July/August 2006 Spirituality
The Spiral of Growth

by Ken Russell

Understanding the spiral of growth can help you deal with one of the most discouraging experiences on the spiritual path: coming up against the same old problems again and again.

Spiritual growth is different from linear growth. Linear growth teaches us that once we understand or resolve something, we move on to the next thing. As a child, you may have struggled with the multiplication tables, but once you overcome that, you move on. You are done with earlier problems.

This is not what happens as we tread the spiritual path and work through our conditioning. We do not solve one problem and move on to the next. We do not graduate from one set of difficulties to another. We discover that we are always dealing with the same conditioning. We cannot change the past, and the past formed our conditioning. Our conditioning is like a life koan, something we continue to deal with until we finally see it clearly and are free of it. It is a given that you will contend with it during your entire journey.

Rather, progress is indicated by a growing clarity about the nature of our conditioning. We do not remove or eliminate our conditioning as much as we move into spaces of greater clarity about what it is and how it works. The conditioning remains, but we no longer believe that we are our conditioning.

The spiral of growth is perhaps the best paradigm for progress on the spiritual path. The growth process is cyclic rather than linear. We come up against the same old difficulties repeatedly. We believe we have overcome something, and there it is again, only much more subtle.

At the same time, there is movement, represented by the upward flow of the spiral. The problems come up, but we are in a different place with respect to them each time they appear. We don’t buy into them as much. Perhaps we can even chuckle at them. We learn that this is part of our progress, not being caught in the conditioning. The spiral of growth captures this as the circling around moves to higher and higher levels.

And this upward moving circle is a reminder that you will keep grappling with the same set of problems. As you come to know yourself, you gain the ability to recognize the various patterns as they attempt to influence your life. You understand that you will have certain tendencies because of your conditioning. Then, when you see that tendency arising in your life, you know that you need to be extra vigilant. Over time, the various patterns mutate into subtler forms.

You learn that whatever state you are in, no matter how hopeless it seems or how trapped you believe yourself to be, it will pass. If you become attached to the more agreeable spaces, the expansive ones, you will suffer more when the spiral turns. And the spiral will turn. The phrase “This, too, will pass” will aid you as you traverse your personal spiral, especially on some of the more difficult turns.

©1995, 2004 by Ken Lloyd Russell, www.thewayofseeing.com.