From Growing Up to Waking Up

“I am spiritual, but not religious.” This statement is becoming increasingly familiar, even within the walls of our own formation houses. It reflects a cultural shift where personal experience is valued more than community identity and inherited structures, where rigid religion feels inadequate, and where individuals seek meaning that echoes with their interior life. Yet this declaration also reveals a deeper longing: a longing for authenticity, for maturity, for a faith that grows and awakens.

Recently, while attending a course on formation at the Don Bosco Renewal Centre in Bengaluru, one statement from a resource person struck me profoundly: the religion of tomorrow is at stake, because we are more concerned about Growing Up than Waking Up. Those words lingered within me and sparked the desire to write this article. My thoughts are deeply inspired by Ken Wilber’s The Religion of Tomorrow, a work that offers a compelling and a timely help to live an authentic religious life.

Religious life in India, today, is richly committed to service, administration, education, and social involvement, but the inner journey -- the contemplative, experiential depth that once defined consecrated life -- is often a fading flame. We have become experts in managing institutions, but not always masters of our own inner self. To rekindle the depth of our vocation, we must rediscover, how Growing Up and Waking Up together illuminate religious life. Growing Up and Waking Up are two paths that are distinct, but inseparable. One shapes our psychological, emotional, and moral maturity. The other opens us to direct encounter with God, the Ground of Being.

Focus on Spiritual Experience

Across India, we see a rising hunger for spirituality, and yet paradoxically, a decrease in deep spiritual experience. What we often witness is: on the one hand, spiritual intelligence increasing, where people speak more about spirituality, meditation, psychology, trauma, and inner healing and on the other hand, spiritual experience decreasing, where contemplative depth, silence, surrender, and union with God are rare. The result is a generation that knows the theory of prayer, but not always the taste of God.

Ken Wilber offers a crucial insight: humans possess three eyes of knowing: Eye of Flesh -- senses and science; Eye of Mind -- reason, theology, philosophy; and Eye of Contemplation -- direct encounter, awakening, mystical union. Today, religious life often overdevelops the first two, while the third remains dormant. We speak about God eloquently, but do not always touch God inwardly. We preach transformation, but remain in familiar patterns. In simple words, we teach contemplation without practicing it. The danger is subtle, but real: we become religious professionals without becoming mystics. Thus, the invitation to revisit “Growing Up” and “Waking Up” becomes not optional, but essential.

Growing Up: Spiritual Intelligence

What Does Growing Up Mean? Growing Up refers to the development of our psychological, relational, moral, and cognitive capacities. It is the maturation of the ego, not an enemy of spirituality, but it’s necessary instrument. Further, Growing Up shapes critical thinking, self-awareness, emotional balance, leadership and responsibility, the capacity to love maturely, moral judgment, healthy boundaries, intellectual clarity. Growing Up is not superficial. It is a profound spiritual engagement, but it remains conceptual rather than experiential. It forms structures of consciousness, not states of transcendence.

A large percentage of religious today excel in the “Growing Up” domain. We speak intelligently about God, teach theology, analyse culture, ethics, and psychology; talk moderation, balance, and discipline; understand pastoral needs, function effectively in institutions. This is valuable and needed. However, when spirituality becomes primarily talked about rather than lived, it risks becoming a sophisticated mental construct. Growing Up alone can produce strong opinions without inner silence, theological competence without mystical depth, activism without contemplation, rigid beliefs without union with God, cleverness without wisdom. It is possible to grow cognitively, socially, and morally, while remaining spiritually asleep.

Ken Wilber calls this cognitive spiritual intelligence, a way of thinking about God rather than being transformed by God. This is where mythic-literal religion often becomes stuck: it builds belief systems, moral frameworks, and doctrines without opening space for awakening. This is the dominant religious life today: spiritual intelligence without spiritual realization. For religious in India, this emphasis on Growing Up often leads to administrative efficiency replacing interiority, pastoral busyness replacing prayer, intellectualism masking spiritual dryness. Growing Up is essential, but it is not enough.

Waking Up: Spiritual Experience

What Does Waking Up Mean? Waking Up refers to the movement into nondual, God-centered awareness, the direct encounter with the Divine that mystics across traditions describe with astonishing similarity. Waking Up is experiential, transformative, contemplative, beyond words, beyond concepts, deeply intimate. Waking Up creates states of consciousness rather than structures. It is not about what you think about God, but how you live the God-reality.

Furthermore, Waking Up means moving from head to heart, from analysis to presence, from ego-control to surrender, from religious duty to divine intimacy, from spiritual narratives to spiritual realization. It is the moment when prayer becomes union, silence becomes revelation, and God becomes not a belief, but a lived presence. Waking Up requires contemplative practice, inner stillness, vulnerability, letting go of egoic identity, disidentifying from roles, achievements, and images, dwelling in the present moment, openness to grace. This path cannot be accessed by intellect alone; it requires conversion of consciousness.

Why is waking up rare today? Two reasons stand out: Religious life is too busy, and constant activities prevent deep silence. We confuse talking about prayer with practicing prayer. Spirituality becomes a subject rather than a life. However, without Waking Up, religion remains external. We become caretakers of institutions rather than bearers of divine fire.

Growing Up vs Waking Up

A major crisis in religious life emerges when Growing Up continues, but Waking Up stagnates. We develop intellectual refinement without inner depth, professionalism without contemplation, morality without mystical insight, pastoral competence without spiritual presence. We begin to rely on skills, structures, efficiency, management, while losing the silence that births holiness. This is why some religious people feel spiritually dry, internally fragmented, emotionally exhausted, theologically informed, but existentially empty. Growing Up without Waking Up produces external success and internal restlessness.

The greatest saints were not simply awakened mystics; they were also emotionally mature human beings. Holiness requires both Growing Up, psychological maturity and Waking Up spiritual realization. Where they merge, religious life becomes luminous. Integrated Religious Life Looks Like wisdom, not just knowledge; compassion, not just service; presence, not just activity; discernment, not just decisions; inner freedom, not just obedience; contemplative action, not just activism. Only when the ego matures (Growing Up) can it surrender fully (Waking Up). Only when we awaken (Waking Up) can we love maturely (Growing Up).

Conclusion

Finally, Growing Up builds the capacity for discipleship; Waking Up reveals the mystery of God. Growing Up strengthens the ego; Waking Up helps transcend it. Growing Up gives us skills; Waking Up gives us wisdom. Growing Up equips us to serve the world; Waking Up transforms us into light for the world. Without Growing Up, spirituality becomes immature; without Waking Up, religion becomes empty. Only when these two streams flow together will religious life rediscover its original flame: Christ encountered, Christ experienced, Christ awakened within, and Christ loved in all things. This is the invitation of our time, to mature deeply and awaken profoundly, to grow up and to wake up, to be contemplatives in action and prophets in the Spirit. This is the religion, not of yesterday, but of tomorrow.

Blurbs

A large percentage of Religious excel in the “Growing Up” domain. We speak intelligently about God, teach theology, analyse culture, ethics, and psychology…However, when spirituality is discussed rather than lived, it risks becoming a mental construct.

Without Waking Up, religion remains external. We become caretakers of institutions rather than bearers of divine fire. Growing Up without Waking Up produces external success and internal restlessness.