Is Growing Up Spiritually Possible In Modern Times Lost Paradise?
 |
In a world, which is ruled by a material lifestyle, offering and wanting you to get your hands on all kind of conveniences like electronic devices and gadgets, focusing your entire interest on the media controlled hype and illusions, it is almost impossible growing up spiritually. Also the world wide web is full of distractions of what you must have in this physical world. The result is a fear based life, where our incarnation concept of self-realization is buried under the soil of material desires. So how can we then balance the material and spiritual aspects of our lives?
Growing up spiritually means to look inward
Introspection does not only mean recalling the things that happened in a day, week, or month. You always should take a closer look and reflection on your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and motivations. That means you have to periodically exam your experiences, the decisions you make, the relationships you have, and the things you engage in provide useful insights on your life goals, on the good traits you must sustain and the bad traits you have to discard. That it gives you the essential clues on how to act, react, and conduct yourself in the midst of any situation. As with all skills, introspection can be learned. It takes the courage and willingness to seek the truths that lie deep within you. It is challenging but possible. Some pointers when you introspect: be objective, be forgiving of yourself, and focus on your areas for improvement.
Growing up spiritually is to increase your potentials
Religion and science have differing views on matters of the human spirit. Religion views people as spiritual beings temporarily living on Earth, while science views the spirit as just one dimension of an individual. Mastery of the self is a recurring theme in both Christian (Western) and Islamic (Eastern) teachings. The needs of the body are recognized but placed under the needs of the spirit. Beliefs, values, morality, rules, experiences, and good works provide the blueprint to ensure the growth of the spiritual being. In Psychology, realizing ones full potential is to self-actualize. We can verify several human needs: physiological, security, belongingness, self-esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and self-transcendence. We can also categorize these needs into the three main: material, emotional, and spiritual. When you have satisfied the basic physiological and emotional needs, spiritual or existential needs come next. Achieving each need leads to the total development of the individual. Perhaps the difference between these two religions and psychology is the end of self-development: Christianity and Islam see that self-development is a means toward serving God, while psychology view that self-development is an end by itself.
Growing up spiritually is to search for meaning
There are religions that believe in the existence of God and see the purpose of the human life as to serve the God. In contrary, there theories among psychology that propose we ultimately give meaning to our lives by ourselves. I doesn’t matter if we believe that lifes meaning is pre-determined or self-directed. The main reason to grow in spirit is to realize that we do not merely exist. There is more to it. Even we do not know the meaning of our lives at birth, but over the course of our development we gain knowledge and wisdom from our interactions with people. Development comes through our actions and reactions to the situations we are in. As we discover this meaning, there are certain beliefs and values that we reject and affirm. So we realize that our lives have purpose. That puts all our physical, emotional, and intellectual potentials into use and sustains us during trying times. Ultimately it and gives us something to look forward to achieve, a goal and a destination to reach. A person without purpose or meaning is like a drifting ship at ocean.
Growing up spiritually is to recognize interconnections
Religions stress the concept of our relatedness to all creation, live and inanimate. Thus we call other people brothers and sisters even if there are no direct blood relations. Moreover, deity-centered religions such as Christianity and Islam speak of the relationship between humans and a higher being. On the other hand, science expounds on our link to other living things through the evolution theory. This relatedness is clearly seen in the concept of ecology, the interaction between living and non-living things. In psychology, connectedness is a characteristic of self-transcendence, the highest human need according to expert Maslow. Recognizing your connection to all things makes you more humble and respectful of people, animals, plants, and things in nature. It makes you appreciate everything around you. It moves you to go beyond your comfort zone and reach out to other people, and become stewards of all other things around you.
Growing up spiritually is the result of an expanding spiritual consciousness on a day-to-day basis. We are here in this incarnation to learn from experiences, bad and good, and to build the results of these learning experiences in our Being as a whole. Only through this inner awareness, spiritual growth will occur and most important, further consciousness expansion will be possible.
Related Videos:
The 12 strand DNA activation is a great life transformer
Weight Loss Supplements
Top 7 Significant Advice For First-Timers In Yoga
Miscellaneous Feed
What do you think about this write-up?