Why have we signed up for this Journey to Higher Consciousness? Is it not because there is something within us that prompted us to do so?

Have you ever attended a high school or college reunion and noticed that some, if not most, of the people there really had not changed since you saw them many years ago? Yes, they looked older and had many years of career and family life experiences to share. However, on balance, they were still sharing the same jokes, for the most part making the same predictable comments, and still talking about the “good old days.” To your astonishment, you felt there was really nothing you had in common with them anymore. 

If you have had this experience, what we can call our “inner grower” has been at work, or you would not have made this observation. You too would have felt and talked the same as you did years ago and felt quite at home with the old crowd.

A woman recounts how she went back to her hometown after living elsewhere for thirty years. One of the first things she did on her return was go to the park in the city she loved and visited so often when she was growing up. Everything about the park still felt so familiar. The trees were taller, there were some new walkways, but overall it looked and felt the same. 

She thought to herself, “This experience is so familiar. It’s as if I never left here. What if I hadn’t left? I would have experienced being here many times, but never experienced the many other parks I have walked through since then.”

What struck her was the real possibility that she could have stayed in her hometown, and because of that never experienced what was beyond it. 

Why did she leave in the first place? Her inner grower was at work, prompting her to move on.

What Is Our “Inner Grower?”

Just as the cosmos has a builtin evolutionary impulse to evolve to a higher order of complexity—to move towards wholeness, completion—so does each one of us have an inner evolutionary impulse. 

Since consciousness is all that is, our inner grower shows itself as a desire to grow in consciousness – although we may not recognize that this is what we are impelled to move toward.

Your inner grower is really consciousness itself—your higher self—within you looking for greater expression through the human form you currently inhabit. The more you follow the promptings of your inner grower, the more consciousness you allow to express through you, and the more your inner grower will “use” you for that purpose.

Thinking will not lead to inner growth, since the source of inner growth isn’t the limited conditioned mind. The inspiration to open to something new, to take different action, doesn’t come from thinking about doing such but from a higher energy vibration which evokes creation.

And, of course, a growth in consciousness does not spring from the false egoic self. The egoic self only encourages us to stay in a state of fear, of conditioned action, of inner stagnation. Its only message is that if we continue to believe in and do the same things, we will be “safe.” Because of this, the more our identity is linked to the false egoic self, the less likely it is that we will be open to the promptings of our inner grower.  

What Does a Prompt from Your Inner Grower Feel Like?

It can feel like an inner creative tension: a push from where you currently are and a pull towards where you really want to go or grow to. 

Some speak of our inner grower as generating “divine discontent” because it’s impact is often experienced as a kind of malaise that brings just enough inner discomfort to provoke us to change something.

Examples of this are the woman who suddenly realizes she really wants to have a child, the priest who feels called to leave his vocation, an older woman suddenly wanting to return to school, or an employee who becomes willing to risk leaving their job in order to find one that’s more suitable to their temperament and needs.

Our inner grower does not cause us anxiety, which usually brings with it a fearful reaction to what is or is imagined to be. Anxiety carries with it a mixed energy of reactivity and panic: you want to be free of whatever is an issue for you now. Our inner grower carries a different energy.

The energy of our inner grower is more subtle, more like a pervasive feeling that resides in the background but colors our current life situation. It suggests movement but never pushes us. We are always given a choice: the comfortable pew or the pull to the unknown, to the new. Uncertainty is almost always a factor when our inner grower is at work tilling our inner soil. 

Having said that our inner grower doesn’t cause us anxiety or fear, do we feel a sense of unease? Yes. Our inner grower’s promptings can awaken the fears we carry within us that have prevented us from moving into a fear-free higher level of consciousness.

The question is whether we give into this unease, and let it stop us from experiencing change, or push through it. The more often we give into the unease that precedes growth, the more likely we will continue to give into it as we move through life. Like everything else, unease grows when we feed it. 

Many who push through this state of unease are lauded as courageous, strong, admirable. However, almost always, they don’t see themselves this way. For them, not to address the unease and “grow through it” is ironically more painful than doing so. For them, stagnation is their worst fear: fear of not growing, of not experiencing more of life and of their capacity and potential. 

Once we have pushed through the feeling of unease, on the other side we know it not as unease any longer but as our essential goodness, which has pressed to come through.

How Will I Know Whether It’s My Inner Grower That’s at Work?

Often a signal that our inner grower is at work is that we experience  personal surprise: surprise that we want to have children after all, surprise that we want to write a book or join a spiritual community and so on. 

Our inner grower urges us at times to be silent, still, inactive. At other times it asks us to take action—and take it now. 

When you grow something, there is a period when there is little activity on the outside, though much is going on inside the seed. Then comes a time for rapid evident outward growth. The flowering suddenly appears overnight.

Our inner grower usually calls us to take small, incremental—though still challenging—steps. If we don’t pay attention to these calls from our inner grower to take these small steps, over time these accumulate and we may then be given what we have come to term a “wake-up call.”

Out of love, as we saw in the last lesson, the inner grower often uses life crises as a means of calling us to go beyond some barrier. It may call you to surrender to some circumstance in your life—and not just once, but a multitude of times. It may call you to leave a relationship or a life situation that isn’t supportive of your spiritual growth. 

Opportunity for Self-inquiry and Sharing:

A.  Can you recall a time when you took action that was evoked by your inner grower? Is there a difference between this kind of action, and the kind of action provoked by a need to prove something to yourself or the world?

B.  Since life is always calling all to expansion, on the collective level is there an inner grower for a family? A country? The world? What about the galaxy? The Universe?