ABSTRACT
Great religious leaders who have fashioned our world have, in their religious development, passed through six distinct stages: blindness, awakening, struggle, enlightenment, the gathering of followers, and the founding of an institution. The stage of blindness can also be seen in Mahavira, a contemporary of the Buddha in India and the founder of Jainism. In the Christian tradition the conversion experience is always associated with The Call, Vocation, or Das Ruf, and this has tended to obscure its essence that lies in an awakening out of blindness to a clear seeing of death and destruction. Conversion means a turning to God, and whereas the awakening is frequently accompanied by a turning towards In the case of the Buddha, he, like Sigmund Freud, explicitly rejected any belief in God. Also, conversion is frequently associated with unconscious guilt, and it is not necessarily accompanied by an awakening from a state of psychological blindness.
