I appreciate one version of growth depicted in a Bruce Charlton post, taken from William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness, depicting a spectrum of spiritual progress:
lower man > average > responsible > sophisticated cynic > idealist > poet > mystic > higher man.
The point is not to worry so much where we are, or to force ourselves to be at the higher end of the spectrum. The significance of this is to keep moving forward, gently and wholly. As they say, many are called but a few are chosen.
(BTW, if you're reading this, you're probably at least above average.)
So here's the scary thing when it comes to growth: there is one place many of us get stuck, not quite as in a stand still, but more like a cycling between progress and regression in a pool of fragmented turmoil.
The place where this turmoil happens the most is with the sophisticated cynic. As Charlton notes, “the sophisticated cynic is at the Dead-Centre of the evolutionary scheme - poised, suspended, trapped between lower and higher consciousness. This is a state of wide awareness of options and possibilities; made possible by increased knowledge and learning - but experienced as a pervasive relativism.”
Relativism is a metaphysical resignation with the culture at large. And when you're intelligent, you've got all the more excuse to drop any convictions and stay in dead-center.
“And the centre is 'dead' because there is a state of demotivation. The longer a period of time that is spent in the dead centre; the harder it gets to escape.” Talk about the inertia one must work through even if we want to grow! I'm reminded of Augustine when he said in his younger years, “Lord, make me chaste – but not yet!”
The sophisticated cynic's “materialism and hedonism reduces and deconstructs all higher values - while he 'knows better' than the natural, spontaneous, instinctive Man - and he finds he just cannot forget or discard his sophistication, science, philosophy, ideology... They come back, again and again, to haunt him.” We are all condemned to "religion", but many of our priests are full of clever foolishness.
“The sophisticated cynic is therefore pulled in both directions; and also repelled by both directions. The sophisticated cynic is the permanent adolescent - too mature to be a child, too immature to be an adult; too bored by both immaturity and maturity, seeing-through the innocence of childhood and the responsibility of adulthood. He is cut-off from the basic satisfactions of simply getting-by in practical, material life; and also from the spiritual satisfactions of living for ideals located outwith mortal life and human limitation.” This is Peter Pan syndrome, but without the flying.
“The sophisticated cynic knows that the world of communications - of nature, of other people, of his own evanescent thoughts - are doubtful and unreliable: he has often experienced this unreliability. This insight itself implies that some other and solid form of knowing exists (with which communication is implicitly being contrasted); but when it comes to any specific knowledge, the sophisticated cynic remains unsure: he lives in an atmosphere of doubt... Yet at the same time, he doubts his own doubts, suspects there is 'more to life', and cannot embrace a fully nihilistic skepticism.”
This is one hell of a diagnosis, but for Christ's sake where's the doctor's cure?!
“We begin as immature little-children of God; in spiritual adolescence we solipsistically assert ourselves to be the one-real-God in a universe made-up by our-selves; in maturity we recognise that we are products-of and inhabitants-of the framework of God's creation; destined to become a multiplicity of gods; destined to become God's grown-up children and loving companions both of each other and of the deity. And this is the basis of new, real, permanent relationship.”
Once again, it comes down to relationships. But here with True metaphysics! And in that we develop our capacity to consciously relate to the Spirit, and to make conscious connections that enable us to identify and grasp the whole of reality.
And yet again, this is like the gentle growth of gardening. We tend to what we can, but allow nature to take its course. Like our flora, we flourish, but forward by the way of upward instead of the reverse.
“The phase [of the sophisticated cynic] is a necessary point through-which Men must pass if they are to attain the autonomy required by higher consciousness; but if the lessons are to be learned, then the phase must feel real - must indeed be real - at the time it is being experienced. There must to be a pause in progression - and this pause may become prolonged and arrested into stasis.”
In such spiritual desolation, sometimes it is best to do nothing but to bear witness.
I recall this beautiful passage in MotT:
Now, we occultists, magicians, esotericists and Hermeticists — all those who want to "do" instead of merely waiting, who want "to take their evolution in their own hands" and "to direct it towards an aim"—are confronted with this choice in a much more dramatic way, I should say, than is so for people who are not concerned with esotericism. Our principal danger (if not the only true danger) is that of preferring the role of "builders of the tower of Babel" (no matter whether personally or in a community) to watching over "as gardeners or vine-growers the garden or the vine of the Lord". Truth to tell, the only truly morally founded reason for keeping esotericism "esoteric", i.e. for not bringing it to the broad light of day and popularising it, is the danger of the great misunderstanding of confusing the tower with the tree, as a consequence of which "masons" will be recruited instead of "gardeners".Better that gardeners shall apply. No need to concern ourselves with collective utopias; instead, we sort ourselves out with our internal, external, and Higher relationships under a coherent metaphysical ideal. Then we can grow in the way that was Infinitely intended.