The six stages, bhakta, mahesha, prasadi, pranalingi, sharana and aikya, describe a progression from an ordinary devotee's first faith in Shiva through deepening states of surrender, until the final stage, aikya, in which the distinction between the worshipper and Shiva is described as dissolving entirely, not as an abstract philosophical claim but as the lived culmination of a life of devotion.
The scheme gives every Lingayat believer, whatever stage they occupy, a clear sense of where they stand and what remains, which distinguishes it from soteriologies that describe liberation only as a single dramatic event of realization. Basava, the twelfth century minister and reformer whose teaching and organizing work is traditionally credited with shaping the Lingayat community in Karnataka, and the wider community of sharanas, the Virashaiva saint-poets whose vachanas record their own spiritual experience, gave the stages their devotional content even where later theologians gave them systematic philosophical form. The ishtalinga, the small personal Shiva emblem every initiated Lingayat wears on the body, functions across all six stages as the constant point of devotional focus, so that shatsthala describes an intensifying relationship to a single unchanging object of worship rather than a series of different practices replacing one another.