Friday, August 16, 2013

What Spiritual Growth Means


Spiritual growth changes you dramatically.

You’re a dedicated spiritual seeker. You want to make as much spiritual progress as you can in this lifetime. You want to raise your level of spiritual consciousness as quickly as possible. You want to get on a spiritual “fast track.”

That’s what you want to do — and you're in a hurry to do it. That’s why you’re reading this article.

You may feel that your progress has been excruciatingly slow until now. You may even feel that time is running out.

Can you accelerate your spiritual growth? Yes, you can! I’m certain of it because of my own experience.


My Experience

For me, the process of accelerated spiritual growth began in 1990. That year, I awoke on the morning of July 18th, lucky to be alive after yet another drunken blackout the night before. As I lay there in bed, I suddenly realized I could not go on living as I had been. Then, in an instant of time, I experienced an intense spiritual awakening, a moment of divine intervention in my life. It lasted only a minute or two and is difficult to describe, but I had never before felt anything like it. It was the single most important event of my life.

Sparked by this event, I underwent a complete psychic transformation and profound personality change in the months that followed. Outwardly, my life began to change in breathtaking ways as well — I retired from a military career; I divorced; I came to live in Panama; and I remarried — in less than three years. Then, in the year 2000 when my father was dying of cancer, I experienced a second spiritual awakening, less intense but more prolonged than the first one in 1990. The spiritual floodgates opened, and I became intensely interested in all things spiritual. For me, life became a joyous adventure.

Friends now tell me I’ve changed dramatically, and in truth, I hardly recognize myself anymore. In no way do I resemble the “me” that existed prior to 1990, an up-tight Army officer devoted to career and material pursuits. I like what I have become, and I have become what I am through conscious spiritual growth.

To be sure, I still experience debilitating episodes of frustration and depression. When this happens, I lose contact with Spirit. My sense of spiritual direction grinds to a standstill. I neglect my spiritual studies and practices. But sooner or later, these periods of stagnation come to an end, and my spiritual surge resumes.


The Meaning of Spiritual Growth

Spiritual growth means different things to different people. That’s no surprise. A vast selection of teachings and paths exist for spiritual seekers to choose from. But spiritual seekers everywhere do seem to have one thing in common: they hope to reconnect with God, or Source. 

Spiritual awakenings — such as those I experienced in 1990 and 2000 — can be sudden, spectacular events. They are typically followed by extended periods of slow, evolutionary growth, during which our transformation continues but in a way that is nearly imperceptible.  To me, these extended periods of time feel like spiritual plateaus where I wait for the next big surge. 

As we grow spiritually, we change in so many ways. We seek to establish a relationship with Spirit. We hope to re-discover who we really are and why we incarnated into this physical world. We want to remove the veil that seems to separate us from Spirit.

Spiritual growth releases us from the ego’s grip and the negative beliefs and emotions that have ravaged our lives. We learn that we are not the victims of other people nor of life’s circumstances and we never were. We learn that we ourselves create all that we experience in life. 

Spiritual growth enables us to awaken from the dream of a physical “reality” we always thought was real but is, in fact, just an illusion. This growth facilitates our ascension to a higher dimension. It allows us to transcend the erroneous belief that we are weak, limited, vulnerable physical beings living in a physical world of suffering, pain, and death.

Since the beginning of time, we have lived in the stranglehold of fear and ignorance, leading to all kinds of unpleasant and destructive experiences for us here on Earth. But in recent decades, the concept of rapid spiritual growth has begun to emerge in human consciousness. At long last, we have a chance to awaken from the nightmare in which we have been living throughout recorded history. We can finally raise our level of consciousness and accelerate our spiritual evolution. We can begin to create Heaven here on Earth.


Related posts:
How to Accelerate Your Spiritual Growth
How You Can Benefit from Spiritual Growth



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