The spiritual life is one of progress. Hence, life is not a thing we walk - though we often use that language when speaking of the spiritual life. The spiritual life is an ever-creative flow, for the spiritual life is something life is doing in unfolding itself. A motion. A dance. A spilling-over. It is a moving here onward. And we are life. So, there is something in us reaching forward, even while we can learn better to be content where we are. So, when I speak of walking the Way, there is no where to locate the Way. We move, the Way moves. The Way is, we can say, a moving stillness, or a stillness in motion.
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The Christian contemplative, Richard of St. Victor (b. c. 1123-d. 1173), a native of Scotland, in the school of what some have called the School of St. Victor, wrote in-depth on this transformation. He presents spiritual development with images of crawling, walking, and flying. All models of growth fall short, for life does not evolve so neatly; yet, this one makes sense and is simple to understand because of the images Richard used from everyday life.
1) Crawling
Crawling is Latin cognitio, or cognition. Cognition is imagination; this is like a toddler crawling on the ground. Here, there is much effort and reliance on thinking. I sometimes speak of this as "effortfulness."
2) Walking
Walking is Latin meditatio, or meditation. Meditation balances effort and receptivity. While there is effort, it is not as much as prior.
3) Flying
Flying is Latin contemplatio, or contemplation. This is what Buddhists mean when speaking of "no effort" and "not doing." I have shared the cartoon of the man in sitting meditation before. He looks up and asks the teacher, "What next?" The teacher replies, "Nothing, this is it."
Possibly, it will help here to note that effort will never cease as part of the spiritual journey. It will decrease. The attitude of earning will cease. We all likely begin to earn something - salvation, enlightenment, holiness, afterlife in heaven, God's favor ... . This difference was noted by the late professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and a Christian, Dallas Willard. He wrote in The Great Omission: “Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning." Grace is the freely flowing energies facilitating maturation. No one can earn that. It is free; it is of your own essence, the god-essence. The same energies causing grass to grow, the moon to glow, the waters to flow ... is these energies. As the Greek Orthodox Church recognizes, grace is exactly this: divine energies. Of course, we could name it differently based on terms used in other spiritual paths.
Richard's schema is of a natural emergence of consciousness and spiritual practice. All three, he taught, are good.
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Anthony de Mello, late Indian Catholic Christian priest, in One Minute Wisdom, shares a tale, which relates to the whole process of spiritual transformation and effort -
Is there anything I can do to make myself Enlightened?
As little as you can do to make the sun rise in the morning.
Then of what use are the spiritual exercises you prescribe?
To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise.
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Consciousness emergence is a natural process, and each human, with few exceptions, has the potential to develop the subtle bliss of contemplation. We are like an acorn with the giant oak already present in its tiny body. Regardless, a person must evolve the capacities, even as a child learns to walk only after crawling. We may, for example, experience flying while still crawling, but we will return to crawling. We can get brief visits beyond our capacities, yet we cannot remain there; however, we can when we have grown there. This same principle applies to regressions: we can be walking and revert to crawling, to return to walking. Growth is not a straight line. Still, we have a growth-point of stabilization: to that we return and grow from. If you are a walker, you might regress to crawling, but you will not become a crawler.
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In contemplation, there is a sense of being uplifted out of the aggression and effort of before. One feels release from the I'm-working-at-it. One feels like the Wind is carrying them, which it is. The person still does something, as a bird may flap wings and then glide. So, "not doing" does not mean abstaining from cooperative action with the subtle energies of grace. One may, for example, move between non-aggressive action and total non-action during a time of sitting in silence. Outside meditation, one may notice the same shifts.
The Silence reflects back to you where you have progressed from and to. Still, we sit to sit. We do not push toward an endpoint. We are not enlightenment chasers. If crawling, crawl fully and enjoy it. If walking, give yourself totally to walking, and enjoy it. If flying, soar freely in the Sky, relax in the Wind, and enjoy it.
No need to rush. Just keep leaning into the posture of surrender to the natural process. The yeast of life, the nature of which is to expand, is already with you - is you. Jesus used this image of yeast: "Another analogy. God’s reign is like a small measure of yeast a woman works into the dough for many, many loaves of bread, and she waits while the dough silently rises."
When one uses yeast, they do not try to make the yeast do what yeast does. The yeast does what yeast does... silently. In spiritual growth, you trust that in you which does its work. All you do is posture yourself. You set an inward intention and act. You do what you do, and grace does what grace does.
This yeasting way is why consent is foundational to spiritual transformation. On the Way, we are repeatedly humbled. We are hollowed out, again and again. We may have to return to our initial point of yes many times. In fact, the Way is living that first yes. We live from that initial yes the whole way. That yes anchors us.
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All this means usually what is happening spiritually within you will be totally unknown to you. You will notice after it has happened. You and others will see the fruit of how you have been grown. So, a challenge is to remain faithful to the Way when you have no idea whether what you are doing is accomplishing anything.
So, it is like the yeast. You do not keep opening the oven to see if it is working. Just let it be, which means stay out of the way. The late Zen Buddhist teacher, Suzuki Roshi, in Becoming Yourself, put it this way: "If you walk through the fog, your clothes will become wet; without you making any effort or being conscious of it, they quite naturally become wet." So, we can say, "Just keep walking." That simple.
Again, as Suzuki Roshi says, "Big self will take over small self." Who you are will progressively come out from behind the clouds of who you have pretended to be. The Sun was already there. The Way is not finding yourself but the subtraction of what is hiding you.
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There is that of you that does not need your help. That may be humbling to accept, but it is true. Like the yeast, it will do the accomplishing. At some point, you have no desire to claim any accomplishment in the unfolding. I intentionally wrote above been grown, for the evolution of yourself is something done to and with you. The whole way of the Way is receptivity. The key is not what you can do, but what you will allow to be done in you, for all such growth, as in the beings of the natural world - insects and plants and animals ... - is from within to without.
