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How Do Decisions Cause Us To Grow?

THROUGHOUT LIFE our brains keep growing in their capacity to interact with spiritual reality. 

  • At about age five our brains have matured to have an ability to make decisions incorporating a desire to serve the needs of other people. 

  • Frequently those decisions reflect a child’s desire to be fair or to share with a friend or with a pet. 

The mental ability to think of another’s welfare is a sign indicating readiness for progress in the formation of unselfish habits and character—a marker for readiness to grow spiritually at a more rapid rate than before.

Our inner spirit can lead us and suggest virtues for us to admire and adopt. Admiration and adoption involve decisions regarding what we like and what we want. 

This is how those decisions can be envisioned to happen:

  • Our inner spirit reveals truth to us in tiny increments which we can accept by very small decisions. 

  • Because these individual insights are usually small and casual, they can, over time, easily become part of our nature. 

We can accept the accuracy of a truth insight by judging it with our instincts for truth and by proving it in our experience. Then we can make the insight a part of our nature by applying it to ourselves. 

For Example:

As a young adult I realized that I enjoyed being with people who treated me with courtesy and respect. It took quite a while, but eventually it occurred to me that others might find my company more pleasant if I was courteous and respected them. Then I realized that it gave me joy that they enjoyed my presence.

All of this recognition of truth, testing, acceptance, and habit formation proceeds as we make decisions to change our behavior and adopt new virtues. 

  • Even the most ordinary decision, when fully explored, involves an ethical consideration of “How does this affect others? Is it fair and reasonable?” 

  • Our inner spirit wants us to consider how our decisions affect our relationships. 

  • Our inner spirit is very much interested in helping us choose to link ourselves together in loving relationships. 

This goal of love linkage is important to our spiritual parent, but not just the end result is important. It is also important that we freely choose to pursue the goal. 

  • Our spiritual parent wants partners who are personally pursuing the goal of loving unity because they genuinely and personally want it. 

  • So, our spiritual parent waits patiently; guiding, suggesting, and participating in our tests for truth, so that we can be satisfied that we sincerely want to pursue the goal.

By giving us this power of choice, our spiritual parent has delivered a lot of power to us to create and cultivate our own spiritual future. 

Through our choosing, we master ourselves and prepare ourselves to participate as partners in the great adventure of our spiritual parent—living the mortal life with us as we choose step-by-step to grow more and more spiritually vibrant.

How Do We Grow Spiritually?

About Us

We are a group of spiritual adventurers sharing our ideas about how to grow spiritually and experience joy in a world that sometimes feels so difficult.

We offer ideas based on our own experience. We do our best to give you simple descriptions, explanations, examples, and exercises.

We promise: no obligation to us on your part, no cost, nothing to join, nothing you must profess to believe, no attempt to convert you. We simply want to share what we have discovered; you can use whatever works for you.

May you grow in the joy of living!

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The Urantia Book is what the creators of these pages all have in common. If you are curious about the book, click on the link above.

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