What does spiritual growth mean to you?

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We are born with something that I call, for lack of a better word, “consciousness.” You can have more or less of it. Having more of it basically makes you more self-aware. Spiritual growth mostly revolves around purposefully increasing your consciousness. You become more creative, more resourceful, smarter, wiser, all of these things. They are all just different words to describe consciousness.

Consciousness lives in you but is stored in your soul. I like to think of it as a stew that contains within all the things you’ve ever experienced, over all the lifetimes you’ve ever experienced them in. Some people like to think all these experiences are stored somewhere. Maybe they are, but I don’t like to think of it that way because it seems like every “past life experience” people have is of some king or whatever.

Instead, a stew. If you’ve got a good palette, you can pick out individual seasonings that went into a stew. All of your past experiences meld together to form a rich, complicated being. When you are born, you basically just take your past consciousness and insert it into a new mind, where it takes root instantly.

Modern life is way too big for one person to really understand, so there could never be a real “blueprint” for living life. Which is great, everyone can choose themselves. We do, our personalities form as infants and they carry with us through our whole lives. All of this choice we have, and there is mountains of it, contributes to our sense of self.

I could make an analogy to computer science terminology but that would be a little too complicated for the scope of the question. Ask me in a comment if you’re interested and know the basics of information theory.

Spiritual growth means different things to different people. If you are at a low level, then growth involves chasing personal goals because things like leadership and romance are beyond you. If you are at a high level, then “lower” level issues are quickly resolved so you have to deal with more and more ‘meta’ issues.