than
being frightened by it, they seek to penetrate ever deeper into it that they may
understand more—even with the realization that the more they understand, the greater
the mystery will become. They love mystery, in dramatic contrast to those in Stage II,
who need simple, clear-cut dogmatic structures and have little taste for the unknown and
unknowable.

“While Stage IV men and women will enter religion in order to approach mystery,
people in Stage II, to a considerable extent, enter religion in order to escape from it.
Thus there is the confusion of people entering not only into religion but into the same
religion—and sometimes the same denomination—not only for different motives but for
totally opposite motives. It makes no sense until we come to understand the roots of
religious pluralism in terms of developmental stages.”

In the remainder of Peck’s chapter in The Different Drum he touches on several

important caveats to this general structure of spiritual stages: there are gradations
between stages; people frequently bounce back and forth between two stages
indefinitely; we tend to feel at ease with people one stage below us, but intimidated by
those one stage above, etc. But one disclaimer, in particular, gave me the goosebump
sensation of self-recognition:

“No matter how far we develop spiritually, we retain in ourselves vestiges of the
previous stages through which we have come, just as we retain our vestigial appendix.”

Small wonder, I thought, that my own spiritual suitcase invariably feels so haphazardly
arranged, like having a large wardrobe that mostly doesn’t match, even as I settle into
the joy lately of feeling truly at home in my own skin, for better or worse, for the first
time in my life. I’ve packed and unpacked my spiritual bag so many times that, by all
rights, it should be worn completely out.

At first, I seemed to have skipped Stage I altogether. My family was so intent on

churchgoing that I was born into a pattern of fanatical Stage II attendance. We were
there, literally, every time the doors opened. Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday
night, deacons’ meetings, cemetery committee meetings, choir practice, Youth Group,
Vacation Bible School, seven nights a week during our twice-yearly revivals, and more.

Looking back, it’s clear to me that my brain and heart made the leap to Stage III several
years before I was old enough to do anything about it, such as move out of my parents’
house. There were just too many things about Christianity that didn’t add up for me, not
least of which was the assumption that Jesus and hate-mongers like Bull Connor were
playing for the same team. By the time I finally left home to go to college, I had enough
of religion to last me several lifetimes.

If I could graph the years since then, my spiritual life would look like the trajectory of a
pinball through a machine...with one exception. I’ve never been back to Stage II, even
though I’ve overcome my phobia of churches and spent a great deal of time in them.
Sometimes I even seek them out when I’m traveling, the same way I manage to drop
into strange libraries in towns I pass through. But I can’t picture myself ever joining a
church again.

A handful of times, while caroming around the freedom of Stage III, I’ve crashed and
burned and come to rest in the hellish, chaotic Stage I that was denied me, growing up.
Which I guess is the inverse corollary to author Tom Robbins’ famous statement, that it’s
never too late to have a happy childhood.

Each time that I survived and rebounded I seemed to be, counter-intuitively, a little
farther along on the Stage III path: clutching my worn copy of Alan Watts’ 1951 book
The Wisdom of Uncertainty. If Watts was right, and uncertainty truly was the beginning
of wisdom, then I was becoming one wise son of a gun.

I’m not yet at the Stage IV that Scott Peck describes, but there are times I feel I’m close
enough to get a glimpse of its landscape, the way Moses was granted the mixed blessing
of seeing the Promised Land from a high vantage point though he could never cross
over.

I know it’s Stage IV that I’m seeing because Peck’s description of it matches exactly
what I feel, for a sparse if crystalline handful of minutes across months or years:

“I have labeled Stage IV communal as well as mystical,” he writes, “not because all
mystics or even a majority of them live in communes but because among human beings
they are the ones most aware that the whole world is a community and realize that what
divides us into warring camps is precisely the lack of this awareness. Having become
practiced at emptying themselves of preconceived notions and prejudices and able to
perceive the invisible underlying fabric that connects everything, they do not think in
terms of factions or blocs or even national boundaries; they know this to be one world.”

But that light at the end of the tunnel is also the basis for one of Peck’s most stern
disclaimers:

“It is during the process of conversion from Stage III to Stage IV that people generally
first become conscious that there is such a thing as spiritual growth. There is a potential
pitfall in this consciousness, however, and that is the notion some have at this point that
they themselves can direct the process. ‘If I take a bit of Sufi dancing here,’ they tell
themselves, ‘and visit a Trappist monastery there, and do a bit of Zen meditation as well,
I will reach nirvana.’

“But that’s not how it operates, as the myth of Icarus tells us. Icarus wanted to reach the
sun (which symbolizes God). So out of feathers and wax he built himself a pair of
wings. But as soon as he even began to get close to the sun, its heat melted his man-
made wings and he plummeted to his destruction. One meaning of this myth, I believe,
is that we cannot get to God under our own steam. We must allow God to do the
directing.”

It’s at the very end of Peck’s chapter, though, that he lays down the ultimate caveat
about this Stages of Spiritual Growth business. After he gave a talk on the concept at a
psychiatry symposium, the speaker who followed him added this commentary:

“I think Scotty’s stages have a good deal of validity, and I suspect that I will be using
them in my practice. But I want you to remember that what Scotty calls Stage IV is the
beginning.”

Well, good.

Lord knows, I’m ready to get started.

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