We can see that the ability to physically manifest (cardio-vascular capacity, strength, and flexibility, etc.) is limited by the body’s fitness. You can increase physical fitness and capability by wise training up to the reasonable limits of physics and the maximum load of your muscles and bones at their strongest. This training is done in a gradual fashion that stretches temporary limitations while laying a good foundation for growth. Wise training does not overstretch limits (ending in injury like a blown knee), but neither does it rest in comfort (where fitness flatlines or declines). Wise training is about OPTIMAL challenge, and, I would say, optimal enjoyment of the process and conscious learning about healthy expansion and growth of the body’s capabilities.
Mental and emotional training follow similar principles, but the medium has changed, as well as the “instruments” of growth. Now you express movement and growth not through the body but through the brain and glands, as well as the “heart” of feeling itself. We are now getting less concrete, but nonetheless we have very real goals and standards that apply. Am I calmer and less anxious? Am I sharper intellectually and more critically aware of the world around me?
The measurements for mental and emotional training tend to feel less concrete and more subjective, but there are still ways to gauge growth, fitness, and health. Here to, there are structural limits to how far we can go. Push your emotions too much (especially in the absence of sleep and other physical requirements for health), and you can “blow” an emotional fuse (i.e. “blow your top”). Push your thinking too intensely for too long and your can “blow” your mind, ending in a kind of neurotic mentalism in which everything is so critical that you end up with a tangled mess of debilitating concerns. If you don’t exercise your emotions and mind enough, you will lack depth and substance of feeling (making for very boring romance as well as life) or become a lazy thinker, vulnerable to the basic cliches and propagandas of the times.
Enter spiritual fitness. Here we take a great leap, because spiritual fitness can enlarge our capacities, our “nth” limits in the physical, emotional, and mental realms, but it can also enlarge itself through our choices, openness, and commitment. The ability to manifest spiritually is limited only by the “soul” (what hermetics call the “higher mind”), which is to say our whole infinite being itself. There are no patent “real” limits to this soul growth, stretching, and strengthening imposed by the brain, emotions, and body. In fact, the spirit can open the heart, head, and body to a higher frequency, energy, and movement.
So if we are interested in delimiting all phases of human existence, including society itself and those aspects that go beyond the individual (because spirit is also connective as well as expansionary), then we must pay attention to spiritual fitness and observe and experiment with how it operates. We must ask for wisdom and a certain “grace” (energy and intelligence from the larger) that does beyond our limited purview of experience, prejudice, and assumption. A simple form of this can be found in the wonder of Nature, and all the learning that can come just by stepping outside your door and into the master creator, fashioner, and connector that is Mother Earth. Just noticing the architecture of a rose and letting that sink into the being can be like taking a drink out of a pure mountain stream– imbuing beyond words, and in many way beyond WORLDS!
The gifts of spirit, though, still require an appreciative, loving, and respectful heart. To be given something from the spirit is not to have worldly desire fulfilled (desire for a car, a sexy body, or even a soulmate), but to have desire itself transformed, to be drawn outward and onward, and to be giddy (if a little nervous) at the prospect of unexpected knowledge and surprising transformation. Spiritual fitness involves the simple but difficult requirement of being open to something beyond ourselves, and inviting it into our being’s home to stay. You see this in whistleblowers and activists of conscience who were called to address suffering in the world, or who went from timidity to courage in challenging some injustice, or who simply have a change of heart and forgive someone who did them wrong.
You see this spiritual fitness in artists, who open themselves to inspiration and devote themselves to a new story, painting, dance, or song. It is high time we arrange our individual and social priorities toward spiritual fitness. In doing so, we shall open up all the other dimensions of our beings and potentiality and bring forward and untold renaissance and wealth for generations.
