How can I tell the difference between real spiritual growth and fantasy or wishful thinking?
–Portland, Oregon

Every person doing spiritual practice should ask this question many times. Spiritual awakening is the opposite of fantasy and trancing out. If you want to discover true awakeness and the fullness of human life, you must learn to recognize fantasy, and you must take steps to minimize opportunities to fall into fantasy.

On a very basic and necessary level, all practitioners must pay attention to what they eat and how they move and sleep. Why? Because it is easy to create disturbances in the body and mind and then mistake these disturbances for spiritual growth.

Try your best to adhere to an appropriate diet and exercise routine, to guard against exhaustion and overstimulation, and to get the right amount of sleep at the proper times. The goal is to calm internal winds and relax the body and mind through appropriate conduct. This is the foundation of real spiritual growth.

For instance, if you are always exhausted because of inappropriate conduct, you are more likely to slip into trance while you are doing your practice. In a trance, you can have all kinds of visions, but these are not signs of spiritual growth.

It is also possible to kick up internal winds to such a degree, you might actually get high on wind and mistake this for spiritual growth. I have seen this happen to some people who eat a raw food diet.

Sometimes, through wrong View, a person misidentifies certain kinds of physical sensations as spiritual experiences. This happened to a teacher I know. He thought he was becoming enlightened when he was actually heading for a heart attack.

So, taking care of the fundamentals of healthy conduct will ensure that you are less prone to these kinds of detours.

Another fundamental is working with an experienced teacher who has some realization and can guide you based on her or his own, first-hand knowledge. My teachers have always asked me specific questions about the fruit of any practice I was doing, and they let me know when I was falling into wrong View or fantasy. This is invaluable.

Some of my teachers have told me ahead of time about signs that a particular practice is developing correctly and bearing fruit. These signs, such as specific visions, insights or dreams, are called, in Tibetan, “nyams.” Nyams come from the experiences of Masters who have gone before us. We can all experience these same nyams because Reality has precise languages in which it communicates to us in our various circumstances.

Here are some of the more general signs of real spiritual growth.

First: Real awakening always shows up in day-to-day conduct. You will relate to people and situations differently. If you have gained the fruit of a practice, you will embody the fruit, not just have some concept or fleeting experience of it. It may take quite some time to be able to integrate the relaxation and expansion we gain from practice into our everyday lives, but this is ultimately what real spiritual growth is about.

Second: You will understand more about how reality is. Spiritual growth is about more fully embodying the living, conscious wisdom of reality. When we experience real growth, we also find we understand more about how Reality works. We can participate more fully based on this understanding. Spiritual experiences that remain, for us, on the level of physical sensation, are incomplete. They are good first steps, but we can know from this limitation that we still have a ways to go.

Third: Once we have actually established ourselves at a new level, there is an impervious, vajra quality to that. Maybe our human intellect still wants to brag, defend, or doubt, but it doesn’t get very far. In fact, our descriptions and explanations and arguments are just a joke. Real spiritual accomplishment is calm, Self-luminous and Self-evident. It doesn’t need any supports.

My diksha Guru told me that, in order to avoid fantasy, “throw out everything and see what’s left.” Living without the stories of one’s spiritual experiences is a practice that will lead you to discover the Reality of your condition. It is a tough practice, real tapas (austerity), but the fruits will be very sweet.

In Ma’s love,
Shambhavi

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