Three Ways to Analyze Your Personal Spirituality
There are 3 ways to analyze your personal spirituality, because basically your personal spirituality has three parts. These parts are its origin, it progress and its end or culmination.
I shall now teach you the 3 ways to analyze your spirituality. I will teach you how to analyze its origin, whether you have already begun the journey of your spirituality or not yet. Then I will teach you how to analyze its progress, whether you are progressing well in your spirituality or not. Thirdly I will teach you how to ascertain whether you have already attained its end or culmination or are near it.
Analyze the Starting Point of Your Spirituality
If you want to know whether you have already begun your spiritual journey the question you need to ask is: Did a moment come in my life when I was thoroughly dissatisfied with it to the point that I wanted to abandon my life then and to live a completely new life?
If you have not yet experienced such a moment in your life you have not yet begun your spiritual journey. To all appearances you may be a good person but if you have not undergone an experience of total dissatisfaction with your life, you have not yet begun the first step in the quest for genuine spirituality. I want to give 2 examples of such an experience of total dissatisfaction with life. Of course I do not mean that you also experience these examples in the same way. What I want to emphasize is that a similar situation has occurred in your life.
The first example is that of Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism. He lived in the 5th century before Christ in India. He was the son of King Suddhodana who wanted him to be his successor as king. But when Siddhartha was 29 years old, he left his palace to see his subjects. There among his subjects he saw an old man, a sick man, a decaying corpse, and an ascetic. The sights of these suffering human beings depressed him, and he got dissatisfied with his life, so totally dissatisfied that he quit his palace and lived the life of a beggar. That was Siddhartha's beginning of his spiritual journey.
The second example I give you is that of Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone, the founder of the Franciscans. He lived in the 12th going to the 13th century. He was the son of a wealthy cloth merchant in Assisi, Italy, and he lived a carefree life of a wealthy man. But soon he was completely dissatisfied with his life renouncing even his father and his inheritance, even getting rid of the clothing his father had given him. He stood naked.
These are extreme cases of dissatisfaction with the present life. But such dissatisfaction must occur before you can begin your spiritual journey.
I cannot forget the words the preacher directed at me when this moment happened in my life. He told me, as though he addressed his words personally to me only, 'Burn the bridges to your past life in such a way that even if you want to you can no longer return to it.'
If you have experienced this dissatisfaction with your life then you have begun your spiritual journey. If not, you have to wait until your searching for a better life leads you to this experience.
Analyze the Progress of Your Spirituality
Now we go to the second analysis. Do you want to know whether you are progressing in your spiritual life? The way to do this is rather simple. Just ask yourself: Have I become more compassionate towards others, not just human beings, but even animals and plants and minerals.
We also notice that in the lives of the two persons we cited above they grew in compassion towards creation as they progressed in their spiritual life. The reason for this is because progressing in spiritual life is a progress towards the Creator and as we come nearer to him we begin to love more and more his creation.
Growth in learning or in wealth is no guaranteed sign of spiritual progress. The only authentic sign of spiritual progress is compassion.
So, you ask yourself: Have I become more compassionate towards others, my family, my friends, the animals I meet, the plants I pass by? If you can answer this affirmatively, you are sure of progressing well in the spiritual life.
Analyze Whether You Have Attained Your Goal in Spirituality
Now we go to the third way to analyze your personal spirituality. This is about its end or culmination. How do you know whether you have attained perfect spirituality or have reached the end of your spiritual journey?
Some people are of the opinion that there is no end to our spiritual journey as long as we are still living on this earth. My opinion is different. I say that there is an end to our spiritual journey even while we are still on this earth. This means that we have already attained complete growth. We are already stable. We can no longer be swayed by this or that opinion. And we keep on producing spiritual fruits.
The nature of any journey is that it has a beginning and an end. If the spiritual journey is all beginning and going and there is no end to it, then it is not really a journey; it is more of a treadmill. But spirituality is not a treadmill.
So, how do you know whether you have reached the end or are near the end of your spiritual journey, having attained the purpose of spirituality in life? It is simply done by asking whether you are afraid of death or not. If you are still afraid of death, that means you have some unfinished business to do here on earth. But if like Socrates the philosopher or Jose Rizal the Philippine national hero, you are no longer afraid of death it means you are ready to go into the world of pure spirits.
Now that you have analyzed your personal spirituality according to its origin, progress and its end, you can truly decide in what stage you are in your spirituality, whether you have already started this spiritual journey or not yet, how well you are progressing, and whether you have already attained the end of this journey or are near it.
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Here are my other blogs which may be of help to you:
http://bit.ly/spiritdev for your spiritual growth
http://bit.ly/alterhealthcare for your health
http://bit.ly/novotrends for learning about the new trends around us
http://bit.ly/bepaidonline for earning some income from the Internet
Here are your links to download the e-books for FREE. To download a copy of A NEW CHRIST by Wallace D. Wattles click this website http://bit.ly/anewchrist. To download a free copy of A NEW EARTH by Eckhart Tolle click this website http://bit.ly/ebookanewearth. I hope that you enjoy reading these free e-books and profit much from them, as I have also profited greatly from them.
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