Spiritual Growth and a Well Lived Human Life

Many of us talk about spirituality and spiritual growth, but what we mean by that is often left a little vague and hard to define. When I speak of spirituality or spiritual growth, I specifically mean the growth of the higher dimensions of who we are.

To appreciate this, we first need to accept that we exist in many dimensions of reality beyond our familiar three dimensional reality. We are conditioned to focus all of our attention on the limited reality of material objects in time and space, and our physical incarnation is important and needs to be taken care of and allowed to grow and develop in many ways, – however when I speak of spiritual growth I mean growth in less tangible, higher frequency dimensions of reality in which we live without a physical body, in forms that are difficult to imagine.

Our physical body exists in the material dimensions of Earth, but our physical existence isn't the limit of who we are. Our human attention has become compulsively fixated on this narrow aspect of reality, but as we expand our awareness through spiritual work we begin to experience ourselves beyond our body, beyond this lifetime, and beyond the limits of the material universe.

Spiritual growth is an expansion beyond the physical dimensions of reality into the higher spiritual domains of being. By attuning our hearts and minds to our higher potentials, we not only experience those higher parts of ourselves, we begin to occupy them. Through spiritual work we expand our sense of embodied existence and begin to feel ourselves living in subtle energetic realms.

The attainment of abiding in inner freedom is necessary for spiritual growth because only if we can remain calm, centered and nonreactive, through the often bizarre experience of higher dimensional expansion will we have the wherewithal to see the journey through to the end.

Our spirit is naturally expansive. It will always expand to its full potential if it is given the proper conditions for growth. If we take care of the spiritual atmosphere we surround ourselves with we will expand into higher dimensions of being. There's no question about it. It's not what might happen, it is what will happen sooner or later unless something blocks our growth.

What blocks spiritual growth is our conditioned and habituated focus on anxious concerns about our Earthbound human existence. If we are rigidly and relentlessly fixated on only the physical aspect of our being, we are not free to expand beyond that.

Of course this does not mean ignoring your earthly life. You don't need to reject earthly existence, in fact quite the opposite, you must live well on Earth. You want as much of your energy as possible to be free to expand into higher dimensions. Ignoring your physical existence will not free your energy, it will only lead to problems that will then demand more of your energy to address.

Living well in the context of spiritual growth means giving your physical life exactly the energy and attention required for us to be comfortable and not more than that. We need to give our life what it needs while avoiding neurotic self-involvement. The ideal is to live passionately and fully while remaining free and easy – in the world but not of it.

We want to live our lives in a way that doesn't demand more energy than is appropriate. The energy that remains can then be focused on our spiritual work and establishing a depth of inner freedom that opens our hearts and minds to every aspect of the experience of being human, and brings us to the very edge of what’s possible. Resting in this depth of freedom is how we grow into higher dimensions beyond the limits of our familiar human experience.