Achieving Balance: The Modern-Day Spiritual Challenge of Material vs. Spiritual Growth
It takes a Herculean effort to develop spiritually in a society dominated by power, money, and
influence.
Electronic equipment, gadgets, and tools, as well as entertainment via television, periodicals, and the internet, have conditioned us to focus our attention primarily on bodily demands and desires.
As a result, our ideas about self-worth and self-meaning have become jumbled.
How can we achieve a balance between our material and spiritual selves?
To grow spiritually, one must search within.
- Introspection extends beyond recalling events from the previous day, week, or month.
- You must examine and consider your ideas, feelings, beliefs, and motives.
- Examining your experiences, decisions, relationships, and activities regularly may bring important insights about your life objectives, the positive attributes you must maintain, and the undesirable ones you must reject.
- Furthermore, it provides guidance on how to behave, respond, and conduct oneself in each scenario.
- Introspection, like any talent, can be learnt; all that is required is the bravery and commitment to exploring the truths that lay inside you.
Here are some things to think about when you're reflecting:
Be realistic, forgive yourself, and concentrate on your areas for growth.
Spiritual development is the process of realizing one's full potential.
Religion and science have opposing viewpoints on issues concerning the human spirit.
Religion regards humans as spiritual entities passing through Earth, but science regards the spirit as only one dimension of an individual.
Self-mastery is a common subject in both Christian (Western) and Islamic (Eastern) teachings.
The demands of the body are acknowledged, but they are subordinated to the requirements of the soul.
Beliefs, values, morals, rules, experiences, and good actions give the pattern for spiritual growth.
Self-actualization is defined as attaining one's full potential in psychology.
Maslow defined several human wants, including physiological, security, belongingness, esteem, cognitive, aesthetic, self-actualization, and self-transcendence.
James previously classified these demands as material, emotional, and spiritual.
After you've met your basic physiological and emotional demands, you may focus on your spiritual or existential wants.
The fulfilment of each need leads to the entire growth of the individual.
Perhaps the most significant distinction between these two faiths and psychology is the conclusion of self-development:
While Christianity and Islam consider self-development as a means to a goal, psychology sees it as an end in and of itself.
Spiritual development entails a search for purpose.
Religions that believe in God, such as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, believe that the goal of human life is to serve the Creator of all things.
Several psychological theories contend that we eventually give meaning to our lives.
Whether we feel that life's significance is predetermined or self-directed, growing in spirit means realizing that we are more than just physical beings.
We may not know the significance of our existence when we are born, but we learn and grow through our relationships with others and our actions and reactions to the situations we find ourselves in.
As we uncover this meaning, we reject and support particular ideas and ideals.
Our lives have meaning.
This purpose utilizes all of our physical, emotional, and intellectual abilities; it supports us during difficult times; and it provides us with something to look forward to—-a goal to attain, a destination to reach.
A person who lacks purpose or meaning is like a stricken ship at sea.
Spiritual development entails seeing links.
- Religions emphasize our interconnectedness with all of creation, both living and inanimate.
- As a result, even if there are no direct blood links, we refer to others as "brothers and sisters."
- Furthermore, faiths focusing on God, such as Christianity and Islam, talk of the link between humanity and a higher being.
- Science, on the other hand, elaborates on our connection to other living things through the evolution idea.
- This similarity is evident in the idea of ecology, which refers to the interplay of living and non-living entities.
In psychology, the connection is a quality of self-transcendence, Maslow's ultimate human need.
Recognizing your interconnectedness with all things makes you more modest and courteous to people, animals, plants, and natural phenomena.
It makes you appreciate everything in your surroundings.
It inspires you to go beyond your comfort zone and reach out to others, as well as to become stewards of everything around you.
Because spiritual growth is a process, it is something that happens daily.
We win some, we lose some, but the essential thing is that we learn, and this information allows for future spiritual progress.