Inner life is placing my individual life within the context of humanity.
Inner life is not about self-analyzing, delving into personal problems continuously revolving around myself. It does not revolve around the pursuit of my own goals and personal objectives. It is not simply the practice of meditation and prayer exercises. While all of these may be worthwhile, inner life as described here, is something different.
Basically, inner life is to place my spiritual values and principles above other values that I may have, such as values based on what I want just for myself, without considering the human family.
Inner life is placing my individual life within the context of humanity.
For reflection:
What do I mean by “spiritual”?
What are your spiritual ideals?
What does it mean in your daily life to place your individual life in the context of humanity?
Exercise:
Placing my individual life into the context of humanity: When grocery shopping, I try to reflect on all the people who have made this food possible, e.g., those who planted, harvested, and packaged the food and those who transported it. I could also reflect on the living nature of food and its connection to the chain of life.
To go deeper – see the notes from Inner Life, a study course of 16 Teachings:
First Teaching
Inner Life
Prepared for Cafh Global
Copyright 2024 Cafh Foundation
Have you ever noticed this:
Apart from natural disasters, disease, and accidents, most of the suffering that human beings experience is caused by us.
Furthermore, the more we advance in knowledge and abilities, the greater the suffering that we cause ourselves. Although many human beings are working for our well-being, they are only a tiny part of humanity.
For this reason, it is worth looking at and, even better, investigating what really moves us to be able to create what we want for the world.
In other words, we need to develop our inner lives.
But what is inner life really? What does that search involve, and how can it be carried out?
Some of us might believe that inner life is thinking a lot, self-analyzing, delving into personal problems, and continuously revolving around ourselves. Others look for inner life by focusing
their will on pursuing their goals and personal objectives. There are also those who believe that inner life is continuously practicing meditation and prayer exercises.
It is beneficial to meditate on one’s own needs and rely on firm willpower to carry out the purposes. It is also good to practice exercises of meditation and prayer. These practices help us to unfold and generally form part of the asceticism characteristic of spiritual life.
But they are not actually inner life itself.
Basically, inner life is placing our spiritual values and principles above other values we may have, such as values based on what we want just for ourselves, without considering the human family.
This value we give to the spiritual is not just a mental approach. Instead, it is the meaning we give to our existence when we place it within parameters that transcend us.
To summarize, inner life is a vital, complete attitude that transforms our acts into spiritual life.
Our fields of interest spontaneously shift towards a transcendent objective. We stop becoming scattered internally in feelings and thoughts that lead us from one thing to another and instead guide our life by a single, spiritual intention.
So inner life is not limited to some movements of our mind and our heart. It is our habitual disposition based on a spiritual ideal.
The search for inner life goes hand in hand with a deep knowledge that we have always possessed within ourselves, the resources that will grant us the inner fulfillment we yearn for. It is a consciousness of being, a knowledge that every conquest will only be a re-discovery. In this knowledge, there is the infused certainty that we will reach the goal we yearn for and that we will fulfill our destiny.
Undoubtedly, this faith is not enough for our inner life to be possible. Nor is it enough to accept the postulate that material values are vain and fleeting. Accepting a postulate as good is one thing; guiding our life by it is something very different.
The challenge we face when we want to unfold lies in harmonizing what we believe we are with what we really are and with what we yearn to be. Thus, our spiritual life’s main effort is toward achieving unity between what we think, feel, and do and what we yearn to attain.
From the ascetic-mystical point of view, the level of inner life comes from the depth of our habitual recollection, the clarity of our discernment, and the breadth of our state of consciousness.
Inner life is a progressive and expansive self-consciousness—the new world we can discover and conquer.
The first step towards inner life is learning to discern what is good for us and everyone. The next steps involve living in accordance with this good until we can no longer differentiate it from ourselves.
Living guided by the highest values and identifying ourselves with the good keeps us from the selfishness that often hinders our attempts to expand our consciousness. It allows us to focus our attention on our fundamental human problems and discover ways to overcome them. It also helps us to place the different aspects of our personal problems within the great context of life. This dispels our illusions, leaving room for a loving contemplation of life as an expression of the Divine Mother (the feminine image of God in its aspect of Creator of the Universe).
Thus, inner life is one of the forms in which the process of expansion of our consciousness is expressed.
