Quotes About Growth

My personal belief is that Jesus's own human mind knew his full divine identity only after his resurrection. He had to live his life with the same faith that we must live, and also "grow in wisdom, age, and grace" (Luke 2:40), just as we do.

Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.

The surrendering of our false self, which we have usually taken for our absolute identity, yet is merely a relative identity, is the necessary suffering needed to find "the pearl of great price" that is always hidden inside this lovely but passing shell.

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

Seventy times seven is a medicine for a healing community, not for a community with all the answers beforehand and all the appropriate punishments afterwards.

Such a down-and-then-up perspective does not fit into our Western philosophy of progress, nor into our desire for upward mobility, nor into our religious notions of perfection or holiness.

Do not be shocked, but I suspect some priests' and ministers' moral failures are actually very helpful to their own "salvation" and necessary for their growing up.

I would like to describe how this message of falling down and moving up is, in fact, the most counter-intuitive message in most of the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right.

The True Self always has something good to say. The False Self babbles on, largely about itself.

Francis of Assisi was a master of making room for the new and letting go of that which was tired or empty.

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

The advantage of those on the further journey is that they can still remember and respect the first language and task. They have transcended but also included all that went before. In fact, if you cannot include and integrate the wisdom of the first half of life, I doubt if you have moved to the second. Never throw out the baby with the bathwater. People who know how to creatively break the rules also know why the rules were there in the first place. They are not mere iconoclasts or rebels.

you never think yourself into a new way of living. You invariably live yourself into a new way of thinking.

How you get there is where you arrive.

Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. What else would be worthy of God? In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and the earnest will find it.

unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

Trust the process.

spirituality

Unless religion leads us on a path to both depth and honesty, much religion is actually quite dangerous to the soul and to society.

It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

In times of great change [which is always], learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists." Faith

it is very surprising to me that so many Christians who read the Scriptures do not see this. Yet maybe they cannot answer a second call because they have not yet completed the first task. Unless you build your first house well, you will never leave it. To build your house well is, ironically, to be nudged beyond its doors.