How To Measure Your Spiritual Progress

We are all here because we want to make progress in our spiritual lives.  We want to open ourselves to that Magnificence which we call God, and we want to experience that profound peace – that marvelous ‘settledness’ and comfort that only God can provide.  So, how do we know if we are making progress?  Maybe what we think is a deepening of our spiritual life is really just another illusion, thrown up by our always–inventive egos.  To keep ourselves from diving too deeply into dead ends, it seems vital that we develop some method of discernment.  So that is our task for this week.

Every generation of spiritual seekers has to figure out some way of measuring what they are doing.  As a result, each of the major religions has had to come up with a solution.  Within the Christian church, this solution was first developed for clergy and then for those who took on monastic vows.  Most people are familiar with the notion of a rule of life when it’s applied to Catholic clergy.  Before a man is ordained a priest in the Catholic Church, he commits to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  These three vows become the standard against which he measures his spiritual progress.

Now, please understand me.  I am not suggesting that you adopt these three vows.  They are extremely difficult to follow, and failure here often results in a great deal of shame and guilt, emotions that damage us spiritually.  Furthermore, we don’t need to maintain an ecclesiastical structure to evaluate our own spiritual progress, so these particular vows are unnecessary for us.  That being said, adopting an explicit rule of life does give us a yardstick to evaluate our spiritual progress.

I would like to suggest several possible rules that will enable you to evaluate your own progress.  These rules are adapted from Buddhism, and they revolve around the practice of generosity, ethical discipline, and patience.  These three areas are familiar to every spiritual seeker, for each of the major religions emphasizes these practices, each in its own way.  They are part of the common spiritual heritage shared by all humanity.  Let’s look at each of these in turn and explore how we can use them as tools to measure our own progress.

Generosity.

Generosity is the practice of giving freely to others, without expectation of return.  This includes sharing material things such as money, clothing, and the like.  It also includes sharing knowledge and offering protection.  

We have a great example of the principle of generosity in the story of the Good Samaritan in the Christian scriptures.  In this story, a Jew is badly beaten, robbed, and left for dead by the side of the road.  The people one would expect to help this poor man, fellow Jews and clergy, passed him by without helping.  His enemy, a man from Samaria, not only stops and helps but also transports him to an inn and pays for his medical care.  Clearly, the Samaritan is engaged in the deeply spiritual practice of generosity, giving both his time and his money, and offering profound protection.

I strongly suspect that this Samaritan had turned the spiritual principle of generosity into a rule that he used to guide his life.  It probably went something like this: whenever I see someone in dire need, I will do my best to help them.  Let’s look at what this entails.  First, it entails putting our own needs to the side.  This involves making someone else’s needs more important than our own.  It is, in effect, a direct assault on our ego.  It is us saying, “There is something more important than gratifying the Me-Me-Me voice in our own heads.”  

The spiritual effect of this is an opening of our hearts.  This opening allows the love of God to pour into us and to transform us.

Many of us witness or practice this generosity in our daily lives.  You see it when a mother picks up a crying child and soothes him.  You see it when a father takes on an extra job in order to provide money for his daughter’s education.  In both cases, the parent puts aside their ego-driven selfishness in order to care for someone in need.  Yet, because there is no clearly articulated rule of life here, these profoundly spiritual acts go unnoticed, both by those who engage in them and those who observe them.  Adopting an explicit rule helps us first to see what is happening around us, and then to use these data to evaluate our spiritual growth.

So, how might you adopt generosity as a rule for your own life?  First, avoid “heroic” gestures!  You know, things like giving all your money to the poor and that sort of nonsense.  These kinds of gestures are almost always ego-driven, so instead of diminishing our egocentrism, they actually reinforce it.

So start small.  Look for some small way that you can be generous towards others.  Perhaps, on Monday mornings, you might get coffee for the people you work with.  Perhaps you might volunteer to do the cooking or the dishes.  The actual action doesn’t matter so much as your intention, your open heart, and your doing this action on a regular basis.

Let’s talk about that last part a bit.  When you do something on a regular basis, sometimes you are in a good mood and sometimes you feel grumpy.  If you only get your workmates coffee when you’re feeling good, you are probably not making much spiritual progress.  It’s when you feel grumpy – when you really don’t want to do it but you do it anyway and you use the occasion to deliberately open your heart – that’s when real spiritual progress starts to accrue.  That’s when you confront your fiercely self-centered ego.  It goes something like this: first, you open your heart to serve someone else, and then that heart-opening allows you to be more open to the love that God always and faithfully pours into us.

The purpose of adopting a rule of life is to confront your self-serving ego.  It is our egos, remember, that block us from fully enjoying God’s Presence and Love.

Ethical Action

All the major religions of the world state that four behaviors will hinder our spiritual progress.  These include lying, stealing, sexual improprieties, and violence.  This means that, if we are to make spiritual progress, we need to clean up our lives and eliminate these behaviors.  The sad thing is, while we give lip service to these ethical precepts, we rarely change our behavior.

Let’s take lying as an example.  It is a rare person who believes that lying is acceptable, and it is equally rare to find someone who lives by this principle.  If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we lie all the time.  We lie to protect ourselves, and we lie to protect the feelings of others.  In almost every case, our lying is the result of our ego's need to “look good.”

Ahhhh… Here it is again – that self-centered ego furiously shouting “Me–Me–Me!”  It keeps popping up – again, and again, and again, doesn’t it!  It’s important to recognize that the ego is not inherently bad or sinful or wrong.  It is a tool that the Divine has created and used for our survival.  But, like all tools, it has a limited application, and we need to learn to discard it when it has outlived its usefulness.  While the ego can keep us alive in this world, it is simply an obstacle to our spiritual progress.

So, how can we use these four ethical precepts to construct a rule of life?  As always, it’s best to start small.  Pick one of these precepts – lying, for example – and fashion it into a rule for yourself.  For example, you might decide to stop your own white lies.  No matter the situation, you might decide that you will always tell the truth unless someone’s life is at stake.  Then comes the hard part…

To be successful with a rule of life, two things are necessary: truthfulness and humility.  To be successful, you need to discern between truth and falsehood.  And then, even when it is difficult or painful for you, you must stick to the truth.  This is where humility comes in.  We need to acknowledge when we break our own rule.  We all would prefer to see ourselves as perfect, but none of us is even close.  So if we're to make spiritual progress, we have to be real with ourselves.  We have to acknowledge when we are at fault and not try to make excuses or “pretty up” the mistake.  It is here that we directly confront our ego, our self-centeredness.  It is here that we say that God is more important to us than our own self-serving ways.  In doing so, we create an opening for God’s love.

*  *  *

This is pretty heavy stuff, isn’t it?  I don’t know if reading about this is difficult for you, but writing it certainly is difficult for me, so I’m going to stop now.  The things we are talking about now are the difficult part of the spiritual path.  It’s hard to look at what’s required if we are to make progress.  It’s even harder for me to 

acknowledge my shortcomings publicly as I struggle to share this with you.  So let us hold each other in prayer this week, trusting that God is working his will in our hearts.  Trusting that the Divine is working even harder than we are to bring us to our true Home.

With love,

P.S.  Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class.  If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web.  If you have an interest, please write me at [email protected]. 

Humility as a Tool  → Letting go → Fear → Openness →  Acceptance & Growth

If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible:  The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇

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