The Seven Initiates

The Sevenfold Path, Deepened One Initiate at a Time

The developmental heart of the work is a sevenfold path called the Seven Initiates: Listening, Intimacy, Balance, Art and Alchemy, Embodiment, Worship, and Providence. They are pillars and thresholds at once. As pillars, they hold up a Body of Worship. As thresholds, each is the gateway to the next, and none may be skipped: there is no Intimacy without Listening, no Balance without Intimacy, no Art without Balance, no Embodiment without Art, no Worship without Embodiment, and no Providence without Worship.

It matters greatly how the path is travelled, for it is not a ladder climbed once and left behind. We do not finish Listening and move on from it. Rather, as we deepen through the initiates, we add to the development of each, one at a time. Listening is opened first, and never closed; when Intimacy is taken up, Listening goes on deepening beneath it; when Balance is reached, both Listening and Intimacy continue to mature, now informed by the new ground. Each initiate, once entered, remains in development for the whole of the path, so that by the time one stands at Providence, all seven are alive and growing together. The path is cumulative, not sequential-and-discarded — a deepening of the whole person through one threshold after another, each addition strengthening all that came before.