Am I Making Progress?

My wonderful wife and I were relaxing in a mineral hot spring pool under a clear blue Colorado sky. Out of nowhere, she commented, “Sometimes, I feel I’m not making much spiritual progress.”

If you are on a spiritual or religious path, I’m sure you know that feeling. Even after years of meditation, prayer and practice, we still have pangs of uncertainty: Will I ever become the person I hope to be?  

That conversation made me wonder, what does it mean to ‘make spiritual progress’? How are we to know if our qualms or convictions are true or not? I spent time pondering the questions, writing down ideas that came to mind, creating the bones for what I hoped would be a profound article. Nothing came together.

On impulse, I consulted the Oracle, ChatGPT with a question: What is the meaning of spiritual progress? With a world of knowledge at its virtual fingertips, it immediately came up with a full and faultless answer:

No way could I come up with a better summary than that! So why did I feel discontented? Was it my inadequacy or jealousy? Had I just been supplanted, discounted and told my thoughts didn’t amount to a hill of beans? Something wouldn’t settle.

Then it came to me: AI comes up with pat answers, but it can’t feel what it’s like to have questions, certainly not those questions that bubble up from deep inside us. It gives us information gleaned from a thousand human sources, but its very clarity and certainty are inhuman. Certainty in the realm of the spirit feels wrong. To be fully human is to not know exactly who we are or what we can become.

Every living breathing human being is a mystery. Our essential nature escapes definition. It cannot be reduced to a few bullet points. My wife’s doubts speak of her self-awareness and aspirations better than any measure of ‘progress’. It is only when we stop questioning ourselves or fail to recognize we can become more and better, that our inner nature stagnates and festers.

Unrestrained certainty is a kind of sickness. In contrast, humility and doubting are signs of spiritual longing. As Erich Fromm tells us, “The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition that impels man to unfold his powers.”

How can we embrace uncertainty and let go of our attachment to progress? Unlike ordinary outer experiences, the inner world is not bound in time. It helps to remember the spiritual path has only beginnings, never endpoints.

Waking each day, we are reconstructed anew out of the fragments of our history and the expectations of an imagined future. All that exists is today, and the present moment is only about 3 seconds long! Essentially, the idea of spiritual progress makes no sense.

Yet here’s the dilemma: the desire for progress, the welling up of doubts and insecurities, the shortness of life and the enormity of the spiritual journey, these are the engines that keep us moving and changing. Somehow, we have to embrace the yearning to become more than we are and yet let go of the idea of progress.

So perhaps that is a good definition of the spiritual journey: Make constant effort, surrender everything.