Sufism

Between the lowest and the highest self lie the inspired, the submitted, the content, and the pleasing self

Because the Qur'an's three named stages of the self left a large practical gap for spiritual guides to work with, Najm al-Din Kubra filled in four intermediate stages to more precisely track a novice's actual inner progress.

The Qur'an names only three states of the nafs explicitly: ammara, lawwama, and mutma'inna. Later Sufi psychologists found the distance between the second and third too large to be useful for tracking an actual novice's day-to-day progress, so they interpolated further stages. Najm al-Din Kubra, founder of the Kubrawiyya order and known for his close attention to inner visionary experience, is credited with systematizing a fuller seven-stage scheme, inserting al-nafs al-mulhama, the inspired self that begins receiving intuitive guidance, along with al-muslima, the submitted self, al-radiyya, the content self, and al-mardiyya, the self God is pleased with, between the reproaching self and the self at peace. The scheme functioned less as abstract theology than as a diagnostic map a shaykh could use to locate exactly where a student stood and what kind of inner struggle was appropriate next.