The Behavior Changes Needed for a Spiritual Life

Hey ! Welcome to today’s message:

The six major world religions all agree that four specific behavioral changes are necessary for a truly spiritual life.  The failure to implement these changes will negatively impact your prayer and meditation and will result in significant barriers that impede the process of theosis or divinization.  These four changes include:

1. No lying

2. No stealing

3. No sexual improprieties

4. No violence.

While this looks like standard religious fare, let’s look deeper so that we can understand why these particular behaviors have the potential to impede or even stop your spiritual progress.

Let’s take stealing, for example.  Imagine that someone points a gun at your chest and says, “Give me your money, or I will blow you away.”  The thief is saying that, in effect, his needs are more important than yours.  This is the essence of self-centeredness, isn’t it?  “My needs are more important than you or your life.”  Me – me – me!  

In effect, the thief has drawn an impenetrable boundary around himself, and that boundary blocks him from uniting with God.  How can you be on a spiritual path, which is God-centered, while refusing to center your life on the Divine?  Clearly, the me–me–me part in all of us gets in the way and blocks our spiritual progress.

The same holds for the other behavioral changes that are necessary for a truly spiritual life.  When we lie, we do so for self-centered reasons.  Once again, our self-centeredness blocks our spiritual movement.  Furthermore, since the Divine is often referred to as the Truth, it seems obvious that telling untruths is harmful to us spiritually.

As for sexual improprieties, you might ask yourself, “What exactly are they?”  The clearest answer is that they are what you think they are.  We each have an inner knowingness about what is right and wrong, proper and improper.  We need to listen to that inner knowingness and make our decisions accordingly.  What is sexually improper for a twenty-something is quite different than what is improper for an older person committed to celibacy.  What is important in this spiritual discipline is that you constantly ask yourself, “Am I doing this for selfish and egocentric reasons, or am I motivated by selflessness and love?”

Let’s see if I can make things clearer by using a couple of examples.  Let’s start with something like affairs.  If one of the partners in the affair is in a committed relationship, and the affair is hidden from the other partner, then clearly, this is a sexual impropriety.  It is driven by selfishness, and selfishness blocks our spiritual progress.  Even if the affair is not hidden and has the consent of the other partner, it is still driven by selfishness.

Now let’s look at something that may not be so clear, for example, masturbation.  In my view, masturbation is normal and ordinary.  It is either a means to relieve tension or a way to have a sexual fantasy.  In both cases, it is ego-driven and self-centered.  That being said, it is unlikely to cause as much damage as a secret affair.  Again, the watershed question to ask is always, “Is this behavior driven by my selfish desires?”  If you answer in the affirmative, then that behavior needs to be altered so that you can be more fully open to the embrace of Divine Love.

Let’s look at the last behavior that always inhibits our spiritual growth – violence.  Violence comes in many forms, from rape and murder of another human being to swatting flies.  In every case, violence comes from our egocentric and selfish needs.  As such, violence impedes our spiritual progress.

But what about a righteous war, you might ask, like that against Hitler?  Are you saying that’s bad?  Yes, I would say that even a righteous war is bad, but I would also say that they are sometimes necessary.  I also believe that the men and women who committed violence in those wars were all spiritually damaged by their experiences.  That being said, I am extremely grateful for their sacrifices, and I believe their selflessness in service to others counteracts, to some considerable degree, the spiritual damage they sustained.

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These are the four behaviors that need to be regulated for us to make spiritual progress.  There are, of course, degrees in each of these behaviors.  The critical part, in my view, is that at the beginning of your spiritual work, you are aware that these four behaviors can derail your progress.  Being aware of these pitfalls, you can make your choices accordingly.  Of note, the need for changing these behaviors is not negotiable.  All six of the world’s great religions have agreed that these behaviors must be regulated for genuine spiritual progress.

So let’s take a look at what regulating these behaviors means.  I’m not saying you have to change them now, at the start of your spiritual journey.  I am saying that they need to be aware of them in order to make significant progress.

By regulation, I mean that these behaviors need to be brought under control.  We need to be aware of the necessity of changing these behaviors, and we need to take steps to do so, starting now.  

Let me give you a rather inconsequential example of this in my own life.  Because I live in an agricultural area, we have a lot of flies in the summer.  When I first moved here, I spent a lot of time swatting at them.  After one particularly explosive incident, I realized I was engaging in violence and that this violence was undoubtedly impacting my spiritual life.  As a result, I investigated other ways of controlling these pests.  I found that if you plant certain varieties of salvia, a plant that has an odor that repels flies, you can keep those pesky critters out of your house.  My next step in this ongoing process will be learning to ignore those few flies that still get into the house.

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I hope you have found this helpful and that you are thinking about what you can start doing now to change these four behaviors in your own life.  The direction of a truly spiritual life is one in which we identify and release our ego-driven, selfish desires.  As we do so, we become more and more open to the love of God, which is always fully and deeply present to us.

I look forward to continuing next week with an exposition of our first spiritual practice.  This practice is the foundation upon which you can open yourself fully to the Unseen.  I hope you will invite your spiritual friends to join with us.  Having others to meet with and talk about these things will accelerate your own transformation (and theirs).

P.S. 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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