The Sixth Step of Maslow's Hierarchy: Why True Spirituality Is So Hard to Achieve

Have you ever considered that what you know about human development may be incomplete? What if there's a hidden level of consciousness that explains why spiritual transformation feels impossibly elusive for most people, and why our society seems designed to keep us trapped in endless cycles of survival and relationship drama?

Let me show you something that will change how you see human nature, society, and your own spiritual journey.

Maslow's Foundation: The Original Five Steps

Most people know Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs: physiological survival, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Maslow studied what makes humans truly fulfilled and successful, creating a framework that became the foundation of modern psychology, marketing, and social organization.

But here's where it gets interesting. What I'm about to share with you is a spiritual reinterpretation of Maslow's work—one that consolidates and extends his original insights to reveal why authentic transformation remains so rare.

The Five-Step Spiritual Framework

Note: This framework builds upon Maslow's foundation but reinterprets it through a spiritual development lens. Where Maslow's levels progress from physiological → safety → love/belonging → esteem → self-actualization, this framework consolidates survival and safety into Step 1 (basic security needs), recognizes that love/belonging fundamentally relates to species preservation and intimate connection (Step 2: Relationships/Sexuality), reinterprets esteem as the drive for genuine personal agency (Step 3: Power), transforms self-actualization into deeper inner work (Step 4: Self-Knowledge), and adds what most consider the spiritual pinnacle (Step 5: Traditional Spirituality).

Here are the five steps that most of humanity struggles through:

Step 1 - Survival (Food/Shelter/Safety): A significant portion of the global population focuses primarily on meeting basic survival and security needs. When fundamental necessities like food, shelter, and safety are uncertain, it's nearly impossible to think about anything else.

Step 2 - Relationships/Sexuality: Food and shelter are secure, but most relationships are complicated, and they cannot progress past this fundamental need for connection and intimacy. This includes everything from finding a partner to navigating sexual fulfillment to maintaining long-term bonds.

Step 3 - Power: Personal agency and the ability to influence your circumstances and environment. This goes beyond recognition or respect—it's about genuine empowerment and control over your life direction.

Step 4 - Self-Knowledge: Deep inner work, understanding your psychological patterns, expanding consciousness, and developing authentic self-awareness.

Step 5 - Traditional Spirituality: What most people consider "spiritual"—meditation, prayer, religious practice, seeking connection with the divine.

The Numbers That Reveal Everything

Now here's where it gets shocking. Let me show you the actual distribution of humanity across these levels:

Step 1: Over one billion people remain focused primarily on survival and basic security needs.

Step 2: Nearly six billion people—essentially the entire global “middle class”—are stuck at the relationship level. They have food and shelter, but their intimate lives are in constant turmoil.

Step 3: Maybe one million people globally operate from genuine personal power. Think about it: politicians, major business leaders, people who actually influence systems and structures. In a world of eight billion people, this represents a tiny fraction.

Step 4: Perhaps five million people worldwide engage in serious self-knowledge work. You can measure this by who reads consciousness-expanding books or engages in real inner development.

Step 5: A few thousand people reach what we traditionally call spirituality.

To put this in perspective: when "The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra was published—a fundamental book bridging science and spirituality—it sold over one million copies globally. That sounds impressive until you realize it's just 0.0125% of the world's population. Even being translated into more than twenty languages, it barely made a dent in global consciousness.

The vast majority of humanity exists in completely different information bubbles—focused on celebrity relationships, gossip, entertainment, and survival concerns. Even within educated circles where these concepts might be familiar, the actual audience that engages with consciousness expansion remains remarkably small.

You cannot progress to a higher level while fundamental issues at lower levels remain unresolved.

Why People Get Trapped at Each Level

The key insight is this: you cannot progress to a higher level while fundamental issues at lower levels remain unresolved.

If you're struggling with basic security (Step 1), you literally cannot focus on relationship concerns. If your relationships are chaotic (Step 2), you cannot develop genuine personal power. If you haven't claimed your power (Step 3), authentic self-knowledge remains elusive. And if you don't truly know yourself (Step 4), traditional spirituality becomes mere performance.

Here's what's particularly fascinating: most well-meaning seekers naturally gravitate toward higher concepts while the foundation levels remain unresolved. This is a completely understandable human tendency—we're drawn to the transcendent because it feels more meaningful than dealing with relationship challenges or financial concerns.

What I observe is that people often feel called to explore consciousness, meditation, and spiritual concepts while still working through fundamental life areas like intimate relationships and financial stability. This isn't a failing—it's simply where we are as a species learning to integrate all aspects of our existence.

How to Actually Progress Through the Levels

If you're serious about advancement rather than spiritual entertainment, here's the real work:

Identify where you actually are. Be brutally honest. If relationships are your primary source of stress and focus, you're in Step 2, regardless of how many spiritual books you've read.

Resolve each level completely. For Step 2, that means first developing genuine self-love and self-acceptance, then understanding the psychology of attraction, learning authentic communication, resolving sexual and emotional patterns, and creating genuinely fulfilling intimate relationships.

Do the deep work required. Not spiritual bypassing, not positive thinking, not visualization—but the real, often uncomfortable work of resolving the fundamental issues that keep you stuck.

Only when that foundation is solid can you build something truly transformational on top of it.

The Hidden Sixth Step: Unity Consciousness

But here's what changes everything. There's a sixth step that goes beyond traditional spirituality altogether.

Traditional spirituality—Step 5—is still fundamentally limited. It's still individual-focused: "My enlightenment, my connection to the divine, my spiritual practice."

The sixth step is something entirely different: the recognition that there is only One Consciousness in the entire Universe, and each of us is simply an individualized expression of that singular awareness.

When someone truly reaches this level (if ever), they understand at a cellular level that "what I do to another, I literally do to myself." They grasp this not as a nice moral principle, but because there genuinely is no "other."

Someone operating from the sixth step doesn't just believe "we are all one"—they experience it directly. Their brain has integrated this truth at such a fundamental level that competition, hatred, and exploitation become impossible. They understand that harming anyone literally harms themselves, and helping others literally helps themselves.

This creates what we might call "practical enlightenment"—someone who can function powerfully in the world while maintaining constant awareness of the underlying unity of all existence.

Why Society Prevents This Evolution

And here's the crucial point: our entire social system is designed to prevent people from reaching the sixth step.

Think about it. If you keep one billion people focused on survival—working multiple jobs just to afford rent, dealing with food insecurity, lacking healthcare access—they can't organize around larger systemic issues because their mental and physical energy is consumed by immediate necessities. If you keep six billion people obsessed with relationship drama, sexual frustration, and romantic problems, they never develop the mental clarity to question power structures or seek deeper truth.

What's the number one topic of conversation among most people? Relationships. Who they're dating, who broke up with whom, sexual attraction, romantic drama. It's endless, consuming, and it keeps people's consciousness completely absorbed in Step 2.

The system stimulates sexual desire from one direction while creating taboos and restrictions from another. Perfect recipe for eternal frustration and stagnation.

Current power structures would become obsolete overnight if even a small percentage of people reached genuine unity consciousness. War would become impossible. Environmental destruction would stop immediately. Economic inequality would be naturally corrected.

This is why the lower levels are so carefully maintained and enforced. A population operating from unity consciousness cannot be controlled, manipulated, or exploited.

The Evolutionary Moment

What we're witnessing is a species-wide evolutionary challenge. Humanity is being called to transcend survival-based consciousness and step into unity awareness. But everything about our current civilization is designed to prevent this transition.

We're at a crossroads. Either we evolve beyond the first five steps into genuine unity consciousness, or we remain trapped in cycles of conflict, scarcity, and separation that our survival-based systems generate.

The sixth step isn't about becoming a better person or achieving personal enlightenment. It's about recognizing what's already true: there is only One Consciousness expressing itself as the entire universe, including you.

When this recognition becomes lived experience rather than intellectual concept, everything changes. Not because you've gained something new, but because you've stopped believing in the illusion that was causing all the problems in the first place.

That's the real spiritual path. Not transcending humanity, but finally understanding what humanity actually is: individual expressions of a single, infinite awareness learning about itself through countless perspectives.

The question isn't whether this evolution will happen—it's whether you'll be part of the wave that helps humanity make this transition, or remain caught in the systems designed to keep consciousness trapped in the lower levels.