habits

100:1.8Re­li­gious habits of think­ing and act­ing are con­trib­u­tory to the econ­omy of spir­i­tual growth. One can de­velop re­li­gious pre­dis­po­si­tions to­ward fa­vor­able re­ac­tion to spir­i­tual stim­uli, a sort of con­di­tioned spir­i­tual re­flex. Habits which fa­vor re­li­gious growth em­brace cul­ti­vated sen­si­tiv­ity to di­vine val­ues, rec­og­ni­tion of re­li­gious liv­ing in oth­ers, re­flec­tive med­i­ta­tion on cos­mic mean­ings, wor­ship­ful prob­lem solv­ing, shar­ing one’s spir­i­tual life with one’s fel­lows, avoid­ance of self­ish­ness, re­fusal to pre­sume on di­vine mercy, liv­ing as in the pres­ence of God. The fac­tors of re­li­gious growth may be in­ten­tional, but the growth it­self is un­vary­ingly un­con­scious.

110:6.6Ev­ery de­ci­sion you make ei­ther im­pedes or fa­cil­i­tates the func­tion of the Ad­juster; like­wise do these very de­ci­sions de­ter­mine your ad­vance­ment in the cir­cles of hu­man achieve­ment. It is true that the su­prem­acy of a de­ci­sion, its cri­sis re­la­tion­ship, has a great deal to do with its cir­cle-mak­ing in­flu­ence; nev­er­the­less, num­bers of de­ci­sions, fre­quent rep­e­ti­tions, per­sis­tent rep­e­ti­tions, are also es­sen­tial to the habit-form­ing cer­tainty of such re­ac­tions.

160:3.2When these ex­pe­ri­ences are fre­quently re­peated, they crys­tal­lize into habits, strength-giv­ing and wor­ship­ful habits, and such habits even­tu­ally for­mu­late them­selves into a spir­i­tual char­ac­ter, and such a char­ac­ter is fi­nally rec­og­nized by one’s fel­lows as a ma­ture per­son­al­ity. These prac­tices are dif­fi­cult and time-con­sum­ing at first, but when they be­come ha­bit­ual, they are at once rest­ful and time­sav­ing. The more com­plex so­ci­ety be­comes, and the more the lures of civ­i­liza­tion mul­ti­ply, the more ur­gent will be­come the ne­ces­sity for God-know­ing in­di­vid­u­als to form such pro­tec­tive ha­bit­ual prac­tices de­signed to con­serve and aug­ment their spir­i­tual en­er­gies.