- Spiritual Growth -
Text Only Version
Contents
Truth
and Reality
Updating Your Map
True Love
Falling in Love
Grace
Spiritual Growth
The Source of Grace
The Meaning of Evil
Conscience
Self discipline is essential to spiritual growth as well as emotional growth, and one area in which we need to discipline ourselves is our dedication to truth and reality. Our everyday behavior is based upon our understanding of the nature of the world around us. If our understanding is accurate, we generally know where we are in life and we have a good sense of purpose and direction. The light of our truth illuminates our spiritual environment and allows us to see clearly rocks and shoals along our spiritual path. On the other hand, if our understanding of the world is inaccurate or incomplete, we are more likely to get spiritually lost and find ourselves in situations that we do not understand. We may feel confused and uncertain how to solve our problems and lacking in a clear purpose and direction in our lives.
It is our responsibility, therefore, to make sure our view of reality is accurate. It is sort of like a "map" based upon which we get our bearings in life. The problem is, making sure our map is accurate takes effort, sometimes lots of effort. All through out our lives we are faced with new information that may contradict what our map tells us. We can ignore the new information and sail on through life with a possibly inaccurate map, or we can revise and update our map and incorporate new information as we receive it.
Unfortunately, many people choose the easy route and ignore all new information that is inconsistent with their current view of reality. They just do not want to deal with it. This can be psychologically and spiritually unhealthy because we can then become very misguided due to inaccuracies in our map, and as a result make wrong decisions in life. This may be one reason people become closed-minded: it is easier to routinely reject new information than to expend the time and energy necessary to find out if it is true and relevant to our lives. It is essential to validate and update our understanding of truth and reality, our map, if we really want to know where we are in life and where we are going, and if we hope to make wise decisions.
How do we know if our understanding of life, our "map of reality", is accurate? One way is to examine it every once in a while through deep self-reflection. If you're like me, though, you're not so inclined to deep self-reflection. So how can we can have examination done? By opening ourselves up to friendly challenges from other people who have a different view of life. Sharing our views with like-minded people does not really work as a "challenge" though, because they will usually reinforce the ideas we have in common.
The best type of interaction for this purpose is one that really makes you think about why you believe what you believe. People can actually help us by asking us questions about our beliefs that might never have occurred to us. Many of our own views we take for granted, while to someone else they might seem questionable. Great! If our map of reality can provide answers to their questions and concerns, we can feel confident that it is accurate in those areas. However, if we find our map does not hold up too well under close examination, then maybe our map is in need of revision. If we cannot see where our map is off, it will be very hard to change it.
In order for this to work we need to be honest with ourselves. When we are challenged it will benefit us only if we are honest with why we think the way we do. It takes courage to admit to ourselves that we may have been misguided or misinformed about something. It takes even more courage to decide that we would be better off changing in a particular area of our lives. Sometimes we find ourselves resisting accepting something we know is true. It does not help much if we open ourselves up to challenge, realize we need to update our map, and then do not follow through with that change. Changing our view of life is hard, but it well worth the effort in order to have a more accurate map of reality.
True love is very misunderstood, and despite the best efforts of philosophers through out the ages it still remains a mystery to most people. The definition of true love offered by Dr. Peck is worth considering, however. Basically, he explains true love as giving of yourself for the sake of the spiritual growth of other people and for your own spiritual growth.
The first thing you may notice about this definition is that it implies true love has a purpose, and that purpose revolves around personal growth. Love is not just an emotion, however intense and deep it feels. Central to this definition is the idea that through loving others we ourselves grow. Through the practice of loving we become a more loving person. Spiritual growth can thus be measured by how loving we truly are.
True love of oneself is also included in this definition. To love yourself means doing what is good for your own personal and spiritual growth, even when it is uncomfortable or difficult. Loving ourselves does not mean just being nice to ourselves and satisfying all our earthly pleasures. (In reality, this is very detrimental to our spiritual growth because it makes us self-indulgent and self-centered.)
To love others takes effort, and in some cases this can be very hard work. Ideally, we should also be able to love people whom we do not particularly like or find attractive. This is not as unreasonable as it may sound, if you understand that love is not just a feeling, but it is expressed when you do something for another person that benefits their spiritual and emotional growth, which in turn helps them realize their full human potential.
Most of the ideas expressed in Dr. Peck's book I wholeheartedly embrace, but I feel his definition of true love needs to be expanded. It is true, but at the same time it is incomplete. Love which has the primary purpose of nurturing the spiritual and personal growth of others as defined by Dr. Peck I think of as "parental love", as in the love of parents for their children, or the love a person has for another that they are in a position to help in some way. However, there are two more types of love that we can experience.
The second type is the love between a husband and wife, or conjugal love, which has an aspect of giving for the sake of the other's spiritual growth, but it is much more than that. The love between a husband and wife is also the unity between male and female and contains within it the purpose of reproduction. We can love our spouse purely as an expression of our appreciation of and response to their beauty, in addition to our interest in their spiritual growth and development. Dr. Peck does not address either of these aspects of conjugal love.
The third type of love is the love children have for their parents, or "children's love". Prior to adulthood, children generally are not capable of assisting in the spiritual growth of their parents or older siblings, yet they can love them very deeply. Children's love is also not addressed by Dr. Peck.
I believe you cannot really define true love without considering the concept of beauty. In the broad sense of the word, (not just physical attractiveness) love and beauty are really two aspects of the same giving and receiving action that occurs between people who love each other. The more you truly love someone, the more energy they will receive from you in their personal and spiritual growth, and the more beautiful they will become. Likewise, as they become more beautiful to you, your desire to love them grows too.
Similarly, as young children, the more our parents protect us, care for us, and sacrifice for us, the more beautiful they become to us and the more we love them. The more your children develop and mature the more beautiful they become and the more love you feel for them. It seems that there is beauty latent within love, and love latent within beauty, which helps makes the whole experience of loving so dynamic and wonderful.
Where is the best way to learn and experience these three types of love? It is none other than the family. In an ideal family, all three types of love are developed. This is one reason why the family structure is so important--it is our school of love. If we recognize the family as vital to our spiritual and emotional growth, then the basis of the family--marriage, is equally important.
What really happens when two people experience "falling in love", and is this true love? Believe it or not, Dr. Peck very convincingly explains that falling in love, or infatuation, is not true love. Nobody can deny that when we fall in love with someone, the emotions we experience are very intense, and we feel wonderful and very happy. However, there are several problems with falling in love, that reveal it is not true love.
First, falling in love almost always involves sexual desires. In contrast, through true love our purpose in loving is the other person's spiritual and personal growth, and satisfying our own sexual desires has little to do with the other's spiritual growth. People do not fall in love or become infatuated with their children, parents, brothers and sisters, although we can love them very deeply.
Second, the feelings associated with falling in love are usually temporary. The ecstatic feeling of being in love eventually passes. True love is permanent and should last a lifetime.
Third, the experience of falling in love is in reality a collapse of a portion of what psychiatrists call our ego boundaries. Ego boundaries normally protect us from from getting too emotionally close to too many people. When our ego boundaries collapse and we fall in love with someone, we feel very close and intimate with that person. We feel positive and happy all the time. We feel like anything is possible, that there are no limits to what we can do together. We feel we can overcome all obstacles and we will live in a state of bliss forever.
But this is not reality. Eventually, when lovers begin to have minor disagreements, or when the attractiveness that brought them together looses its appeal, they begin to realize that they will not live in bliss forever, and they begin to fall out of love. When they find themselves no longer in love, they can either end the relationship, or begin the work of building real, true love. True and lasting love sometimes can have its beginnings in an experience of falling in love.
Since falling in love involves a collapse of your ego boundaries and limits, you are not making effort to extend them. Real loving requires you to extend your limitations, expand your ego boundaries, and grow spiritually, all of which take effort and may be difficult and a challenge to accomplish. Falling in love, on the other hand, is easy and effortless.
Fourth, when you fall in love with someone it is usually not through your own conscious choice. Many times people fall in love with other people who are not really the best match for them. When you fall in love, you can feel "swept off your feet", that is, you loose control of your emotions and your rationality.
Finally, falling in love usually has nothing to do with one person's concern for the spiritual growth and development of the other. Rather, the main focus is the satisfaction of your own emotional and sexual desires. When you fall in love you tend to idolize each other and see each other as perfect and not in need of any kind of improvement or spiritual growth.
As a result of his experiences as a psychotherapist, Dr. Peck has witnessed numerous incidents of what he calls "grace", which he defines as a force originating outside the human consciousness that directs and enhances our spiritual growth.
Grace manifests itself in may ways. Evidence clearly exists of the ability of people to overcome extreme childhood emotional distress and to grow up to be mature, healthy, successful adults. The ability we have to find solutions to our problems by exploring the subconscious (especially through psychotherapy) is an established fact. Our intuition, which guides us and provides direction that protects us against dangers we are not even aware of is another example. Consider the experiences of synchronicity, where seemingly miraculous chance events occur that have great meaning and benefit to us. Dreams which give us insight or warnings of future events are another example.
In all of these types of events there are some fundamental commonalties:
- they serve to enhance our spiritual and emotional growth,
- they are largely unexplainable by modern science,
- they occur in everyone's lives but tend to be unappreciated, and
- they do not originate inside the human mind.
This force of grace cannot be seen, measured, or located, but it is very real nevertheless. It operates with each of our lives, whether we are aware of it or not. It therefore makes sense to try to understand what grace is and how it operates so we can work with it and therefore benefit from it.
Let's say we can consider spiritual growth to be evolution on an individual level. Through out the course of our lives we have the capacity to grow and evolve from an immature, self-centered child to a loving, caring and emotionally mature adult. The fact we achieve spiritual growth at all in itself is amazing, considering all the difficulties and suffering people have to endure in their lives.
In order to understand spiritual growth from another perspective, let us venture into the world of physics for a moment. Physicists have developed what is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy. It is the formal explanation for the natural tendency for physical objects to break down, wear out, and degenerate. This law states that the amount of disorder in a closed system always tends to increase, and will never decrease.
For example, ice cubes in glass of hot water will always melt and result in lukewarm water. The ice cubes and the glass of hot water have more order, and therefore less entropy than a glass of lukewarm water. The glass of lukewarm water has more entropy because its contents have a uniform, undifferentiated temperature. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, development and growth of a closed system do not happen automatically; outside influence, or input in the form of energy, direction, or control, from outside the system is required.
The same is true in our spiritual growth. Our natural inclination is to take the easy way, to coast down towards a state of maximum spiritual entropy, to not challenge our understanding of reality, and to not expand and push out our limitations. It takes effort, and does not just happen by itself. But as we all know, people do grow and develop spiritually, in spite of the opposing force of spiritual entropy.
So what is "outside influence" that empowers us to go against the downward spiritual tide in our lives and to make the effort required to grow and develop? It is none other than the power of love. It is through our effort to love others and to receive their love, and to extend ourselves for the sake of the spiritual growth of our fellow human beings that we can overcome our own spiritual stagnation. With the power of love we can also overcome laziness, fear, and self-centeredness. Loving others is the key to accomplishing spiritual growth. This is the main point of The Road Less Traveled.
The most outstanding capacity we have as humans is the ability to love and sacrifice ourselves for other people. The greatest saints and sages that ever lived were all known for their love, compassion, and sacrifice for mankind. Even though we cannot all become like Mother Theresa, if this is in fact the highest calling in life, then learning to love others is of paramount importance.
We can now ask the question: where does grace come from? Who or what generates this force that operates in our lives to guide our spiritual growth? Philosophers and theologians through out history struggled to explain this and have come up with only one meaningful answer: God is the source of grace. This may seem at first to be a very simplistic view, to say God is the source of grace, but offering God as the source of grace can explain why grace operates in our lives, its purpose, and its goals.
This idea that God is behind the grace that helps us in our spiritual growth is not the final, complete answer, however. On the contrary, it is just the beginning. We should also ask: what is the purpose of spiritual growth? Why does God want us to grow spiritually? To what ideal are we growing towards? How do we identify that ideal, if indeed it even exists? In Genesis we can read that God gave Adam and Eve the commandment to be "perfect". Regardless of whether or not we take the biblical story literally, it is still meaningful to consider, what does it mean to be "perfect"?
I think to become perfect means to become like God in that we should embody all His good qualities: love, truth, beauty, righteousness, forgiveness, honesty, etc. Now to accomplish this means that we have to overcome all that is imperfect, immature, and not good about ourselves. Most people would agree that this is an incredibly difficult task, if not downright impossible. However, would God ever expect us to do the impossible? I don't think so.
Spiritual growth is hard work. It's painful. It take effort, and it doesn't come naturally. If we do not think we need to strive towards any spiritual ideal, then we can all take it easy. It is not easy to believe in a God that expects us to take responsibility for our spiritual lives. It is much easier to not believe in God, or absolute truth, or eternity. But we need to remember we are not going it alone. God and God's grace are there, helping us and guiding us along, whether we realize it or not, and whether we appreciate it or not. We should at least be grateful for the effort being expended on our behalf, and ideally we should recognize it and make it a part of our everyday life.
If we consider the idea that God is behind the force of grace in our lives, then this naturally leads us to consider the opposing force. What exactly is the nature of the spiritual entropy, laziness, selfishness, fear of challenging ourselves and pushing out our limitations? For the sake of discussion, if we label our efforts toward spiritual growth "good", we can justifiably label the opposing force "evil". Just as we call the source of the goodness in our lives God, we can call the source of the evil influence in our lives the devil.
We do not need to debate doctrine and identify precisely who or what God is and the devil is in order to benefit from this understanding. What matters is that we grasp the concept that there are two diametrically opposed forces operating in every facet of our lives. One force, "God" is always pulling us along towards goodness, and the other force, "evil" is doing everything it can to hold us back. We are in the middle, so it is in our best interest to be aware of how the force of grace is working in our lives so we can work with it and resist the opposing force.
GOOD expressed to an extreme degree manifests itself as total unselfishness: always putting others before yourself, always caring and considering what you can do that will benefit other's spiritual growth and well being.
EVIL carried to the extreme manifests itself as total selfishness: aggressively pursuing the satisfaction of your own desires to the total disregard of the health, well being, and lives of other people.
Stealing, murder, rape, and most other crimes are in reality expressions of selfishness taken to the extreme. This selfishness in our society is undeniable, and it is also evil. When evil manifests itself, the response of spiritually healthy people is concern and righteousness, which can then actually motivate them to do good, more good than they would otherwise do. How many people have started missions or charities after learning of the terrible injustices that have befallen children in third world counties, famine caused by political reasons, or mass starvation? Evil can be used by good to further more goodness in this way. We can grow spiritually by involving ourselves in the fight against selfishness, ignorance, and evil.
It has been said "all it takes for evil to flourish is for enough good people to do nothing". How true!
In our personal struggle between effort and laziness, openness to challenge and fear of challenge, spiritual growth and spiritual decline, good and evil, our conscience can tell us very clearly when we have done something wrong. How does our conscience know what is right and wrong? For that matter, what is the conscience anyway?
We all experience the conflicting desires to do good and evil within ourselves (who doesn't feel a guilty conscience now and then?) If we identify that part of our mind that always seeks to direct us towards goodness as our "original mind", we can then say that the source of our original mind must be God, who by definition is the ultimate source of all goodness. Likewise, we have an "evil mind" that has its ultimate source in the devil.
True spiritual growth then, is in reality the empowerment and development of our original mind, and the unity of our lives with goodness and our original mind, and ultimately our unity with God. Spiritual stagnation can then be understood as the situation where this movement towards goodness and God is not happening. Spiritual decline then is movement in the other direction, towards evil and selfishness.
It is our responsibility therefore, to utilize the grace we experience in our lives to effect spiritual growth in ourselves and others. We have powerful forces on our side, namely the power of love, God's grace, the force of conscience, intuition, our original mind, our spiritual mentors, and our understanding of the truth and reality. Our opposition has powerful forces too: hate, bigotry, selfishness, fear, ignorance and falsehood. If we can at least recognize that we are in a battle and understand the forces that are influencing our lives, we stand a chance of achieving victory.
It has been said that the devil's greatest victory is to get you to believe he does not exist, because then you will not fight, and if you do not fight you will be defeated.
God's greatest victory is achieved when we can love unconditionally, no matter what, and when we remain faithful and determined to never give up in our quest for the perfection of our hearts.
