The best technique for spiritual growth: be a good person

Have you ever noticed that within the Buddhist Eightfold Path to nirvana, half of its elements are not about meditation, mystical insight, or altered states of consciousness, but simply about being a good human being? It is easy to assume that awakening and enlightenment must be something esoteric, something hidden in caves or reserved for the deeply initiated. Yet again and again, across traditions, the message returns with surprising simplicity. Before the visions, before the bliss states, before the kundalini risings and the third-eye openings, virtually every wisdom tradition on the planet places the same quiet, unglamorous thing at its very foundation: the daily, ordinary practice of being a decent human being.

Within this path, four aspects stand out as profoundly ethical in nature. Right Intention invites you into a conscious decision to renounce harm, cultivate goodwill, and embody compassion toward all beings. Right Speech calls you to restrain from falsehood, gossip, harshness, and divisiveness, recognizing the creative and destructive power of your words. Right Action anchors you in ethical conduct, guiding you away from harming life, stealing, or engaging in exploitative behavior, especially in intimate relationships. Right Livelihood extends this integrity into the way you sustain yourself, asking that your work does not cause harm but instead contributes, however quietly, to the well-being of the whole. Together, these are not mystical practices – they are the architecture of goodness. They shape the soil in which awakening can grow.

Before Enlightenment, There Is Character

The ancient yogic system of Patanjali will teach you the same thing. The Yoga Sutras describe eight limbs of yoga – Ashtanga, meaning “eight-limbed” – and the very first one, Yama, is not a breathing exercise, not a physical posture, not a meditation technique. It is a set of moral restraints, and Patanjali was clear: you cannot skip this step.

Here, you are asked first to embody Ahimsa, the principle of non-harming, which extends beyond physical violence into the subtle realms of thought and intention. You begin to notice how even irritation or judgment creates a ripple of harm within your own nervous system and outward into your relationships. Then comes Satya, truthfulness – not merely in what you say, but in how honestly you live, how aligned your inner world is with your outer expression. Asteya follows, inviting you to refrain from taking what is not freely given, whether that be material possessions, time, attention, or even recognition.

What is striking here is that before you are taught how to sit still or breathe consciously, you are asked to become trustworthy – to yourself and to others. It is as though the tradition is quietly reminding you that spiritual power without ethical grounding is not wisdom, but distortion.

The Heart of Love in Christianity and Sufism

If you turn toward Christianity, you encounter a similar essence clothed in the language of love. At the core of the teachings attributed to Jesus is a radical simplicity: love your neighbor as yourself. This is not presented as a poetic ideal, but as a practical instruction for living. Forgiveness, compassion, humility – these are not accessories to faith; they are its substance. The Sermon on the Mount, for instance, does not describe mystical techniques, but a way of being that transforms how you relate to conflict, judgment, and even your enemies.

In Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam, this same principle is expressed as a path of the heart. The Sufi does not seek God in abstraction, but in the refinement of character. Kindness becomes a form of remembrance. Generosity becomes a prayer. The polishing of the heart – removing arrogance, resentment, and selfishness – is seen as essential for experiencing divine presence. In this sense, being a good human being is not separate from spiritual realization; it is the doorway through which it is entered.

What Indigenous Wisdom Has Always Known

Long before the great institutional religions developed their ethical frameworks, indigenous peoples around the world were articulating something even more fundamental – not just rules of behavior, but entire cosmologies grounded in the understanding that goodness is woven into the fabric of existence itself.

In many African cultures, the philosophy of Ubuntu, often rendered as “I am because we are”, describes a reality in which the self is not separate from community. Your humanity is literally constituted by your relationships. Bishop Desmond Tutu spent much of his life translating Ubuntu into language the wider world could hear: a person becomes fully human through generosity, through care, through the willingness to hold others’ suffering as if it were your own. There is no spiritual development, in this worldview, that leaves your community worse off.

The Andean concept of Ayni, sacred reciprocity, teaches that the universe itself operates on a principle of balanced exchange. To live in Ayni is to give back what you have received, to remain in right relationship with the living web of existence, to understand that your wellbeing and the wellbeing of everything around you are not in competition but in correspondence. Paqos, Andean spiritual practitioners, will tell you plainly: you cannot do energy work, you cannot connect to the apus or the Pachamama, from a place of energetic debt caused by taking without giving.

And from the Lakota tradition comes Mitakuye Oyasin, “all my relations”, a phrase that is at once a prayer, a worldview, and a practice. It is an acknowledgment that you exist in kinship with every human being, every animal, every plant, every stone, every star. To live from this recognition is to live ethically, because harming another is understood as harming yourself. It is a non-dual ethics arising not from commandment but from direct perception of interconnection.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice – and Why It Has to Come from the Heart

Here is the thing no one warns you about when you begin a spiritual path: if you read all of this and think, “right, I need to be a good person in order to get enlightened,” you will have almost certainly missed the point entirely.

The spiritual teacher Ram Dass used to speak about the difference between acting lovingly and being love. The first is a strategy, a technique, a way of accumulating spiritual merit. The second is a state of being that naturally expresses itself in how you speak, how you listen, how you drive your car, how you treat the checkout person at the supermarket when you’re tired. The traditions we’ve explored are not asking you to perform goodness. They are pointing to the fact that as you genuinely open – as the contracted, defended ego begins to soften – kindness, honesty, and care arise naturally, the way warmth arises from a fire. You don’t instruct the fire to be warm.

This matters because the path can become deeply distorted when ethics is treated as a spiritual obligation rather than a living expression of your inner state. You can be scrupulously non-harmful on the surface while quietly seething with judgment, competition, and the need to be seen as a spiritual person. You can practice ahimsa as a brand. The traditions saw this clearly, which is why they were always careful to point to the intention beneath the action – what the Buddha called cetanā, and what Jesus pointed to when he spoke of the heart as the origin of all that matters.

The practical invitation, then, is not to add “be kind” to your to-do list. It is to ask yourself honestly: where in my life am I causing harm that I have rationalized away? Where am I less than truthful because the truth is uncomfortable? Where am I taking – energy, credit, resources, attention – beyond what is genuinely mine to take? These questions, sat with honestly and with compassion for yourself, are themselves a profound spiritual practice. They do the same work as the meditation cushion. In fact, for most people living ordinary lives, they probably do more work.

The path does not begin when you sit down to meditate. It begins when you answer the phone. When you respond to a difficult email. When someone cuts you off in traffic and you notice what moves through you. When you have the chance to speak truthfully and feel the pull toward the more comfortable half-truth. These are the real laboratories of awakening. The cushion prepares you for them. But the test, and the teaching, is always in the encounter with another human being.

The Foundation Beneath All Foundations

Every tradition we have touched here – Buddhist, yogic, Christian, Sufi, African, Andean, Lakota – arrives at the same quiet recognition: you cannot build a genuine interior life on a foundation of harm, dishonesty, and disconnection from others. The inner and the outer are not separate domains. The way you treat your neighbor is a direct expression of the state of your own consciousness, and, more powerfully, consciously choosing to treat them with care, truth, and generosity is a direct way of changing that consciousness.

You don’t need a teacher, a retreat, a method, or a tradition to begin here. You need only the willingness to look honestly at your life and ask what it would mean to show up a little more fully as the goodness that, somewhere deep inside, you have always known yourself to be. That recognition – quiet, simple, completely unglamorous – is where every genuine spiritual path, in every culture and century, has always begun.