The Myth of Spiritual Growth

A few weeks ago I was conversing with someone on Zoom, and he asked me whether I felt like I had grown spiritually. I responded that things certainly change, but I hesitated to use the term growth. I have been thinking about that question ever since. I thought it would be good to explore it in an episode. In this episode I explore spiritual growth from within nonduality. Do we grow and mature spiritually? What exactly would be growing? Are we spiritually evolving as a species? 

Transcript

The Myth of Spiritual Growth

A few weeks ago I was conversing with someone on Zoom, and he asked me whether I felt like I had grown spiritually. I responded that things certainly change, but I hesitated to use the term growth. I have been thinking about that question ever since. I thought it would be good to explore it in an episode.

As a Christian pastor I am familiar with the concept of spiritual growth. It is one of the goals of Christian education, whether of children or adults. It is thought to be the purpose of a devotional life and spiritual practices. The Bible seems to speak of it. The gospel of Luke says that after Jesus’ encounter with the religious teachers in the temple at the age of twelve that “he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”

The apostle Paul implies that Christians grow spiritually. He scolded the Corinthians saying that they should have grown up enough to be able to eat spiritual meat, but they were still babes on a diet of spiritual milk. Ephesians says, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, that is, Christ.”  First Peter says, “like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.” Second Peter encourages us to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

Scripture encourages us to grow spiritually. But when I was asked the question about spiritual growth recently I hesitated to use the term growth. My first reaction to the question is that the concept of spiritual growth is a minefield for the ego. The idea that we might be becoming more spiritual or godlier or more enlightened is the type of thing that the ego would clamp onto and use to maintain its power over our lives.

Thinking we are spiritual is the domain of the Pharisees. The word Pharisee literally means “separate ones.” They saw themselves as separate from others: more holy, righteous and spiritual than others. Those were the people Jesus had the most severe words for; he called them hypocrites. 

For that reason the idea that I might consider myself to have spiritually grown and am growing still seems like an opportunity self-deception. Even though the New Testament appears to say there is such a thing as spiritual growth, this is not something that a person can determine about themselves. It is like the person who says that they are the humblest person they know. 

Spiritual growth may be something we can discern in others, but not in ourselves. We are too close to ourselves to see clearly. What good can come from that anyway? What is the purpose of measuring ourselves against some spiritual yardstick? Why do we want to assign ourselves a position along some spectrum of spiritual maturity? It is just another way of comparing ourselves with others, and speaking nondually there are no others! There is only one!

Then there is the question of who would be doing the growing? Is the ego growing? Is the individual self growing spiritually? There is no such creature. The separate self is a fabrication of the mind. What does it mean to say that a figment of our imagination is growing? Maybe if we were a novelist and were writing about a character in a book, we could write into the story that the character was growing in awareness or morally or spiritually. But it is a fictional character.  The same with us. So the human persona can grow in this sense as a fictional character, but it is not real in an ultimate sense.

As I look back on my personal life – my life as a character in this drama of life - I certainly see changes. I see how thoughts have changed and behavior has changed. My wife has recently been reading some of her journals that she kept decades ago. We were lying in bed the other night, and she was reading me some excerpts. It was interesting and fun. I had forgotten completely about some of the things we thought and felt and did back then. It felt like I was hearing about someone else. 

My religious and spiritual ideas have changed over the decades. I have gone from nominal Christian to atheist to evangelical to progressive to agnostic to nondual. My views on social, ethical, and political issues have changed over the decades. In that sense my persona has changed. It would like to think that this character has grown wiser. But then I remember that at each point in my life I thought I was growing. Now I look back and see that sometimes I was regressing when I thought I was going forward. At other times I was running in circles. I was wrong when I was convinced I was right. It is all the drama of the ego deceiving itself and thinking it is growing. 

What does growth mean in nonduality? We are not the persona. We are not the character that we have been playing for as long as we have been self-conscious individuals. When we wake up to Ultimate Reality, we wake up from the myth of a separate self, including the myth of a spiritually growing self. We are not that person. We are the whole. We are what is being expressed through seven billion humans on this planet, as well as all the other animals, and plants and microorganisms.

We are both Adolf Hitler and Mother Theresa, Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. Think on that for a moment! We are the parts and the whole. We are the universe conscious of itself. We are the Absolute. Does the Absolute change? Process theology says God changes, but I have a hard time with that idea. That would be a lesser God. I define Reality as that which does not change, even though on a phenomenal level it would be expressed in all that changes. 

It is popular these days to talk about spiritual evolution. Christian philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin speaks of that. People today talk about humankind evolving spiritually. Some say we are at the edge of a breakthrough in human consciousness. I don’t see it. Humans have physically evolved like any other life form on earth, but I don’t see the evidence for spiritual or moral evolution.  

I see change but not growth. As I read the Bible the biblical concept of God has changed from a tribal deity who ordered genocide to a universal God of Unconditional Love proclaimed by Jesus. But that is just growth in human understanding of God, not the growth of God. After all, many Christians have now returned to a tribal violent xenophobic deity. The same with some forms of Islam and Hinduism. So are we evolving or devolving?

What we really are does not grow. We are Being. Being does not grow. Being is. Truth does not change, amidst all the changes of this phenomenal world. This Changeless One is what I call God. True God. This is the One who identified as I AM to Moses. This is the one that Jesus identified with when he said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” This is what we are. This I AM is manifested in a billion changes throughout the evolution of the universe and life on earth but Itself does not change; it does not grow. That thou art. 

This persona may change and grow, but that is not my true nature. Humans can become more aware of their identity as Being, but that is not spiritual growth. That is simply seeing what we are. What we have always been and always will be. What we really are does not spiritually grow. After all, what we are supposedly growing toward is what we already were before birth. So how is that growth? That is return to the Source. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” said Jesus. We are. I am.