The goal of evolution is to master life, to become people who know who we are and where we are going. Such people know exactly what they are doing. They see clearly, understanding themselves and the conditions around them. Filled with compassion for less progressed beings, they help others learn who they are in the deepest meaning of these words. Such people help others find, as they themselves have found, their true spiritual identity. For all that, one can only point the way to others since all must find the way and become the way for themselves. There are seven stages or “rounds” of human unfoldment which correspond to the development of the seven sheaths:

1. The first stage is that of pure mechanical being. One at this level lives and that’s about all.

2. At the second stage the person is wrapped up in and fascinated by things perceived.

3. At the third stage one is wrapped up in the emotions and desires aroused by sensations and seeks out more and more experience.

4. At the fourth stage the person has developed intellect by which to plot ways to gain the objects of desire.

5. At this stage spiritual intelligence begins to dawn. One begins to realize that there is more to life than formerly believed. Thought becomes more abstracted and not confined to gratifying self. It begins to be concerned with understanding things, and senses deeper levels of consciousness within.

6. At this stage intuition, wisdom, and the sense of oneness grounded in all embracing love become the person’s natural state. Knowledge arises spontaneously from within.

7. At this stage one has become a fully enlightened soul with no more lessons to learn on this earth.

The final goal of human evolution is to become more than human. It is the self-realization of the Divine. From each of the personalities which it informs, the monad extracts the essence—those thoughts and aspirations which are capable of adding to its stock of cosmic experience. When it has assimilated the experiences of the successive personalities; when it has overcome the passions and desires which bound it to the wheel of birth and death; when it has learned to maintain a continuous, self-conscious existence in spirit; the monad then becomes a “Dhyan Chohan” or “Planetary Spirit.” Its evolution is now a matter of attaining consciousness on higher and higher planes of cosmic consciousness. New worlds open and consciousness unfolds on levels which are as the overtones, as it were, of the seven planes of terrestrial consciousness. Builders, Planetary Spirits, Lipika—these are but a few of the names assigned to some of the innumerable classes of Dhyan Chohans (literally, Lords of Meditation) evolving in higher worlds of conscious life—realms greater, more vast, more all-encompassing than can be imagined by the greatest and most holy saint on this  sphere called earth.