The Seven Stages of Love: A Journey from Attraction to liberation

Where Sufism meets the Vedas, and the heart learns to dissolve

"Love is not a feeling. It is the very fire in which the self is burned  until nothing remains but the Beloved."

 Rumi

There are journeys that take you across oceans, and then there are journeys that take you through yourself. The journey of love is the second kind  the harder, the more terrifying, the more beautiful kind. It begins with a glance and ends, if you are brave enough to let it, with the total dissolution of everything you thought you were.

The ancient wisdom traditions of the Indian subcontinent and the mystic schools of Sufism both understood something that modern romance seldom dares to teach: Love is not a destination. It is a transformation. What begins as attraction ends  not at the altar, not in a home with children and a garden  but in a kind of sacred death, a beautiful annihilation of the ego in the fire of the Beloved.

Across centuries, poets like Rumi, Hafez, and Bulleh Shah; sages like Krishna, Narada, and Shankaracharya; and the unnamed rishis of the Upanishads all mapped this terrain. The path, it seems, has always had seven stations.

Let us walk them together.

  Dilkashi (دل کشی): Attraction

The First Spark. The First Lie of the Self.

It begins, as all great stories do, with a moment you cannot explain.

A face across a room. A voice that settles strangely in your chest. A laugh that makes you forget what you were doing three seconds ago. This is Dilkashi the drawing of the heart. The word itself is Urdu poetry: dil (heart) + kashna (to pull). Something pulls the heart. You do not choose it. It chooses you.

In the Narada Bhakti Sutras  the ancient Sanskrit treatise on devotion  Narada defines the awakening of love as para anurāga, an inexplicable, supreme attraction toward the divine. He notes that it arises spontaneously, without reason or prior cause. This is significant: Narada, speaking of love for God, begins exactly where human love begins with an attraction that defies logic.

The Bhagavata Purana describes the gopis of Vrindavana experiencing precisely this when they first encountered Krishna. They were not searching for him. He found them  through a song on a flute, drifting across the evening air. Their hearts were pulled. Dilkashi.

The Sufi masters called this initial pull jazbah an inner magnetic force. Jalaluddin Rumi writes in the Masnavi that the reed flute weeps because it has been separated from the reed bed  and when we hear that weeping, something in us recognizes it, because we, too, have been separated from our Source. Dilkashi, in the Sufi understanding, is not mere romantic chemistry. It is the soul recognizing something of its original home in another being.

For now, though, it is just a spark. A smile returned. A heartbeat quickened. The journey has begun.

 ٢ — Uns (اُنس): Attachment

When the Spark Becomes a Warmth You Cannot Leave

If Dilkashi is the lightning, Uns is the rain that follows — slower, steadier, soaking into the earth of your being.

Uns comes from the Arabic root meaning intimacy, familiarity, the comfort of being with. It is what happens when attraction deepens into attachment  when you begin to find the world slightly less interesting when this person is not in it. You begin to orbit them. Their presence becomes a frequency your nervous system learns to depend on.

The Yoga Vasistha one of the most profound texts of Advaita Vedanta speaks at length about chitta vritti, the modifications of the mind, and how the mind, once it fixates on an object of love, begins to take the shape of that object. The mind becomes porous. It lets the beloved in. This is Uns in its psychological essence  the beginning of interpenetration, where self and other start, very gently, to blur.

In Sufi terminology, Uns is one of the maqamāt the stations of the mystic path. Al-Ghazali, the 11th-century Sufi philosopher, writes in Ihya Ulum al-Din (The Revival of the Religious Sciences) that uns with the Divine is the station of quiet intimacy  where the seeker no longer approaches God with awe and trembling alone, but with the ease and warmth of a friend. He sits comfortably in the presence of the Beloved.

This stage, in human love, is both beautiful and dangerous. It is beautiful because attachment is warmth. It is dangerous because it is the first root of maya the illusion that the other belongs to you, or you to them. The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 2, verse 62) warns: "Dwelling on sense objects gives rise to attachment; from attachment springs desire." Krishna does not say this to condemn love  he says it to illuminate the mechanism. Uns is the soil. What grows from it depends entirely on what we plant.

 ٣ — Ishq (عشق): Love

The Fire that Refuses to be Managed

There is attachment, and then there is Ishq and they are not the same country.

Ishq is the word the Urdu and Arabic languages reached for when ordinary love felt too small. It derives from the Arabic root ashiqa to cling, to grow tendrils like a vine. Ishq is love that has become structural. It has wound itself around everything inside you. You cannot remove it without removing yourself.

The Bhagavad Gita Chapter 10 gives us one of the most exquisite portraits of Ishq in all of literature  though it speaks of it as divine love. Arjuna, overwhelmed, asks Krishna: "Who are you? Tell me everything." And Krishna, instead of giving a philosophical lecture, offers a love poem. He says: I am the light in the moon, the fragrance in the flower, the courage in the courageous, the intelligence of the intelligent, the love in those who love. Arjuna is not being given theology. He is being given Ishq the understanding that the Beloved is woven into the very fabric of reality.

The Kena Upanishad poses the great question: "By whom is the mind made to think? By whom is the prana set in motion?" The Upanishad's answer is Brahman  the ultimate ground of being. But the Sufi mystics gave the same answer a different name the Beloved. Ishq, at this stage, has begun to exceed its human container. You love a person, yes  but through them, something vaster has begun to speak.

Rumi writes in the Masnavi:

The lover's ailment is unlike all other ailments love is the astrolabe of God's mysteries.

At the stage of Ishq, you are no longer simply fond of someone. You have been alchemized. You think differently, see differently, dream differently. The beloved has become a lens through which all of existence is refracted.

 ٤ Akidat (عقیدت): Trust and Reverence

When Love Kneels Before What It Loves

Love, if it is real, eventually produces reverence.

Akidat is a word of deep Arabic roots, from aqada  to bind, to tie, to make firm. It is the knot that has been tied between two souls. But it is more than trust in the transactional sense more than "I trust you not to hurt me." Akidat is the reverence of a devotee. It is love that has looked deeply enough into its object to see something sacred there and chosen to bow.

The Bhakti Sutras of Narada describe shraddhā a Sanskrit concept nearly identical to Akidat as the cornerstone of all devotional love. Shraddhā is not blind faith. It is seeing clearly and still choosing to trust. The Mundaka Upanishad (III.2.3) says: "This Atman cannot be attained by one without strength, nor by one without shraddhā." The truth you love most cannot be reached without reverence for it.

In human love, Akidat is the moment when infatuation graduates into something more dignified. You have seen this person truly seen them, their weaknesses and their wounds and your love did not flinch. Instead, it deepened into a kind of awe. You revere their courage, their tenderness, the specific way they carry their pain. You have stopped trying to possess them and started wanting to honor them.

Sufi thought places great emphasis on adab a concept that encompasses reverence, refinement, and the etiquette of the heart. Hazrat Inayat Khan, the 20th-century Sufi teacher, wrote: "The more one knows of love, the more one becomes humble." Akidat is the humility that love earns. It is love with good manners — love that takes off its shoes at the threshold.

٥ — Ibadat (عبادت): Worship

When the Beloved Becomes Your Qibla

The word Ibadat means worship. And this is where many people grow uncomfortable because they were taught that worship belongs only in temples and mosques, not in the landscape of human love.

But the mystics knew better.

In Sufism, there is a concept called Ishq-e-Majazi and Ishq-e-Haqiqi the metaphorical love (human love) and the real love (divine love). The Sufis taught that these are not opposites. They are stations on the same road. When a human being loves another deeply enough when they arrange their entire inner life around the beloved's wellbeing, when the thought of the beloved is the first thought at dawn and the last at night they have discovered, even if they don't know it, the posture of prayer.

The Bhagavata Purana (XI.2.40) says: 

"Whatever one does, whatever one eats, whatever one offers, whatever one gives away that should be done as an offering to the Supreme." This is the essence of Ibadat: the transformation of all action into offering. At this stage of love, nothing is done for the self anymore. Every gesture is a devotion.

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali speak of Ishvara Pranidhana the surrender of all actions to the Divine. The yogi who reaches this state is not performing duty; they are performing love. Ibadat in a human relationship looks like this: you no longer love someone because of what they give you. You love them because loving them has become your sadhana your practice, your discipline, your path.

Mirabai the 16th century Rajput queen and mystic poet is the perfect embodiment of Ibadat. She worshipped Krishna not as a distant deity but as her Beloved, her husband of the soul. She sang: "Mero toh Giridhar Gopal, doosaro na koi." "My only Beloved is Giridhar Gopal, there is no other." Her entire existence became an act of worship. And the tradition records that she was not diminished by this  she was illuminated.

٦ — Junoon (جنون): The Sacred Madness

When Sanity is the Last Thing You Want

Junoon means madness. And at this stage of love, that is exactly what the mystics and the beloved produce in the lover.

This is not the madness of pathology. This is the madness of Majnun, who wandered the desert calling for Layla, who carved her name into the stones, who when asked "Why are you sitting with the dogs?" replied, "Because they have been in the same street as Layla." This is the madness that the sane world cannot explain because the sane world has not gone far enough into love to understand it.

The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 12) describes the highest devotee the bhakta as one who is unmatta, intoxicated. Not by wine, but by love. Such a person transcends social norms not out of rebellion but out of absorption  they are simply too full of the Beloved to have room for convention.

In Vedantic philosophy, this state corresponds to what is called samavesh  total immersion where the individual consciousness becomes so saturated with the consciousness of the Beloved that the boundary between the two begins to dissolve. The Chandogya Upanishad whispers it as Tat Tvam Asi "Thou art That." The lover, in the madness of Junoon, starts to experience what the philosopher merely speaks of: the identity of the lover and Beloved.

Rumi was himself a portrait of Junoon. When his teacher Shams-e-Tabrizi disappeared, Rumi wrote poetry so relentlessly thousands of verses that the scholars of his time could not comprehend where it all came from. He went to Damascus searching for Shams, then returned and realized: "Why do I search outside? I am him. He speaks through me." That realizat.

Bangalore 

21/02/2026