The Challenge Of Spiritual Growth In Modern Times

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Sunday, August 16th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

To have spiritual growth is to take a closer look inwards toward your inner soul.

To be a dweller on this earth and to grow spiritually in a world defined by power, money, and outer influence is surely a daunting task. Today’s conveniences such as electronic equipments, computers, and tools as well as entertainment through television, magazines, and the internet have predisposed us to direct our attention mostly to our bodily needs and wants. As a result, our ways of seeing our self-worth and self-meaning are muddled. How can we strike a balance between the spiritual and material aspects of our day to day living?

Challenges

Many challenging roads will come into our lives as we take this journey through this life. There are some pathways that lead to a life of single blessedness, marriage, and spiritual vocation. Some of these pathways could ultimately bring us happiness,fame and fortune on one hand, or despair, isolation and distress on the other. Some of these roads lead to shining happiness as there are roads to deep despair, roads towards sweet victory and exultation, and roads leading to defeat and dissatisfaction.

Examine

When we look deep within ourselves we should go beyond the recollecting of recent events thattook place in a day, week, or month. You will need to look closer and reflect on your inner thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and motivations. Take time out to examine your experiences, the decisions you can make, the relationships you are working on, and the things you engage in provide useful insights on your life goals, try to focus on the good traits you must keep with you and the bad traits you have to get rid of.

A healthy mental and spiritual cleansing is absolutely necessary for the soul.Moreover, it gives you clues on how to act, react, and conduct yourself in the midst of any situation. Like any skill, introspection can be learned; all it takes is the willingness and courage to seek the truths that lie within you. Here are some pointers when you introspect: be objective, be forgiving of yourself, and focus on the areas for improvement.

Growth

To grow spiritually inwards,is to develop your capabilities.
Each and every time that you do your best to improve the quality of your life and your being, be it to cleaning up your house, extending your hand and helping a friend, to fail on board exams and getting up and trying again, maybe you have offered to take care of your neighbors sick dog,life has a way of giving you karma points for those merits.
Religion and science have alternate takes on these unknown matters of the human spirit. Religion views people as spiritual beings temporarily living on Earth, while science views the spirit as just one aspect of an individual. Mastery of the self is a recurring theme in both Christian (Western) and Islamic (Eastern) teachings.

Beliefs

The needs of the body are recognized but placed under the needs of the spirit. Beliefs, values, morality, rules, experiences, and hard work provide the blueprint to ensure the growth of the spiritual being. In Psychology, self-actualization is the realizing of one’s full potential. The psychologist Maslow identified several of these needs as humans: physiological, security, belonging, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and self-transcendence.

Needs

James earlier categorized these needs into three: material, emotional, and spiritual. It seems that it is human nature that 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 biggestdifference between these two religions and psychology is the end of self-development: Islam and Christianity will believe that self-development is a means toward serving God, while modern psychology views that self-development is an end to the means by itself.

To grow spiritually is to seek for a higher purpose

Religions that believe in the existence of God such as Christianism, Judaism, and Islam suppose that the purpose of theirhuman life is to serve the Creator of all things. Several theories in psychology propose that we ultimately give meaning to our lives. Whether or not we believe that life’s meaning is self-directed or pre-determined, to grow within your spirit is to realize that we do not merely exist. We do not know the meaning of our lives at birth; but we gain knowledge and wisdom from our interactions with the people we meet and from our actions and reactions to the situations we are in. As we uncover this meaning, there are certain beliefs and values that we reject and affirm. Our life has meaning. Thissense of belonging puts all our physical, emotional, and intellectual potentials into use; keeps us going during trying times; and gives us something to be hopeful for—a goal to achieve, a destination to reach. A person without meaning or purpose is like a drifting ship at sea.

To recognize these interconnections is to grow spiritually.

Religions stress the concept of our relatedness to all creation, be it animate or and inanimate. Thus do 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.

Connection

This relatedness is very clear in the concept of ecology, the interaction between living and non-living things. In psychology, connectedness is a characteristic of self-transcendence, the upper most human need according to Maslow. Recognizing your connection to all things makes you more humble and respectful of people, animals, plants, and things in the world. It makes you appreciate everything around you. It moves you to reach out to other people and go beyond your comfort zone, and become care-takers of all the things around you.

Growth

Growth is never ending, thus to grow in your soul is a day-to-day encounter. The important thing is that we never stop learning, and from this knowledge, further spiritual growth is forever within our reach.

If your growth stops then you are dead.Never stop the learning of your soul. Growth is life.It is the bread and butter of our life and our earthly existence.

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