What is Growth?

What is Growth?

I was asked this question recently, and didn't have an answer. When the gods ask you a question, you should listen. In my experience it means they're giving you something to meditate on... and so I did.

What is Growth?

Growth in some ways is an expansion. When the seed of a tree is planted, it tries to grow. It breaks out of its shell, and reaches heavenward. It branches out, and it spreads itself in all directions. It spreads its roots through the soil, and grows strong, and stable. Sometimes it becomes so large, and so strong, that it blots out the very sun, granting shade to other life that lives below it. Some things will die in that shade, and others will flourish. Grass may die from lack of light, but in the soil, mycellium networks will grow and flourish, and spread the tree's influence well beyond its roots.

But we are not trees, so what is growth in a person? At first I thought about how I want to grow as an artist, but that is only on aspect of myself as a person. What is the essence of growth that extends into the nature of individual humanity?

To grow, is to expand oneself outward. I don't mean the physical self (though I wonder if perhaps some people subconsciously take that route to gain a greater feeling of control and dominance by taking up more space. I have known people like that before..) but I mean the "Self" in a deeper sense.

It's difficult for me to put into words. Projecting your awareness is one part of this, but projecting your dominance is another. I don't mean false dominance, which is characterized by pointless aggression either. I mean the control that you exert over your own life, and the control over your life that you allow others to have. When you know you have dominance, you can display this to others, without the posing and posturing.

Dominance behavior in dogs is a good illustration of what I mean by this. It's always the lower ranked that try to
dominate others by mounting them. While perhaps not a perfect analogy, this also represents dominance and "rank" in humans as well.

You might wonder how we wandered into concepts of dominance and control, from the idea of a tree reaching to the sky with its branches... It's definitely relevant, but I'll try to bring this back on track.

To grow is to have influence over your surroundings. Before you can have conscious influence, you have to become aware of of yourself, and the space you find yourself in. This is easier for a tree. A tree stays rooted in one spot. It knows itself, because it stays in one place and is able to observe its surroundings. It knows the caterpillar is munching on its leaves. It knows that its roots just grew enough to hit another pocket of mycellium in the soil. It knows the squirrel is running through its branches. It knows when something blocks the sun from its branches, and endeavors to spread its branches around it. The tree is ever in a state of growth, but its growth is a constant discovery of the world around it.

It is harder for a person to know themselves, because we are always changing our place in our environments. This is likely why most meditation seems to involve the act of sitting, or becoming a tree, or a rock...something that roots into the earth. Stillness is needed for the initial knowing of the self. But once we know ourselves, we know also what is NOT ourselves. We are able to stand indifferent to the pointless criticisms of others, and on the other hand, able to gracefully accept when others are right that we were wrong about something.

This means that to know yourself, is to have power over yourself, and to only allow others to have the power over you that you allow them to have. This I think is a key hidden in plain sight. We have to be ourselves before anything else.

So what is growth?... I'm not certain I know the whole answer yet, but what I do know is that I have to truly know myself before I can find out. Perhaps that was the answer Upwawet actually wanted me to find.