How to Reach Enlightenment: The 7 Levels of Soul Awareness

Claudiu Bulaceanu, PhD

The question of how to reach enlightenment has been asked for as long as human beings have noticed they are more than their bodies. Most answers to how to achieve enlightenment describe a technique. Meditate this way, follow this teacher, keep this discipline. Very few describe what a soul actually passes through on the way, which is the part that decides whether the technique does anything.

After more than 25 years of measuring soul vibration in people from more than 40 countries, I work with a scale of seven levels of soul awareness, and enlightenment is the seventh. This page sets out the seven levels, where the Buddhist stages of enlightenment fit on them, where most of humanity is standing at present, and the three real paths by which souls have moved up through the levels to the top. It also names the foundational work all three paths require, which is the part most articles on enlightenment leave out.

What Enlightenment Is

Technically, enlightenment means a soul's awareness has stabilised at the vibration of the seventh chakra, the crown. It is not a peak experience, a permanent state of bliss, or the dissolution of the personality into nothing. It is a specific organisation of consciousness in which the personality and the soul are fully aligned and the soul operates through the personality without the friction that usually exists between them. I have written a full, measurable definition separately, and the framework behind it is on my spiritual concepts page.

From the outside, an enlightened soul still has a body, preferences, and a place in the world. The difference is internal. The constant inner conflict between conditioned reaction and deeper knowing has resolved, and the wisdom that appears in glimpses for everyone else is reliably available. To become enlightened is to complete the climb through the seven levels below. Reaching the top in a single lifetime is uncommon. Most souls progress over many lives, a level or two at a time, and that is the normal shape of the journey rather than a failure of it.

Paths to reach enlightenment

The 7 Levels of Soul Awareness

Each level corresponds to one chakra, one dimension of vibration, and one band on the vibration chart I publish. What changes from level to level is how the soul perceives Creation and what it can do inside it. These are the levels of enlightenment as I measure them, though only the seventh is enlightenment itself. The levels are not a ranking of good and bad people. They are seven different sizes of the world a soul is able to see.

Level 1: Ground, the Awareness of Survival

At the first level the soul perceives Creation as a place of threat and scarcity, and it acts to stay alive. Fear about safety, money, health and death decides most of what the person does, and material dependencies hold the attention on the body. What is available at this level, once its material clears, is being grounded, self-reliant and connected with Nature, which is the foundation every level above needs. What remains is everything above.

Level 2: Attachment, the Awareness of Bonds

At the second level the soul perceives the world through its relationships. Identity is held in the people closest to it, and the shadow of that is possessiveness, obsession, longing and anxiety about losing them. Cleared, the same level is tenderness, peace and generosity to family and close friends. The soul at this level can love, but only what it can hold.

Level 3: Will, Where Most of Humanity Stands

At the third level the soul perceives the world through the self. This is the level of ego, will and personal power, and its shadow is anger, pride, frustration, apathy, fear of judgement and attachment to the material. Its cleared form is reason, courage and the determination to grow. By my measurements the grand average soul vibration of humanity is 3.4 at present, which places the average person at this level, and it is why the world as a whole is described as 3D. Most people who begin a spiritual path begin here, and most of the difficulty of the path is the difficulty of leaving it.

Level 4: Heart, the Awareness of Connection

At the fourth level the soul begins to perceive that it is not separate. The shadow is isolation, an inability to forgive, and grudges that survive for decades. The cleared form is love, empathy, gratitude, trust and joy that does not depend on circumstances. This is the level of the higher 4D souls whose numbers are rising quickly at present, and it is the level where most spiritual awakenings do their main work, which is why the crisis of awakening lands here.

Level 5: Integrity, the Awareness of Truth

At the fifth level the soul perceives the gap between what it says and what it is, and cannot tolerate it. Hidden agendas, judgements of others and the intellectual pride of being right surface to be cleared. What is available is communication with integrity, mercy, openness, and the ability to hold to a principle when it costs something. Souls at this level often produce visible changes in their outer lives, because arrangements built on pretence stop being possible.

Level 6: Wisdom, the Awareness of Causes

At the sixth level the soul perceives why things happen. The shadow is a lack of trust in its own seeing, a habit of handing decisions to others, and attachment to ideas about spirituality in place of the thing itself. Cleared, the level is acceptance, full compassion, higher understanding and devotion. The souls I have identified at this level in history include several close disciples of the Buddha and figures revered across the traditions, and I have written about how hard the lessons of acceptance and compassion actually are in practice.

Level 7: Unity, Enlightenment

At the seventh level the soul perceives Creation as one field and itself as part of it, while remaining in a body in a material world. What remains to clear is small: the last attachments that survived everything below. What is available is unity with God and energy, stillness, presence, unconditional love, and a concern for humanity that replaces concern for the self. This is enlightenment, and it is the level of Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda and Yogananda.

Where the Buddhist Four Stages of Enlightenment Fit

Search for the stages of enlightenment and nearly every result describes the four stages of the Theravada tradition: the stream-enterer, the once-returner, the non-returner, and the arahant. These come from the Pali canon and describe a practitioner's progress in terms of the fetters released at each stage and the number of rebirths remaining.

The four stages are real and I have no quarrel with them. What they describe, in my reading of the scale, is the final approach: the movement through the upper levels toward the seventh. A stream-enterer has already left the third level well behind. The Buddhist map is good about the last part of the journey and silent about the first part, which is where almost everyone actually is. The seven levels cover the whole distance, from survival awareness to unity, and that is the difference between the two maps rather than a disagreement between them.

The seven factors of awakening that the same tradition teaches, mindfulness, investigation, energy, joy, tranquillity, concentration and equanimity, are not stages. They are qualities to be cultivated at every level, and they are as useful at the third as at the sixth.

Where Humanity Is Now

From my research, the average is 3.4 (chakra scale) and was 3.6 before 2020. The drop reflects the pressure of the years since, and it is one reason the number of fully enlightened souls incarnated on Earth has fallen from roughly 7,000 a few years ago to between 3,000 and 4,000 now. At the same time the population of higher 4D souls is growing fast. They are the ones who will carry the shift from 3D to 4D awareness, and the upheavals of the present are the clearing of older, denser energy that has to happen before that shift can settle. Each soul decides, consciously or not, which side of it to stand on. The wider picture of that shift is the subject of my article on spiritual ascension.

The Three Real Paths Up the Levels

Every serious tradition has its answer to how the levels are climbed, and the answers differ enough that a seeker can spend years confused about which to follow. From studying the lives of those who reached the seventh level, I have come to recognise three real paths. Most of what is written on the subject is variation inside them.

Path One: Living Fully Aware

The first path is the one originally intended for ordinary humanity: live with the constant, embodied recognition that you are a soul using a body to experience this world. Not as an idea from a book but as a felt truth carried into every moment. It has no formal procedures and it has its own discipline, which is the discipline of presence itself. The practitioner observes every experience as material for awareness, pauses before reaction and asks what the soul is actually saying, meets people and events as they are without judgement, and lives from the felt sense that everything is connected.

The historical example is Rama, hero of the Ramayana, who lived before 1000 BCE. He went with the flow of events, did what needed to be done even when it required battle, refused to judge those who wronged him, and stood his ground with compassion. He is not recorded as practising formal meditation or ascetic disciplines. He lived a life of such complete awareness that the awareness became the path. Most people who attempt this path fail it by mentalising it. The simplicity is a different kind of demand, not an absence of demand.

Path Two: The Structured Spiritual Path

The second path is for those who recognise that the unstructured awareness of Path One is not where they currently are, and who therefore need formal practices, procedures and teachers to move them toward it. This is the path of meditation, initiation, sacred music, mantras, mudras, asanas, and the slow work of clearing the system enough that real awareness becomes possible.

Those who reach the seventh level by this route generally pass through the same major movements: spiritual awakening, in which the personality begins recognising the soul as the deeper identity; releasing the limiting beliefs held in the subconscious, which is what allows everything else to function; opening the chakras through sustained practice; kundalini awakening and rising through the chakras until the energy stabilises at the seventh; and enlightenment as the final integration. On this path a genuine spiritual master is not optional. The dangers of doing it wrong are real, and the perception required at the advanced stages is too subtle to develop reliably alone. Buddha, Lao Tzu, Vivekananda and Yogananda walked this path, with different traditions and methods.

Path Three: The Devotional Path

The third path is rare and the surface description hides what actually happens. The practitioner devotes themselves so completely to a higher being, a deity, a master or a divine principle, that over time the original soul departs and a higher, already enlightened soul takes over the body. The body continues, the personality continues in a transformed form, and the soul that lived the earlier life is no longer the soul that completes it. From the outside this is described as enlightenment through devotion. At soul level it is a soul replacement, the same mechanism as a walk-in transition reached through devotion rather than other circumstances.

The historical example is Ramakrishna, who devoted himself entirely to Kali, Rama and Krishna, explored several traditions, and whose transformation took the form of an enlightened soul taking over his body over time. This path cannot be willed. The complete devotion it requires is itself rare, and the soul-level agreements that allow the transition are not under the personality's control. It exists, it has produced enlightened beings, and it deserves to be understood honestly rather than romanticised.

The Foundation Beneath All Three Paths

Here is what most articles on enlightenment leave out, and it decides whether decades of practice produce results or only the appearance of results. All three paths share one requirement underneath their techniques: the release of the limiting beliefs held in the subconscious. These beliefs are absorbed in childhood from family, education, religion, society, inherited through family lines, installed by traumatic experience, and reinforced by years of unexamined repetition. They run beneath conscious thought and steer perception, decision and reaction before the rational mind knows anything is happening.

Path One cannot work if the awareness it requires is constantly hijacked by unconscious beliefs. Path Two cannot work if meditation, mantras and kundalini practice are happening on top of an unreleased belief structure. Path Three cannot complete if devotion is intellectualised rather than embodied, which is what happens when beliefs about worth, surrender or trust are still operating underneath.

I have watched many sincere practitioners spend years on meditation, sacred rituals and grounding practices without raising their level much, because they neglected this layer. The techniques were real. The beliefs they were practising on top of were also real, and the beliefs were the stronger force. A focused limiting beliefs release session reaches what self-inquiry and standard practice cannot, because the deepest beliefs live at energetic layers the conscious mind does not have direct access to. This is also why soul growth moves quickly for some people and slowly for others despite equal effort. The pace is set by how thoroughly the belief layer is being addressed, not by hours of practice logged.

Choosing Your Path

Path One stands alone. It does not mix well with the other two, because their formal procedures become substitutes for the unstructured awareness it requires. Paths Two and Three mix naturally, and many structured practitioners carry a strong devotional element while many devotional practitioners use structured practice.

Usually you do not have to choose. The path that is actually open reveals itself through where sustained attention naturally goes. If formal practice draws you, you are on Path Two. If devotion to a particular being pulls with real depth, Path Three may be opening. If neither pulls hard but you find yourself increasingly committed to living each moment with awareness, Path One is what your soul has chosen for this life. Following a path your soul has not chosen rarely produces results, however disciplined the effort. The balance of your masculine and feminine aspects also shapes which path fits, because the structured path suits one lean and the devotional path the other.

How to Know Your Level

People misjudge their own level in both directions and by a wide margin. The commonest error is placing yourself at the fifth or sixth level because of an experience, when the experience was a visit rather than a residence. A soul can touch the sixth level in meditation and live from the third the rest of the week. What counts is where it lives. The symptoms of awareness rising are also easy to confuse with kundalini activity, and I have written about the difference.

Two checks help. If fear about money, safety or health still decides what you do, the level is the third or below, whatever you have experienced higher up. And if you can describe your limiting beliefs in detail but still act from them, they have been understood rather than released, and the level has not moved. Release changes behaviour. Understanding alone does not.

The direct measurement is a spiritual reading, which gives your soul and body vibration, the state of each chakra, and the main beliefs holding the level where it is. Energy abilities, when present, do not move the number. Siddhis can be active in a soul at the fourth level, which is why gifts on their own tell you little about where a person stands.

Questions People Ask

How many levels of enlightenment are there?

On my scale there are seven levels of soul awareness, one for each chakra, and enlightenment is the seventh. The Buddhist tradition counts four stages, which describe the final approach through the upper levels rather than the whole distance.

What are the four stages of enlightenment in Buddhism?

Stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner and arahant, defined by the fetters released and the rebirths remaining. In my reading they sit across the sixth and seventh levels of the scale above.

Can you skip levels?

No. Each level clears the material the next one stands on, and a soul that has not cleared the third cannot hold the fifth even if it visits it. Forcing the climb, usually through kundalini practice on an uncleared system, causes most of the damage I am asked to repair.

How long does it take to move up one level?

Years within a life, and often more than one life per level. The pace is set by how much unreleased material the soul carries and how directly that material is being worked on, not by hours of practice.

What level is the average person at?

The third, the Will level. The grand average soul vibration of humanity by my measurements is 3.4 at present, down from 3.6 before 2020.

Is enlightenment the same as nirvana?

They describe the same seventh level from different traditions. Nirvana is the Buddhist term for the state of the arahant, which is the release from the cycle of rebirth that the seventh level makes possible.

Where to Start

If you are uncertain where you actually stand, a reading is the most efficient first step, because most people misjudge their level and the reading replaces the guess with a number. For those committed to the structured path, Level 1 of the Body & Soul Ascension Spiritual School is the entry point. It provides the sequencing, the practices, and the experienced guidance that self-directed practice rarely supplies, and it addresses the belief work that underpins all real progress.

Whichever path you walk, the principle holds. The levels are real, the paths are real, and the foundational inner work is what decides whether you are moving or only appearing to move. Choose the path your soul has chosen, do the deeper work all three require, and let the climb happen at the pace your system can integrate. The seventh level has been reached by others. It can be reached by you.