Spiritual Progress

The modern period of our history has been characterized by the idea of progress. Exponents of the idea of progress, such as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, note that science is able to cure ever more diseases, the economic benefits of prosperity are distributed amongst a greater fraction of the population, and the world grows increasingly more peaceful, and argue that this means that our society has discovered the key to human flourishing in the idea of progress. There are others who would hold that progress is a “myth"—an idea that structures our interpretations but does not correspond in any absolute sense to reality. There are increasing concerns that the Western idea of progress was true for Western society through the twentieth century but may no longer hold: real advances in science and technology could be stagnating behind superficial innovations, and the economy may have reached a dead end underneath propped-up stock prices. Further, it is always possible that whatever progress occurred took place for reasons that we don’t fully understand, and could end as quickly as it began.

Beyond this debate about the secular concept of progress, there is a more solid foundation available for progress that does not depend on our economy or machines or anything external to ourselves. That is the idea of spiritual progress. In the frame of spiritual progress, we focus on those things which move our spirit forward along the march towards God. That may overlap with the secular meaning of progress at times—after all, the progress of science and technology has been a wonderful example of the progress of God. But spiritual progress doesn’t need to coincide with secular or material ideas of progress, as it is ultimately an inner criterion.

But if spiritual progress does not align with the usual scientific and economic ideas of progress, how are we to know where to look for it? The clearest way to understand spiritual progress is to understand its opposite. The opposite of spiritual progress is spiritual stagnation—the attitude that does not care about improvement or getting better and is content to leave things as they are without any expenditure of energy or effort. Spiritual progress in whatever direction requires determined and passionate effort. But this cannot be haphazardly applied energy, in the manner of a person who goes on a whirlwind effort of hasty work that doesn’t truly accomplish anything. Progress is attained through energy directed through intelligent effort. (In the terminology of Indian spiritual philosophy, we would say that the opposite of progress is tamas, the quality of laziness and sloth, while progress is attained by sattva, the balanced intelligence, guiding rajas, or forceful energy.)

With this clarification, we can see why the idea of progress is characteristically modern. The ideal of progress has been prominent in the modern period where the mind has been free to try to improve life—in contrast to the ages where life was governed by religious superstition and aristocratic privilege as in the Middle Ages. In such periods, there is no possibility of the mind improving the state of life because its attempts are shot down by the rigid prevailing orthodoxies and social structures.

At the same time, the essence of spiritual progress is not quite the same as the modern secular idea of progress because of the role of the mind. In a spiritual view, the mind is a high faculty, but it is not the highest possible guide; higher and more valuable than the mind’s ideas are the purely spiritual faculties like the soul’s guidance and the spiritual intuition. In the secular concept of progress, the mind identifies the directions that progress should take and then carries out the necessary experiments; in the concept of spiritual progress, it is the soul or spiritual intuition that determines the necessary direction of the progress, and the mind comes into play more as an executive force carrying out the direction. This is because the mind cannot judge what is the true direction for progress; it can make its calculations about the relative tradeoffs of, say, health, prosperity, effectiveness, and so on, but cannot come to a definitive answer. The soul and spiritual intuition are able to directly perceive the true values and order them, and thereby provide an assured basis for directing progress.

However, the results of the soul’s attempts at spiritual progress may not be as outwardly impressive as the mind’s attempts because the soul may attempt to progress in infinitely many directions, not all of which are equally apparent to the mind. The conquest of a psychological deficiency like anger is a valid direction of spiritual progress, but may not seem as impressive as the launch of a rocket; however, it is only the soul that is able to properly judge which has the most truly progressive value between the two things. In addition to the conquest of psychological deficiencies, any skill is an opportunity for progress given the right attitude; activities such as fishing, programming, pottery, business management, and caregiving all become avenues for spiritual progress through gaining skill and perfecting oneself when they are undertaken with the proper spiritual attitude. For a spiritual progressive endeavor, it is important to link the truly spiritual motive for progress to the activity so that it is the soul in charge of the progress. The soul seeks for light, love, and God in the progress, as opposed to the lower ego motive, which seeks for personal reward and self-aggrandizement.

If spiritual progress can be along any possible direction, how should one decide how to move forward? One way is to follow the trend of one’s own nature. Each person’s nature has the seeds of future development and progress already latent: a person’s natural or developed skills, talents, and interests provide the seeds of further growth. The difficulty is to make sure that one is not being spiritually stagnant by settling for one’s limitations. That’s why a second method is to try progress along the lines of one’s weaknesses. The earlier mentioned example of addressing psychological defects is in line with this method. A last method is to look not at the self but at humanity’s efforts at progress as a whole and try to collaborate with them. By paying attention, one can determine trends in humanity’s progressive efforts, and by trying to align with them, one will naturally progress along with the other people on that path. For example, information technology still has vast potential for making changes in our world, and individuals interested in spiritual progress can use this opportunity to collaborate with others in business and research efforts to help humanity make progress while progressing on their individual level as well. The danger with this method is, of course, following the herd too much; this method should not be used if the cost is sacrificing too much of one’s individuality.

One difficulty on the path of spiritual progress is that progress can be difficult to measure. Ultimately, unlike the world of science and technology, spiritual progress cannot have a system of precise measurement. But this doesn’t mean that spiritual progress is a notion that belongs to an earlier age where religious superstition ruled and man didn’t have objective ways of assessing and measuring things. Spiritual progress equally requires the freedom and zest for improvement that came about in the modern age. Further, what the modern age has given us is the name and ideal of progress itself that lets us identify spiritual progress and other kinds of progress. As such, spiritual progress is equally a product of the modern age. In this light, one of the most valuable things that science and technology have given adherents of spiritual progress is a set of intuitions about what progress looks like; seeing the launch of a rocket or the whirring of a large data center will make it hard to forget what real progress is, and will serve as an inspiration and guide on our own paths of spiritual progress.