The capacity and fitness of the
higher brain to undertake and fulfil this function is directly proportional to its freedom from thraldom to his
lower brain, from slavery to his sensory apparatus and its appetites, from the pressures and pulls of his lower nature. It is obvious that his higher brain, with its powers of imagination and reason, may stultify itself by functioning as the tail-end of the sensory apparatus and of the lower brain. It may, on the other hand, redeem itself, and also become true to itself, by becoming truly higher. It is ethical discipline of the mind and discipline of the senses that helps the higher brain to thus redeem itself, and become the agent also of man’s redemption. This is human reason to be, the supreme instrument which lifts life from knowledge to wisdom and from bondage to freedom.
Thus the spiritual
growth of
man is a fact. And the more we know the science and technique of this growth, the better for us and our society. Growth, both the concept and the word, is of protean significance. We know and recognise two types of human growth, namely,
physical and mental, the second less palpably than the first. A baby at birth is about seven ponds in body weight; and everyday it increases in weight. It drinks its mother’s milk, to be followed by other types of food and drink; and it grows steadily until it becomes a full-grown healthy man or woman of 70 or 80 kilos weight. This is the palpable physical growth of man; and we ensure it by appropriate physical nourishment accompanied with exercise. Equally important, though less obvious, is his
mental growth. Through education, a human child grows in alertness, self-confidence, and a sense of individual worth and dignity; this growth continues till he or she becomes an intellectual giant or a giant of will. This is the mental growth of man which we ensure through appropriate mental nourishment - through education, institutional and non-institutional.
These two types of growth are necessary, but not sufficient. There is a third type of growth, most vital and significant, but least recognised, without which the other two will prove man’s undoing, individually and collectively, without which man’s craving and searching for fulfilment will only result in unfulfilment and defeat. This is man’s spiritual growth, or growth in his or her spiritual dimensions, which finds expression in ethical awareness and social feeling to begin with and finds its consummation in the experience, by him, or of he infinite, universal, and divine dimension of his or her individuality.
More abstracts about the PSYCHO-SOCIAL EVOLUTION AS SPIRITUAL GROWTH