Spiritual Development
What does it means to be spiritual or spiritually developed? There are
three aspects to spiritual development: skills, beliefs, and evolution.
- Skills are things such as the ability to serve as a conduit for
spiritual healing
and the ability to perceive communications from spirits.
However, having these abilities does not indicate that someone
is very spiritually evolved.
- Beliefs are what you believe about the afterlife and the purpose of
the earth life. That is also not related to how spiritually evolved a
person is.
- Evolution can exist in the absence of spiritual belief and
skills. The measure of spiritual evolution is a person's ability to
love which, as you will see, is related to how fully that person has
eliminated selfishness.
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Spiritual Evolution
Spiritualists believe that a person incarnates in order to learn.
Christianity, or more correctly, the words of Jesus, teach that what you
are here to learn is: to love God and other people. Buddhism, teaches
that to be able to love you must become unselfish or in other words
lessen the grip your ego holds over your thoughts and deeds. Buddhism
gives practical techniques (meditation and mindfulness) that can help
you to become unselfish.
Therefore, humility is the sign of a highly evolved soul. One should
look for this characteristic when seeking a spiritual teacher.
For humans living on earth, spiritual evolution is the most important aspect of spiritual development. This is because in the afterlife you will have spiritual skills. In fact, spiritual skills will be the only skills you will have at that point. Also, in the afterlife, you will have the right beliefs because you will be able to see for yourself what the afterlife is like. However, unless you use your time on earth correctly and learn to love and to eliminate selfishness, you will not have that ability when you move into the afterlife.
While the great religions of the world teach that developing love for
others is the primary objective of spiritual development, it is not
enough to say this without some instruction on how to develop love. Our
biological nature puts up many obstacles against love. People hear the
beautiful words of the great teachers and then find that it is
impossible to live according to their beliefs. This damages people
psychologically and brings disrepute to preachers and followers alike.
Therefore it is important for humankind to have an explanation of how to
develop love. Love arises spontaneously when hatred and anger and other
forms of selfish and negative thought are absent.
The way to eliminate selfishness through meditation can be found in the
page on meditation. If you practice
meditation daily, then gradually over the years, without straining to be
perfect, you will become less and less self centered and a natural love
for others will arise within you. The chapter on
Short Topics
has more
On The Purpose of Life.
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Beliefs
For more information on spiritual beliefs see the page on
The Principles of Spiritualism
.
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Spiritual Skills
A person's beliefs have a strong influence on his ability to develop
spiritual skills. If he is skeptical and continually attributes
anomalous experiences to coincidence and "natural explanations", he will
weaken his abilities through negative reinforcement. This will also
discourage spirit guides that may be trying to help him. Each person is
born having spiritual skills, but our societal attitudes result, in this
way, in most people losing awareness of their natural abilities as they
mature. Therefore it is necessary to undo the effects of living in an
unbelieving society.
To develop spiritual skills, a person must be accepting of the phenomena
and must continually look for spiritual influence in his life in the
form of coincidences, hunches, and other unusual phenomena. In this way
he will increase his awareness of spiritual influence in his life and
notice more and more the activity of his spiritual skills. This
positive feedback will lead to improvement and enhancement of his
spiritual skills. Therefore it is necessary to err on the side of
credulity rather than skepticism.
There is the risk of incorrectly attributing coincidence to spiritual
influence, however this risk must be borne. One must always maintain an
awareness of this risk and never take rash or unwise actions based on
supposed spiritual influence and never allow belief in infallibility to
take hold.
The regular practice of
meditation
and
relaxation
is also helpful in the development of spiritual skills. These practices
calm the mind and allow one to notice subtle thoughts, impressions,
and sensations that may be associated with spiritual phenomena.
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