The Gate to Stage 6

Layer 1: Seven Documented Episodes

At least seven separate entries - logged through the weekly question or ad hoc, whenever an episode occurs - describing an experience with the phenomenological hallmarks of First Absorption: some loss of the ordinary separation between the one attending and the object attended to, arising without deliberate effort, ending on its own rather than being sustained at will.

The app does not evaluate whether a described episode "counts." A teacher does. This is not a stage where pattern-matching against keywords is adequate - discernment here requires a human who can tell the difference between an authentic account and a student describing what they believe they are supposed to report.

Layer 2: Teacher Review and Confirmation

Your teacher reviews your logged episodes and holds a brief conversation with you - not an interrogation, a conversation - to confirm two things: that what you experienced matches the phenomenology of this stage rather than, say, ordinary relaxation, drowsiness, or wishful interpretation; and that you can articulate the difference between thinking about the Divine and being in contact with it, in your own words, from your own experience.

This conversation is not optional and does not happen automatically at a fixed day count the way the Stage 4 gate did. It happens when you have logged enough material for your teacher to have something real to discern from.

• "Savitarka Samadhi: the mind achieves identity with the gross object of concentration, alternating between the three kinds of knowledge, as the essence of the object gradually clarifies." - Patanjali, Hindu tradition
• "At this point, quite secluded from sense desires... he enters upon and dwells in the First Jhana, which is accompanied by applied and sustained thought with happiness and bliss born of seclusion." - Buddhaghosa, Buddhist tradition
• "It swells and expands our whole interior being, producing ineffable blessings; nor does the soul even understand what is given to it there." - Teresa of Avila, Christian tradition
• "Wonderment is a marvelous bewilderment shining into the heart of a wayfarer... it involves taking refuge in the Lord and shutting tight the door of separation from God." - Abdullah al-Ansari, Sufi tradition

The mind achieves identity with the object. The soul is absorbed, looking in wonder at what it sees. A marvelous bewilderment shining into the heart. Four independent traditions, none copying from the others, describing the same threshold: the point where deliberate effort gives way, briefly, to something received rather than produced.