Just as there are four stages in the life of everyone — childhood, youth, middle age, and old age — there are four stages in one’s acquisition of Jnana (knowledge of the Supreme), quite similar to these stages. The first stage is the apprentice stage: being trained by parents, teachers, elders; being led, guided, regulated, warned, and reprimanded. The second stage is the junior craftsman stage: eager to establish happiness and justice in society, eager to know the world and its worth and values. The third is the craftsman stage: pouring out energies to reform, reconstruct, remake the human community. The fourth stage is the master stage, realisation that the world is beyond redemption by human effort, that one can at best save oneself by trying to reform the world, that it is all His Will, His Handiwork, His World, Himself. Along with this dawn of Jnana, there must also dawn the will to direct all activity in the light of that vision. When you realise that He is the innermost reality of all, you can worship one another, with as much fervour as you now employ when you worship an idol. – Divine Discourse, Sep 27, 1965