The first stage in the awakening of the soul is a feeling, "is there not something else that I could know." He feels dissatisfied with all he knows, with all the knowledge he may have, science, art, philosophy, or literature. He comes to a stage where he feels, "There is something else I must know that books, dogmas and beliefs cannot teach, something higher and greater that words cannot explain. That is what I want to know."

It does not depend upon the age of the person. It may be a child who has that inclination or one who has reached age, and yet does not feel like it. It depends upon the soul. Therefore in the East they call a child an old soul when it begins to show that inclination, when it is not satisfied with the knowledge of names and forms and wants to know something else, although it may not know what it is.
Then there comes a second stage, and that stage is bewilderment. Imagine, an evolved person being more bewildered than an evolved one! And yet it is so, for he begins to see that things are not as they seem to be but as they are. So there comes a kind of conflict: "What shall I call it: this or that, good or bad, love or hate?" There comes a time when all that was accepted in his mind, all that he believed to be so, appears to be quite the contrary to what it seems to be. His friends, his relations, those whom he loved, wealth, position, all things he had followed, change their appearance and sometimes become quite the contrary to what he had thought.

I will give you a little example of this bewilderment. The other day in Chicago a lady came to see me, trembling, in a very sorrowful state of mind. I asked her what was the matter and she said she had had an accident. The house in which she lived had been burnt, she had had to break a window in order to get out, she had hurt her hand, and it had all made a great upset in her life. But then she said, "It is not all that which makes me so upset." I asked, "What else?" She said, "The way how all my friends and neighbors whom I loved and liked acted at the time when the fire was on, has impressed me so that the whole world is quite different now."

What does this mean? That friendship, relationship, love, devotion may not be the same as they appear when it comes to the time of test. Then there comes a time when a person begins to look at things differently.

This reminds me of a word from the Prophet Muhammad, who says in a kind of poetic form, "A witch followed me in the hereafter and I was frightened. I asked, What is this, Lord, that is frightening me? And the answer came, It is the same world that once you adored and worshipped and pursued and thought so much of."

That shows that our consciousness changes our outlook in life; it changes as soon as our soul has opened its eyes. Our whole life changes. We live in the same world, and yet we do not; it is quite a different world then.
The next stage after this bewilderment is the stage of sympathy. We begin to appreciate things more and sympathize more, for so far we had walked on thorns and did not feel them, but in this stage we begin to feel them. We see that others are walking on the same thorns, so we forget our pain and begin to sympathize with them. The evolved ones therefore develop sympathy, a natural outgoing tendency. Troubles, sufferings, limitations everyone has to go through, everyone has to face the same difficulties. Not only the good ones, the wicked one has a still greater difficulty: he lives in the same world with his wickedness, he has a great load to carry. So naturally the evolved one becomes forgiving and sympathetic towards him.
As one goes further in the soul's unfoldment one finally arrives at the stage of revelation. Life begins to reveal itself, the whole of life, each soul becomes communicative, not only living beings but each thing. They say that the twelve apostles knew all languages. It does not mean that they knew English, French and Italian, but that they knew every soul's language, as every soul has its own separate language. They began to perceive vibrations and so every evolved soul will feel the vibrations of every other soul, and every condition, every soul, every object in the world will reveal its nature and character to him.

Sa'adi, the Persian poet, has said, "Once a soul has begun to read, every leaf of the tree becomes as a page of the sacred book of life."