Spiritual advance happens in fits and starts. And, it can accelerate significantly during a crisis, if one makes an effort.
A “crisis” can be any emotionally taxing experience a person faces. While our daily work can also be “emotionally taxing”, a crisis would be much more so. It could engulf our attention and energy in a way that normal work never does. Examples of such a crisis could be death of someone close, a severe problem at work, a blowup in personal finances, a break-up, and so on.
During normal times, as a person pushes herself forward spiritually through conscious effort, she becomes less tolerant of the mental disturbances inflicted by spiritually-negative emotions such as desire, anger, fear, and greed. This increased sensitivity is a blessing in disguise as she becomes more likely to seek help from the spiritual techniques she has been practicing.1 This is particularly true when people can stick to their spiritual routines, like meditation, during the crisis. The support that spiritual practices provide stands in stark contrast to the distress the person may feel on account of a crisis.
A crisis provides an opportunity to sharpen spiritual skills that a person may have been building. It provides a whole new setting to practice these skills and may also have new spiritual adversaries at play.2 Steady spiritual advance, through routines like meditation, makes a person stronger and more resistant to the anguish that events can cause her. But a crisis that makes this same person distraught finds gaps in her spiritual armour. For this reason, a crisis can present a chance to strengthen oneself against a new spiritual challenge.
Just as a person going to the gym can build a different set of muscles with new equipment, a person going through a crisis can develop new spiritual strengths. But, like in the gym example, it’s important to consciously act. One needs to push herself spiritually, using techniques such as TAME — just as she might push herself in the gym to workout with the new machines. Also, for achieving certain muscle-building outcomes, there is no substitute for resistance training. Similarly, there is no substitute for crises when it comes to achieving significant spiritual advance.
Endnote I: Desperation
The mental anguish that a crisis brings with itself can also push a person to urgently look for relief in spiritual routines and exercises. As most of us know, a crisis brings with it some level of emotional desperation. A person looks for relief and is more ready to try anything. This is especially so since a person going through a crisis may feel as though the mental discomfort is stinging her frequently. At this time, a spiritual skill like TAME can be a powerful lifeline. Not only does it provide a technique to reduce mental discomfort, the repeated “stinging” of psychological pain can be a reminder to keep practicing TAME.
Endnote II: Distractions and procrastinations
For all its potential spiritual benefits, a crisis can be a spiritual opportunity wasted. The affected person keeps getting drawn into thought-patterns that center on a cocktail of fretting, practical problem-solving for the crisis, and emotion vortices. And spiritual routines can be procrastinated away as something the person can always come back to “when things get better”. Action-orientation and problem-solving mindset are fine, even necessary, to deploy in a crisis. But, what gets missed out is that during this period, the mind can remain engaged in these “practical” activities while also deploying spiritual techniques like TAME to keep it to a state of peace. Surely, that would also improve the crisis response.
Endnote III: The necessity of crises
Arguably, there is no substantial spiritual progress without crises. A crisis pushes a person to spiritually adapt in ways that she would otherwise not have done.3 It really helps if the person already has spiritual routines as these prepare a foundation for her. However, even with strong spiritual routines, she would be unlikely to push herself hard without the discomfort of a crisis. And, importantly, one can achieve strong self-satisfaction by neutralising the anguish a crisis brings through techniques like TAME. Even partial successes bring astonishment over the control a person has started exercising over her mind and encourages her to redouble her spiritual effort. Such victories over the mind go a long way towards building confidence as the spiritual skills are now “battle-tested”. They also convince the person to look for spiritual solutions to complement practical ones in the next crisis.
Footnotes
1 A person could seek this help both consciously and reflexively. Conscious help is taken, for example, when a person meditates to bring her mind into a peaceful state. Reflexive help is taken when she deploys techniques like TAME during non-meditation times to find relief. After some time, such deployment can become as reflexive as a person shutting her eyelids in the face of a dusty breeze.
2 See this article about the bad actors in the mind. Another analogy could be that the same mental adversaries are using different tactics to foment disturbance in the mind during a crisis.
3 Indeed, ancient spiritual books of Mahabharat and Ramayan describe spiritual advance through the analogy of an all out war against bad actors. The implicit learning one might take after studying them is that crises are engineered by providence to step-up spiritual progress. Perhaps they could be seen as tough love – like shown by a bird that first nurtures its chicks and then gently nudges them off the nest to teach them flying.
