120. One’s Growth Is Due To One’s Experience At The Present Moment

Whatever views you might hold on your present life you can still expand and improve them. Never think that you cannot become better any more and by this also improve your very living. Neither must you think that you are sufficiently good and that you cannot become still better and that your life can also become much better. Even though you must always be calm, do not entertain a feeling that you have achieved everything in your life so that you would not desire to strive for something more.

This stance, even on a spiritual path, is very dangerous and leads to putting yourself in such a position as when man loses the taste of salt of his current living. Such a human stops seeing meaning in his daily living and his thoughts ever more tend to the future, even to that future which will be after the resurrection. However, it might still be a long way to go to this future, since the body still has plenty of unused energy and can move mountains while its inner self has already lost a desire to do anything in this form and is already designing ever more as to how much it would like to act after the death of this form. This inner state is such, as if it were ahead of events and of time. And it also wears out the human who has found himself in this state. He has faith, he entertains a wonderful attitude toward the environment and service but he misses the turning point of the driving power of love in the present moment. It is all focused in the future while in the present moment it is disposed as much as it is necessary to sustain the very action just to proceed.

When this very driving power of love is turned to the past, when all energy is spent only on the research of history, on revering the ancestors, or cherishing traditions, or on reminiscences, this type of human does not employ his present potential either; the potential that he is capable of using for the benefit of the whole, and he becomes like the one who directs his present potential only to the future. By this attitude they come very close to each other. However, the situation in which the two do not use their present potential has absolutely different motives and different causes. But the outcome is very similar – neither of them feels any satisfaction in the present moment with his spiritual growth. And one’s spiritual growth, without relishing the very process of growing, can only cause one’s dissatisfaction with, and even despair in this very moment and due to this, it can lead to one’s isolation from the ambience.

It is particularly because of this that one’s spiritual growth, even as one’s physical growth, cannot be either speeded up or slowed down in the ultimate sense. It is like that which corresponds to an individual’s desire to grow by his participation in this very moment, which envelops him during the very process of his growth. One’s spiritual growth is that individual’s desire to grow. And this very desire can either slow down, postpone this very spiritual growth, or outstrip this very moment. However, the very process of one’s spiritual growth is unstoppable and it progresses only by way of one’s acquisition of experience. And he cannot acquire his experience by even strongly desiring to grow faster, to get more perfect faster, or to be more spiritual faster. He grows, gets more perfect, gets more spiritual, only during the moment of his experience and he is as spiritual as he is spiritual at this very moment. It is only the present moment which determines the spiritual level of every individual in all of creation.