There is no such thing as "spiritual evolution".
New age concepts obscure genuine benefits of religious and philosophical life.
In occult and new age circles, you’ll hear about “spiritual evolution”, “evolving consciousness”, “attainment”, or “higher consciousness” as goals of the practice, whether on the individual or collective human level. These concepts tend to bleed over into paganism as well, which is why they need to be addressed. Plainly put, I am skeptical of their existence, and I believe they get in the way of actual religious or spiritual life.
What do these terms even mean? Aren’t they talking the language of religion?
We first need to ask what the practical benefits of religion or spiritual practice are to the believer, beyond their deity or deities receiving supplication for their own sake. I would argue it’s not that complicated. On the social level, they foster community and human relationships. On the personal level, they promote meaning, virtue, and perhaps introspection that leads one to greater human flourishing and psychological integration. They allow us to frame our experiences and actions. These are all wonderful things, and I’m sure we can come up with more. In ancient Egyptian religions (historic and modern), the focus is on introspection and virtue through Ma’at, meaning through participation in the mythos, and community through shared worship and festivals. You may pause now to fill in those blanks with your equivalent tradition, and if you’re not interested in salty rants, you can log off and go about your day.
Such improvements as above are continuous, incremental and vary between individuals: we’re all imperfect and usually trying to become wiser. Yet talk of “higher consciousness” or “spiritual evolution” implies more than just increasing personal wisdom or virtue, since these can also occur in people even without a specified religion, who just study philosophy or really enjoy self-examination. They speak to a qualitative shift that sets the person apart from others. Catholics have a similar term - “ontologically superior” - which they apply to priests when comparing them to other humans, just as they compare humans to animals or their deity to humans! This isn’t just an added skillset or a +1 to an attribute on a character sheet that anyone can acquire with some study or effort: it almost makes the person more human than human.
Let’s ignore whether “ontological superiority” is even coherent (you either exist or you don’t, without gradations, so its not obvious you can be superior in your existence itself, post-hoc Scholastic rationalizations aside). While the Catholic concept applies to whether or not a person can enact transubstantiation and absolve sins by channeling their deity, the New age, theosophical and occult paradigms of “spiritual evolution” involve another, larger, set of powers beyond human capability. These are based off Eastern mysticism, but only loosely, and to examine what these actually mean in the context of Buddhism or Hinduism requires a post on its own, from a specialist in such fields, which I am not. It also hijacks evolutionary biology (doing the same with physics when using terms like “energy” and “vibration”), which similarly has nothing to do with how evolution is actually understood by science.
Regardless, we are often told by the western new agers that when one has “an evolved consciousness” they can see magic energy, spirits, acquire various psychic powers, see visions on demand like a spiritual Nexflix-and-chill, receive divine communication, and/or otherwise can affect the outcome of things through magic with increasing probability. They also tend to allegedly acquire a perspective of “all is one”, without differentiating any phenomena from another, including humans from other humans. It may often be used to justify owning everything in common or invoking the utopia of John Lennon’s “Imagine”, especially when applied to humanity, as if humans can be forced into “evolved consciousness” as a species. Some accuse the WEF or UN of having this goal of molding humanity into a single species-consciousness through top-down political engineering. On the more extreme end, we see claims of becoming a deity in this life, or being infused with divinity as much as a mortal can.
The failures of such programs, and the stubborn insistence of humans to be treated not as one homogenous mass, but rather as unique, imperfect, beings with their own specific relationships and value hierarchies, is dismissed as others being “less evolved”. After all, the “higher consciousness” possessing person claims, if you had their “level of attainment” you would “be able to see” how correct they are. It just another game of “I know what God thinks”. Similarly, if one balks at a guru’s claim to having Jedi powers, they are judged to “lack the ability” to perceive such things. All of this can be dismissed as fraudulent, especially since these arguments are indistinguishable from justifications of confidence men when you don’t go along with their snake oil sales pitches.
In late antiquity we see a few similar cases: Valentinian and Sethian Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, had concepts of acquiring a level of qualitative spiritual transformation that placed one closer to the divine or enabled the person to “see how things really are”. Some Gnostics even divided humans into three classes depending on how receptive they were to the mindset. While Hermeticism claimed to be Egyptian, it was more a retroactive application of certain Neoplatonic concepts onto Egypt. Actual Egyptians throughout most of their history did not have multiple “levels” of humans based on spiritual progress towards the divine, with the exception of the Pharaoh being singled out from among men. Even then, Pharaonic powers specifically pertained to his function as ruler and high priest of the kingdom, acquired at the coronation ceremony. These concern authority and leadership more than particular magical powers or philosophical insight, and of course there was only one Pharaoh at a time, whose burden was much heavier than giving lectures at the Esalen Institute for $2000 for a weekend. Pharaohs were born into a royal line and educated or given on the job training in certain posts to prepare them for their eventual duties: it’s not like Pharaohs descended, one by one, as needed from a mountain where they were doing yoga and reading the Tao of Physics all day. Besides, the last time I checked, there is no Pharaoh anymore, so it’s a moot point.
Priests too, acquired their authority by delegation of authority, purification rites, and ability to perform the rituals (which included literacy), attributes that are rather mundane in an era of mass education, indoor plumbing, no Pharaoh, and the ability to access the ancient rites on our own. Depending on the time period, priests often held other ordinary jobs outside their temple service, and not until the New Kingdom do we see widespread professionalization. Yet an examination of the private prayers of priests and commoners alike sees requests mainly to simply see the Gods, or to be with the Gods, and act with Ma’at. In the end, they were usually asking for nothing more than virtue and a basic religious experience of the divine presence, not by their own “spiritual evolution” but by divine grace and piety. I suppose you could compare who has more numinous experiences with your friends, but its generally regarded as crass.
With the democratization of the afterlife in the Middle Kingdom, everyone ended up joining the Gods and achieving theosis *after* death anyway, not in this life. Contrary to some new agers, funerary literature was not some secret coded initiation either, but aspirations for the hereafter. It never involved the idea of merging all of creation into one mass…in fact, that was to be avoided, since creation was an act of differentiation. It was Apophis, the serpent of evil, who wanted everything to be unmade back into the primordial waters. If it was to occur by divine fiat (as Atum speaks of in the Coffin Texts), it was in a nebulous future so far off as to be hypothetical. We can acknowledge our shared humanity without becoming a hive mind.
What of magic? As prior posts have indicated, in Egypt magic consisted mainly of invocations of the Gods and their mythos to intercede for a practical effect. It was practiced not just by priests and the Pharaoh, but also folk magicians and commoners. Often they were just to exorcise evil in general, another nod to increasing virtue by destroying vice. There’s no indication that success came due to “higher consciousness” or “levels of initiation”, but by correct performance, appropriate purifications, and ultimately divine judgement. We see similar concepts in Christianity, where whether a prayer is answered is ultimately dependent on Yahweh, or perhaps how faithful one is - decidedly not a “you” thing. Only in cases such as the prosperity Gospel are specific donations to religious institution implied to have a direct causative effect on the finances of the giver, and who wants to be part of that schtick?
Long rambling over, we shouldn’t worry about someone’s “attainment”, or our own. Just focus on self-examination, striving for virtue, contemplating the Gods and Ma’at, using better judgement, and being charitable. Stop looking for magical energy streaming through the air or trying to see ghosts, performing tricks, adopting a certain socially approved signal like “all is one” or “we belong to the earth”, or feeling like you’re a god. Rather, look for how emotionally stable you are, your eudaimonia, and the quality of your relationships and how you can help others.