Why grow?
We often hear the word growth in relation to personal transformation. When we talk of the growth of the economy we can quantify it in absolute terms. We can measure the growth of a tree by its height or career growth in terms of designations and responsibilities. But when it comes to personal growth it becomes a bit hazy. The number of areas where growth takes place is numerous. Many of these areas are interlinked. For instance, nutrition affects memory and moods while concentration depends on cultivating interest and a sense of purpose. These interlinkages have to be mapped. Growth requires a multidimensional approach. Measuring growth is also a challenge. What yardsticks should we use? Most importantly we must be clear as to what we are trying to achieve. Growth may appear to be a magic word but growth for growth's sake is of little use. At different stages of life, growth serves different purposes. Growth has to be directed to specific areas depending on the demands of life. Growth also has to be balanced between the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, social, aesthetic, and personal dimensions. Too much emphasis on spirituality or intellect, without developing other areas, will lead to an imbalanced life.
What do we mean by growth? Growth of what? At the fundamental level, it is the maturing of our invisible being. At some point of time in our evolution, the brain created the conscious self to act as a coordinator. This conscious self is the facilitator of growth. It monitors and measures growth. But growth happens mostly at the subconscious level. Otherwise, our growth will not result in spontaneous responses if everything had to be conscious. Through growth, we are trying to achieve the most mature, effective, and humane responses possible in the situations we encounter in everyday life. By developing our inherent capabilities we can give as much as possible to the world we live in as well as to ourselves. Through growth, we get to live with a more mature person — ourselves. Maturing is not about always making the right decisions. It is about being able to withstand the consequences of wrong decisions. The problems of human society cannot be solved without raising our maturity levels. Immature people mess up not only their lives but also the lives of others. If they unfortunately become a leader, the entire nation suffers.
We have lived for thousands of years without the concept of growth. No one even imagined that human nature could be transformed a few hundred years ago. The only kind of growth, if it may be called that, was of the religious variety. Here the aim was transcendence. William James, America’s famous psychologist, once said ‘The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes of mind’. This whole idea of growth is barely a hundred years old. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry attracting the brightest of minds. The Promised Land of self-fulfillment is well within reach of everyone now. Many will be called and many will be chosen.
We need growth for a variety of reasons. Our brains are not designed for modern living. It was designed in the jungles. We have to fashion ourselves consciously to meet the demands of today’s life situations. For the first time in the history of mankind, we are living in large groups, in megacities. Working in multinational corporations where everything is dictated by the impersonal market is not the same as working for an individual with a personal touch and meeting people whom you know personally. Technology also demands a new mindset. For thousands of years, life has been slow and unchanging. Nothing much happened. Every day was the same as every other day. It is no longer so. We live in stressful times, in a world of deadlines, targets, and bottomlines, where Time is king. The acceleration of knowledge is phenomenal and it is only going to get faster. To keep pace with this expansion of knowledge we need to be educating ourselves throughout our lives. We have to be abreast of what is happening all the time. Technology is a tough taskmaster. It will not let us stagnate. No one could have imagined the extent to which computers and the internet have taken over our lives. We will have to develop new skills, knowledge, and attitudes constantly. Otherwise, those with better skills will displace us. This is true of practically every profession or business these days. Education does not end with college anymore. It begins only after college. We live in a world where jobs vanish overnight due to new technology or outsourcing. Without self-education and self-directed growth, we will become obsolete.
The most important area of growth is in the area of human relationships. We learn how to relate to people by observing other people. We generally get along well with friends and known people. But we will encounter circumstances in life where our maturity level is insufficient to successfully deal with certain kinds of people. During such times we feel bad about ourselves, especially when someone gets an upper hand over us. But here is where growth begins. By observing this person who got the better of us, we learn. Maybe we would not like to adopt his methods, but even that is an aspect of growth. What we would like to be and what kind of a person we would not like to be is what life teaches us through such people. Without growth, we will forever find ourselves lacking in situations involving people. Handling different kinds of people is a skill that has to be learned over a lifetime, maybe with many failures along the way. We also need growth in creating and sustaining relationships, which require specialized knowledge, communication, and emotional skills.
Spiritual growth is a confusing area. Depending on which teacher you go to or the religious system you follow the definition of growth changes. We must be clear in our minds as to what we want out of spiritual growth. Are you aiming for self-realization? But what does self-realization mean to you? Here again, it is total confusion. Depending on which confusion you choose the methods will be different. Probably someone has told you that once you ‘self-realize’ all your current everyday problems will disappear into thin air and you will have a hundred disciples groveling at your feet. Or do you only want peace of mind? Every teacher will have his special technique to deliver this peace. But does it suit your temperament? How we resolve such questions will determine what spiritual growth means for us. But a good determinant of spiritual growth is not just peace of mind or visions of god. Unless it improves human relationships, including relationships with ourselves and with nature, spiritual growth will be the ultimate pleasure trip for the ego and the creation of a spiritual identity. Whatever spiritual practices we adopt the aim is to create sublime and divine qualities in our being, which ultimately translate into beautiful relationships. Having a great relationship with our favorite god or guru, but a disgusting one with our fellow human beings is spiritual growth in reverse. Spiritual growth has to be a living reality affecting our day-to-day lives, not something that we benefit from in the afterlife or even twenty years hence. The ultimate spiritual practice is interpersonal relationships.
We also need growth and maturity on the personal front. We have a plethora of issues to deal with. We get hurt easily and carry it in our heads for a long time. We procrastinate and do everything at the last minute. We are at the mercy of fear, envy, anger, greed, and other powerful negative emotions. We suffer from status anxiety. Insecurity follows us like a shadow. Our self-image makes us feel inadequate by constantly comparing ourselves with others. We act impulsively and regret our actions later. We find it difficult to forgive. We live under false beliefs and don’t know they are false. We get bored easily and run after stimulation and get bored with stimulation. We complain and justify, and justify our complaints. We are not able to shake off inertia and lethargy. Financial insecurity torments us. We mistake opinions for facts, facts for opinions and live on assumptions. We lack depth in our lives. There is always a feeling that it is not meaningful enough and that something is missing. Unless we take each of these issues one by one and work on them, life will become more and more stressful, as these issues will only grow bigger over time. For instance, if fear, envy, anger, and greed are left unchecked they will consume us and direct the course of our lives. But if we grow by developing new perspectives, awareness, skills, attitudes, and knowledge we will notice that the tight grip these issues have over us loosens, and a sense of inner freedom is felt. Action is then free and not constrained by these negative forces. Personal growth is also required for internal and external harmony and to integrate our split selves.
The emotional dimension is probably one area where growth is slowest. Some never seem to grow at all. They enact the same emotional dramas at seventy, that they did at the age of twenty. Emotions are a result of the beliefs, ideas, opinions, judgments, values, attachments, and perspectives one holds. Unless there is a shift in the thinking process at a deeper level emotional maturity will not happen. This requires one to contemplate our emotional responses to life situations and discover what is driving those responses. For example, people who become emotionally upset over failure have to examine the ideas of success and failure and the relationship of those ideas to their self-image. For the refinement of emotions we need to engage in the arts, or at least be able to appreciate them. The arts are the gateway for the awakening of the sublime. A qualitative life requires the cultivation of the aesthetic.
Growth in social conscience is another area of importance, especially these days. This is an underdeveloped area as we are hardwired to think mostly of immediate family and ourselves. To move out of self-centeredness and develop a concern for people whom we don’t know requires a new way of thinking. But in an interdependent world, this is a skill that will become more and more important. We are not living in villages anymore where we recognize most people and meet new people once in a while. We live in crowded cities and apartment blocks, travel in crowded buses, and work in offices along with thousands of nameless faces. This is not something our brains have evolved to handle. We have to literally grow new connections in our brains to live in this new impersonal world of unknown faces and globalization. We also can no longer say that global warming, poverty, pollution, corruption, caste identities, and social injustice are problems politicians have to solve and we have no role to play. It only reveals a lack of growth in social conscience.
An area of growth that affects all other areas of life is our relationship to ideas and concepts. Unlike animals that live entirely in the physical world, we live mostly in a mental world. This mental world is invisible but determines the quality of our lives. It also determines the limits of who we are and what we can become. This mental landscape is constantly changing without our knowledge, based on inputs it receives from the world. Unless we direct this inner world consciously we will be shaped by outside forces, which may very well be detrimental to what we wish to become. This mental world is largely shaped by language. This requires that we contemplate deeply as to the meaning of words, which are the building blocks of language. Not all words, but critical ones, that have the power to decide which direction our lives take. For example, the meaning we assign to the word happiness will determine how happy we will be in life. We will be able to experience happiness only within the confines of the definition we give to it. Anything outside the definition will not give us happiness. It is our choice of how we define words. In the exercise of this choice is where our growth lies. Words such as god, duty, luck, work, money, love, success, identity, stress, peace, time, justice, meditation, service, relationship, and marriage, have to be defined and redefined constantly. We need to liberate these concepts and ideas from their limited meanings. The more meaningful we make such words the more meaningful our lives will become. Our relationship to concepts and ideas is as important as our relationship to human beings. Our relationships with human beings depend on the kind of words we use to describe them.
Growth is not always adding something to our self. A good amount of growth comes from letting go of false views. But how do we know which views are false? This is not always easy to determine as many false views come disguised as the truth. This is where we need guidance, debate, and inquiry. Our minds are hardwired to act upon truths. Once we realise the falsity of something we will let go of it. In the search for what is true lies our growth. The greatest amount of growth and freedom comes from letting go of the various identities we are attached to.
How do we know we have grown and matured? Since we see ourselves all the time we may not notice any major inner change within us. The feeling of ‘I’ rarely changes either. We may appear to be the same person, though we may have changed much. Those who meet us after a length of time will notice more changes in us than we can see. To experience the change within we need to go back in time and re-experience ourselves as we were then and compare ourselves with how we are now. Since growth happens at a subconscious level we can notice our growth in the manner in which we respond to life’s situations. If your responses are mature, humane, and effective consider that you have grown in that area.
Growth has its consequences. If you grow faster than your boss you will not be able to work with him. If your spouse has not kept pace with your growth you will feel that his or her responses are not mature enough. We must strive to include other people in our growth plan by engaging in conversations beyond the ordinary. Those who don’t grow will be constantly faced with immature responses and keep wondering why they are like that.
Growth is self-discovery. In the journey of growth, we discover what our invisible self is and what it is capable of, and what it may become. Our attitude towards growth needs to be that of an adventurer in search of a mysterious treasure. In the search for this treasure the experiences he has along the way lead to his growth. This treasure is not a golden fleece but the flowering of our own being. We also have to guard growth from being hijacked by the ego to serve its own ends, which it will invariably try to do. With growth comes power and responsibility. To safeguard against misuse of this power requires a strong ethical foundation. The growth of knowledge, intelligence, and success requires an equal measure of moral growth and large-heartedness. The stronger the head becomes, the softer the heart needs to be. Otherwise, this very growth will turn against us and become our Frankenstein.
