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The processes of development have fascinated humans for millennia, as evident in various literary works, cultural myths, artistic expressions, or fairy tales that portray heroes and heroines undergoing transformations across the life course.1 Today, developmental psychologists continue to outline, observe, and theorize about the various elements related to human development, predominantly in relation to biological, psychological, social, and spiritual domains. Over the last few decades in particular, psychological discourse increasingly has recognized the importance of spiritual development in the lives of many diverse peoples, not only because of its observed association to psychological, social, and biological domains, but also because of its own purview comprising a unique existential dimension of human experience involving a purpose or deeper meaning in life.2 Although research in this area has grown over the years, a deeper exploration of several key questions is warranted: (l) how should spiritual development most appropriately be conceptualized? (2) What is universal and what is culturally situated with respect to spiritual development? (3) What are the factors that trigger, cause, foster, or support spiritual development? (4) What is the purpose or goal of spiritual development? And (5) how is spiritual development related to biological processes in both ontogeny and phylogeny?The purpose of this paper is to address these questions by drawing insights from the Writings of the Baha'i Faith in order to create a dialogue between Baha i conceptions of spiritual development and contemporary theories in developmental psychology. As the Baha'i Faith is the most recent of the world religions, its perspectives regarding spiritual development have been examined in developmental discourse only to a limited extent. Drawing insights from the Baha'i Faith is therefore important, not only to augment the already rich developmental literature in this area, but also because of the vast writings on spiritual development and the spiritual dimension of human existence found within the Baha'i Faith.In several detailed Writings, Baha u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i Faith, outlines the process of spiritual development as a human universal, yet at the same time describes its unique dramatization in ways relative to each individual's historical, cultural, and experiential situations. Spiritual development understood in this way joins the mounting scientific and philosophical discourses-such as works by Bernstein, Bohm, Lample, Medina, Smith and Karlberg, and Rogoff-arguing, in recent years, for a "dialectical" approach to problem solving and the investigation of reality. From this vantage point, human development is simultaneously universal and relative, cultural and biological, linear and circular, mechanistic and organic. It is all and none of these. The theoretical lens therefore adopted for the following analysis is referred to as an integrative-holistic or a unity-in-diversity perspective, which is inherently multidisciplinary and multiparadigmatic, assuming equality within all levels of analysis (that is, genetics, neurological structures, psychological traits, families, peer groups, and broader contextual influences like culture and ethnicity), thereby attempting to dismantle conceptual borders between nature and nurture, biology and psychology, qualia and quanta, or science and spirituality.Baha u'llah's mystical work entitled "The Seven Valleys" is the primary source for this paper, as it explores in detail the processes of spiritual development. The description drawn from the Seven Valleys is also complemented by other texts from the Baha'i Writings where applicable, namely the work of Baha u'llah's son 'Abdu'1-Baha, as well as the work of philosopher and Baha'i scholar William Hatcher. This paper is composed of four complementary yet distinct sections. First, I briefly describe and summarize Baha'u'llah's depiction of the journey of the soul through the Seven Valleys. …

Bahá’u’lláh’s Seven Valleys and Developmental Psychology