What Does It Mean To Grow Spiritually?

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As I wrote in Spiritual Development Paradox, I have had a growing doubt in what we call “spiritual development” or “spiritual growth”. We’ll get down to the point zero today (As always, my spirit guides helped me figure this out, but I am writing in my regular style rather than jotting down our conversation like I did in the linked articled above.)

So what do you think spiritual growth is all about?

Christian view

I did a little research to make sure I cover the ground. On the internet, most of the top sites on spiritual growth are Christian sites. By reading them, I figure Jesus himself said nothing about growth or development. It’s Peter and Paul who made big deal about it. Look at the glaring contrast here:

Jesus: Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.

Peter: Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. (emphasis by Akemi)

Jesus didn’t put down sinners. If anything, he comforted them to feel better again. (Too many anecdotes to quote here, such as the woman who was about to be stoned or the tax collectors.) But his followers twisted his teaching and changed it to a moral system that encourages effort, control, and perseverance — in short, “spiritual development”.

What is there to improve?

A common understanding of spiritual growth is “to be a better person (spiritually)” or “to be the best person I can be”.

As noble as they may sound, these statements (just as St Peter’s quote above) assume one preposition, that there are good (better, best) qualities. As opposed to bad.

In other words, they are all based on judgments.

And in my opinion, judgments are the first and last thing you want to be free of in your spirituality.

Judgments are made by the mind. When we judge one quality as good, others automatically become bad. And we start worrying, afraid and anxious, with the sense of guilt and shame, like Adam and Eve after eating the fruit that made them tell good from evil.

From there, all human dramas and agonies arise. One tiny seed (or a bite) of judgment growing to dramas of the minds, reinforcing the illusion of separation more and more.

To me, spirituality means to be free from all these craps. Spirit over mind. So calm the mind and be free from the compulsive thinking.

Who are we, to begin with? We come from the Source and are already connected to the Source. We are beyond good. If anything, we want to remember this original state.

There is something fundamentally silly about trying to improve something that is already complete and perfect. I also sense hypocrisy — to get followers, religious teachers had to make people believe there is something wrong with them.

Spiritual hierarchy?

When you buy into this judgmental thinking, you get caught up with hierarchical thinking. I am telling you from experience. Sure, I intended to be kind and fair to everyone, but as long as I believed in any of the judgment calls such as “awakened souls” “ higher vibration”, I had to gage where I stand in the measurement, resulting to either feeling superior or inferior to others. This could be a very subtle or even unconscious process, but it’s there. You cannot be free of self-judgment when you make any judgments.

So your personal relationship gets tainted with all kinds of judgments. No one is quite your equal — they are either ahead of you or behind you. You are hardly facing the person — you are facing your judgment of the person.

And now I say — forget it. Spirituality is about seeing divinity in ALL people and things. Zero exceptions. The homeless guy, your mean boss at work, the teenager with tattoos and pierces all over … everyone.

And isn’t it a wonderful feeling! Life feels so full of love, finally. (Speaking of love, do you sense love in Peter’s quote, even though he mentions it? Do you feel love in Jesus’ quote?) (By the way, I am not putting down St Peter. No personal agenda here. I just want you to see the difference for yourself and he offers such a great point of reference.)

Joy, joy, joy!

To be completely honest with you, I am not 100% free of judgments — yet. It’s a process, and those sneaky little bits of judgments creep back now and then. And when it does, my mind wants to notice and condemn it. In other words, it wants to play the game of judgments. Whew.

Even now, however, I can attest how light, free, and joyous life feels these days! It doesn’t matter what I am doing. It’s all “good”– the kind of good that has no opposite. It just is. It’s not weighed down with any meanings or attachments. And everyone I meet is interesting and kind — or so it feels. They just are who they are.

I don’t care any more if I achieve more Ascension or astral projection or whatever. If something comes along, great. If not, great. I just live it.

I am convinced life is meant to be lived this way because it feels so wonderful. I want to skip around like a little kid! Gee, wish I could still do somersault. Or how about dancing like Shiva?

Undisciplined? Lazy?

Some of you may be thinking this way of free and complete acceptance is just a lazy way of life. We need to beat ourselves up to succeed, right?

To that I say, f*** it. Successes, just as failures, are just illusions in this virtual reality life game. There is another chunk of hypocrisy about driving people to deny the joy that is right here and now in the name of future success. Many personal development teachers use this hypocrisy.

I am so happy to be “nobody”.

Spiritual remembering

You are a spiritual being having physical life. As a soul, you are already complete and perfect. If growing spiritually means anything, it is about remembering this truth. So it’s not really about “growth” — you might call it “spiritual remembering”. (Thanks to Stacey Mathews for joining the discussion on FB and suggesting the term.)

When you remember, you also remember the unconditional love, the same quality of love God has for us. It frees you from the hierarchical world view and enables you to see people, things, and events just as they are, only to find they are wonderful.

Spiritual growth is not about strife, guilt trip, avoiding punishment, and all other nonsense we have been led to believe. Or, to put it in a way that may sound paradoxical, all the spiritual growth / development leads to the realization there is nothing wrong to begin with. This has been my experience (I was so serious about personal development for many years) and I believe it is the path for many.

Related post: If you like this article, you might also like Enlightenment Is Not.

Spiritual Simplicity

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This is a continuation of my last post on addiction, in a sense. At the base of all addictions lies compulsive thinking and so practically all of us are addicted — unless you can stop your thoughts at will and are completely free of inner conflicts, this is the article for you.

Compulsive thinking

Compulsive thinking drives us to do more, effectively diverting our attention from our true nature, which is one with God, or Source. And no amount of “doing” is enough to satisfy our longing to feel one with God. Rather, the thought-driven actions derail us further and further from the feeling of Oneness, leaving us in self-imposed isolation.

This is the mechanism of all addictions and compulsive behaviors. Anything and any behaviors can be the distracting “doing”, whether it is eating, drinking, twittering, working, working for charities, sex, reading, exercising. . . you name it.

So the solution is quite obvious: Quit thinking. Ignore the urge to think and do more. Instead, be still and know who you really are.

If totally quit thinking is difficult, learn to observe your thoughts as you do in meditation. Just observe without reacting to it. The ego, which is doing this compulsive thinking, hates getting direct attention — it likes to hide and manipulate you from there.

Waking up from the human dream

There is an even deeper meaning to this. The “reality” as we know it is not real at all. It’s like a computer simulation game, a virtual reality. Or I might say we are in the collective dream. It feels very real, but it’s not.

So the ultimate purpose of life is not about improving this dream but to wake up. The ego hates this waking up, however, because it cannot exist in the true world.

What I’m figuring out is that the “true world” is right here. Or at least, the gateway to it is right here and now. It’s not about traveling to a wonderful land where life forms glow with brilliant aura and we use psychic powers like telepathy, teleportation and telekinesis — well, actually it is, but then, life forms are glowing and we all have psychic powers already. We just don’t notice it.

Simplifying my life

When I think of this, I notice there really aren’t so many things I need to do. The majority of the things that is taking up my time are unnecessary. Sure, I need to care for my physical body by sleeping for several hours and feeding it occasionally. And I’m happy to do some work.

But beyond that? Everything is optional and I’d like to do things only when that inspires me and brings me genuine joy.

For me personally, this means cutting down my reading time considerably, both online and reading books. I’m also tempted to simplify my diet big time. I want to eat basically the same thing every day, like green smoothie for breakfast, soup or steamed vegs with complex carbs (sweet potatoes or brown rice, maybe) for lunch, and blended soup again for dinner. Minimal variations in the type of greens and other produce.

And I’m attracted to do more physical exercises everyday, like walking and yoga. “Everyday” is a key — no thinking involved if I want to do it today or not. Just walk first thing in the morning — simple and little variations. I think it helps me empty my mind.

Basically, I want to live like a monk while staying at home.

It’s not restriction, it’s freedom

I am not saying these changes are necessary to end compulsive thinking. Someone may be able to stop thinking at will and be completely free of inner conflicts while drinking, smoking, pigging junk foods, and gambling. Fine. I just don’t think I can do that. (Please note being free of inner conflicts is not the same with denial.)

Although my new simplified lifestyle might sound restrictive, it’s really about freedom. From excessive and compulsive thinking and all the mess that thinking has created.

This may also mean I post less frequently on this blog. My apologies. I don’t think I quit blogging like my respectable friend Ariel Bravy did, however.

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” -Tao Te Ching

The Root Cause Of All Addictions And Compulsive Behaviors

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The pandemic of addiction

How many people do you know who eats compulsively, or work obsessively, or spends so much time on the internet, video game, exercise, and so on to the extent it affects their other aspects of life? Or someone who “can’t live” without daily doses of coffee, chocolate, junk foods, sex, not to mention alcohol, nicotine, or drugs? Or someone who goes from one destructive relationship to another with hardly any intervals? Or someone who shops for the pleasure of acquiring stuffs even though they don’t really need them?

Hello? Are you one of them?

Practically everyone is addicted to something or some behavior patters, often multiple of them.

And even though there are physiological issues, some unique to the specific addiction, the root cause of all addictions is one. Until we face this root cause, we just make lateral move from one addiction to another, for example, a recovering alcoholic pigging out sweets and then becoming obsessive health advocate or “born-again” religious fanatic.

Are we all crazy?

And this, when a good life is quite accessible.

Imagine, for a moment, a mediaeval Viking man in the freezing Scandinavia. He doesn’t have enough foods and fuel, no one in the village does. So the only way they can save their lives, along with their families’, is to go out to the southern, slightly warmer area and assault the people there. Some of them would die in the fight, and leaving home is intrinsically painful, so to ease the fear and the emotional pain, they drink alcohol — it keeps them (temporarily) warm, too.

Back then, no one thought drinking was a problem. The cold and the lack of foods and fuel was the problem.

But we don’t live like that, fortunately. We can have a reasonably safe, comfortable, and healthy life — and yet, we throw ourselves into compulsive behaviors that sooner or later destroy our well-being.

And again, so many of us do this. Ours is the culture of obsession and compulsion. Why?

Sense of not being “enough”

There are physiological causes. For example, I’ve been feeling so much better since I started taking extra vitamins (C, E, B complex) — I feel so “normal” around foods. I was suffering a mild hypoglycemia and that was part of the cause of my sugar problem. Likewise, there may be chemical or hormonal imbalance behind many compulsive behaviors. (So consulting a healthcare professional is an idea — although many doctors, or even nutritionists are not very aware of the issue.)

But the physiological cause is not the whole story. If it were, the rehab should have 100% recover rate. And it doesn’t explain the common switching of addictions.

I think the root cause of all addictions is the sense of not being enough. A girl who doesn’t feel she is pretty and lovable enough may attempt to control her food intake. If it’s a boy, he might exercise endlessly. Or they may retrieve to the fantasy world of video game altogether. Someone who doesn’t feel he or she is good enough may work excessively for achievements. And someone who thinks their life hasn’t been good enough or spiritual enough may become by-gods.

This inner sense of insufficiency is very universal in our society. Even kids exhibit it. And we go into compulsive behaviors either to numb the pain of this insufficiency or to overcome it.

But why are we, I mean practically all of us, feeling insufficient? Does this make sense? Who is enough, then? And what is enough?

The disconnection from the Source

The intellectual answer to these questions is to attribute them to the society’s more. But I think there is even deeper issue.

We are suffering from the disconnection from the Source.

Even though most of us don’t remember on the conscious level, we know we are connected to the life-giving Source. We also remember the connection was more full and complete before. We crave to feel that full connection again. That is certainly “enough” — there is nothing more complete than that.

But because we don’t even know it’s the spiritual level hunger, we look to all the wrong places. The truth is, no amount of money, fame, worldly recognition and power, no level of physical fitness and beauty, no amount of knowledge and academic achievement, nothing — absolutely nothing — can replace the satisfaction we receive when we connect with the Source.

So now we have a choice. We can forever seek, possibly switching the target of our compulsive behaviors from time to time, or we can reconnect with the Source.

Test: doing nothing

If you are still unsure, do a little self-test. Do nothing — for a long time — and watch what comes and goes in your mind and how long you can last doing nothing.

“Gee, I have so many things to do, why am I doing this stupid test of doing nothing?”
“I wonder what (name of someone you know) is doing now.”
“This is waste. What do I achieve by this?”
“And how much more time do I have to do this?”

These are some common thoughts that might cross your mind. They all indicate compulsiveness.

If you are comfortable with who you are, you would notice how sweet the air is. Or the light around you. You would feel joy and peace doing nothing.

How to be aware and reconnect with the Source

And this test doubles as a way to reconnect with the Source. Because it’s all about being aware. Being aware means releasing the mental chatter.

When you are thinking compulsively, you are like in a dream when you think the dream is real. You try many things in the dream. You try so hard. But of course, you get nowhere because you are only dreaming. The cure is to wake up.

You wake up from the human collective dream when you release compulsive thinking (and the behaviors that are promoted by these thinking).

Stop thinking and stand still. NOW.

When you do, you may feel a temporary buzz or pain. That is the dying scream of your ego. . . well, for now. Most likely, it will come back soon enough, so again, you stop and release your mental chatter, focusing on the Now.

Personal endnote
I am currently releasing my urge to reading. Yeah, reading can be an addiction, too. It’s an easy addiction because no one frowns at an avid reader. And I don’t mean I would never read — just as I would eat, I would read. But no more reading to overcome the inner feeling of “I may not know enough.”

Spiritual growth is an oxymoron. All it takes is to be aware, to be aware of my connection with God, or the Source. And that doesn’t take any reading. It takes actually connecting.

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