7 Spiritual Growth Signs You Can't Afford To Miss (How to Know You’re Spiritually Growing in Everyday Life) | Spiritual Guidance for Mindful Living | Ep.44

Today, we are talking about signs of spiritual progress, how to know when you are growing spiritually, and it's maybe good to define what we mean by that, by progress.

And so I think one of the things is that when we practice spirituality, when we meditate, when we pray, when we do chanting, and et cetera, we become more aware of our soul, of our inner divinity, um, whatever you want, name you wanna call that.

And so that's one aspect of progress, but I think it's not the whole story.

So becoming aware of the soul is, is important, it's, it's part of progress, but real spiritual progress also means nature's perfection.

That's how our teacher, Sri Chinmoy, refer to it often.

And not every spiritual path is into nature's perfection, but ours is, and I think it's, it's really important to take that into the account of spiritual progress.

Because becoming aware of your soul is one thing, but if your nature, you, your personality does not change with your awareness of the soul, then it just stays as knowledge or as an experience, and you're not really bringing it into the world.

So with that inner soul, with the light of the soul coming forward, we also wanna see that manifested in our, in our outer nature, in our personality.

Wouldn't you agree with that?

I, I would definitely agree with that, and I think one of the wonderful things about real lived spiritual progress is it requires you to get your hands dirty.

It requires to you-

Nice

... to, to get into the world and to do something and to interact with the world in some way and offer something.

And I really like Sri Chinmoy had this beautiful analogy about the perfection of the world or perfection of reality, and he liked to use the analogy of the potter.

And so someone who is making something out of clay, and if the person is too afraid or too apprehensive or too fearful to actually get their hands dirty and actually put their hands into the clay, it's impossible to start shaping the clay.

The clay will always just be like a big, you know, doughy ball of, um, dirt and whatever else you put in-

Yeah

... to make the clay.

Sometimes there's a temptation for spiritual people to withdraw from the world, you know, to live a monk-like life in a monastery or an ashram, and that is, that's very tempting because you can really focus on your inner practice.

But at the, at the other hand, it, it doesn't-- I think a, a life in the world makes you much stronger because you have to deal with the imperfections and the ignorance of the world around you, and you have to, you know, um, see how you are behaving with your spiritual progress in the world, and it, and it actually makes you stronger because you have much more challenges to have.

Yeah.

So sometimes people think that a life like that, you know, makes you so strong spiritually, but if you're never tested against the real world, then, you know, I, I guess your, your inner strength does not really grow.

No, and one other thing that can happen there is if you are living a life that is more solitary or more, um, um, reserved or disconnected from the world around you, it's very easy for all of your experiences to be happening in the thought world.

And the thing about thinking and the inner experiences you have in the thought world is it's very easy for that to be very pristine and very clean and very tidy because it doesn't have to deal with the three-dimensional textured, gritty reality of the world around you.

So if you have taken on a spiritual practice and you're living somewhere where you're not called to be interacting, uh, with the world every day, you can be thinking about your spiritual life in a very beautiful way.