So the call to holiness is the call to find the Kingdom of God within us – to find His Spirit in the Temple of our own bodies. Throughout the centuries Christian authors have attempted to map the spiritual path to the inner vision of the Kingdom. The mapmakers necessarily had to base the maps they drew on their own experience. Since they generally did not realize that different human beings   begin the spiritual path at different levels of awareness, the mapmakers generally assumed that their experience could be   duplicated by others.

The most traditional of these Christian maps was drawn by Dionysios about 500 CE. Dionysios, following an even earlier   tradition mentioned by Clement of Alexandria in the second century, divides the path into three stages of inner growth: (1) purgative (purification from the grossest forms of egotism and selfishness); (2) illuminative (the breaking in upon the person of greater spiritual insights and understandings); and (3) unitive (union with God). Dionysios, however, proposed a second five-stage map based upon what he saw as the five levels of prayer: (1) vocal prayer, (2) mental prayer, (3) prayer of recollection, (4) prayer of quiet beyond thought, and (5) prayer of union with God. There have been many other attempts at mapping with any number of different stages.

There are two basic problems with these traditional maps to the Kingdom. First, all of them have been partial, mapping only portions of the spiritual path. For example, they have generally ignored the growth of consciousness in children, adolescents and sometimes in the ordinary Christian adult. With respect to adults, the mapmakers have assumed that all Christians begin the spiritual path at more or less the same level of consciousness as themselves and so can be expected to duplicate the mapmaker’s experience. This, of course, is not true. The path of each person is unique.