Spirituality I.

Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck.Ralph Waldo Emerson1

Do a quick Internet search on the word “spirituality.” Go ahead. I can wait.

In less than half a second you will likely get around 47,000,000 hits.2 Staggering, right? While that may seem excessive, it perfectly captures the number of different responses you could get if you asked random people on the street what they think spirituality is. It then becomes terribly difficult to discuss spirituality with others because it is so individualized.

In an effort to eliminate some of these communication issues, let’s take a look at the evolution of “spirituality” and what generally makes up the term today. However, it must be noted that because it does have such broad meaning and interpretation, this article only scratches the surface of spirituality.

Basic Spirituality

Most simply, spirituality is “the quality or state of being concerned with religion or religious matters.”3 Quite a vague definition, which is unsurprising given the search results we had earlier.

The root of the word “spirituality” comes from the Latin verb spiro, which means “to breathe, to breathe out,”4 and the Latin noun spiritus, which means “breath, air, life, and soul.”5 We can see from the Latin that the Romans believed in a connection between our breathing and our souls. But it wasn’t until after Christianity became the widespread Roman religion that a word for spirituality itself—spiritalitas—actually developed.

While spiro and spiritus could reference either the mundane act of breathing or the metaphysical realm of the soul, spiritalitas was reserved exclusively for use in ecclesiastical affairs.6 Most uses of spiritalitas can be found in treatises on God and Christianity, not on other religions that the Medieval church encountered. It wasn’t until the development of the English word “spirituality” and the rise of Transcendentalism that the word began to morph and take on new meanings.

Transcendentalism

The modern idea of spirituality sprang forth from the individualistic tendencies of Transcendentalism. Transcendentalism, which greatly emphasizes the power of the individual’s inner or mental essence, arose in response by figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau to New England Calvinist traditions that preached predestination and the doctrine of the Trinity. Emerson and Thoreau believed in neither predestination nor the Trinity; they subscribed to Unitarianism.7 Unitarianism states that while Jesus Christ was the son of God and a man, he was not himself an aspect of God as is believed by Trinitarians.

The Transcendentalists became known for their rejection of what they considered to be the conformity of church congregations. They instead advocated a life spent in isolation, during which time God could be experienced. These experiences, the Transcendentalists held, were the only ways in which a person could come to know God. Emerson went so far as to advocate that Jesus, as a man, celebrated the greatness of man and gave man an avenue in which to share in the divinity of God and take on a likeness to God.8

Transcendentalism paved the way for some of the key aspects of modern spirituality. The individualistic nature of Transcendentalism led many people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to question organized religions and their definitions of what is sacred and holy. As a result, Transcendentalists moved away from ritualized worship and began to seek out ways in which the individual could connect with the beyond.9

Prayer and Meditation

The idea of having a personal relationship with your creator or some divine force led to a stronger belief in regular contemplative practices outside of traditional worship services. This manifested itself in things like very deep, personal prayer and meditation.10

It should be noted that meditation (another word that, like spirituality, is hard to define) and prayer were at one time interchangeable words. However, prayer slowly grew more associated with organized religion; meditation became more of a New Age principle as it became increasingly popular as a secular device to promote mental health and reduce stress. Their goals, however, were similar: to discover a deeper meaning in daily life and to connect with the divine.

All Religions Are True

The second effect of individualizing worship and meditation was the perpetuation of the belief that all things are connected.11 While at first this interconnectedness was mainly used in environmental movements to advocate responsible resource management, it become more widespread with authors like Fritjof Capra and his book The Tao of Physics, which tried to illustrate how the mysticism of Eastern religions is compatible with the study of physics in the West.12

With the notion that all things are connected, even on a subatomic level, came the third aspect of modern spirituality: the idea that all religions have some truth to them. That is, all faiths have elements in them that are similar and interchangeable.13 So, according to the modern idea of spirituality, a person’s individual faith can consist of belief in Christ and Buddhist meditation practices.

Individual Over Institution

The final element in modern spirituality is the acceptance of the individual by the rejection of the institution.14 In America, this mainly applies to the Christian church, but around the world it applies to all organized religion.

The rejection of institutionalized religion stems from the negative publicity that is unfortunately so often deeply connected with it. Because of the tragedies that can sometimes result from religion—from the countless acts of violence by fanatics to terrorist bombings to child abuse cases—people increasingly want to distance themselves from organized religions, preferring to make their own way through the spiritual milieu.15

Maybe you’ve heard someone say something like, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” Perhaps you’ve said this yourself. Essentially, this is what people mean. Though they may have some interest in the metaphysical, they prefer to find their own meaning in life over taking the prepared path of religion. Indeed, some go so far as to say the world would be a better place with no religion.

The End of the Journey?

So now you have a complete and total knowledge of what “spirituality” is, right? By no means! Spirituality is like an ever-expanding black hole; it keeps absorbing different definitions. But as long as we have a general concept of what spirituality can mean—and accept its multifaceted nature—we can continue to have worthwhile conversations between peoples of all different faiths as we strive for understanding and harmony.

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Sadhguru: Spirituality does not mean any particular practice. It is a certain way of being. To get there, there are many things to do. This is like a garden in your house. If the soil, sunlight or stem of a plant is in a certain way, it won’t yield flowers, you have to do something. You have to take care of those things. So if you cultivate your body, mind, emotions and energies to a certain level of maturity, something else blossoms within you – that is what is spirituality. When your rationale is immature, it doubts everything. When your rationale matures, it sees everything in a completely different light.

Whenever any human being experiences something bigger than himself, the traditional way of looking at that is, “this is God…” The whole idea of God is just that – anything bigger than you. It could be a human being or an experience or some aspect of nature. But is this spiritual? No, this is just life. When I say “just life“, I am not trying to dismiss it as a small thing. It is the greatest thing. Only when life becomes an overwhelming, powerful, blissful experience for you, you want to know what could have created this.

If you want to know the process or the source of creation, the most intimate part of creation for you is your own body, isn’t it? There is a captive creator here, trapped within you. You shouldn’t miss him here. If you don’t miss him here, if you know the source of creation within you, you are spiritual.

Does Belief in God Make You Spiritual?

An atheist cannot be spiritual. But you must understand that even a theist cannot be spiritual. Because an atheist and a theist are not different. One believes there is God, another believes there is no God. Both of them are believing something that they do not know. You are not sincere enough to admit that you do not know, that’s your problem. So theists and atheists are not different. They are the same people putting up an act of being different. A spiritual seeker is neither a theist nor an atheist. He has realized that he does not know, so he is seeking.

The moment you believe something, you become blind to everything else. The whole conflict on the planet is not between good and evil as they are trying to project it. It is always one man’s belief versus another man’s belief. The need for belief is more psychological than spiritual. You want to cling to something, you want to feel secure, you want to feel like you know it all. That is coming from a very immature mind. What is the problem if you don’t know anything about this existence. You actually don’t know anything. It’s beautiful! And you see how to make yourself beautiful and joyful within yourself, which is within your hands.

What is a Spiritual Experience?

Going to the ocean or to the mountain and seeking an experience may be beautiful, you must enjoy the world the way it is, but you must understand, the fish in the ocean doesn’t think it’s a spiritual experience, nor does the mountain goats think the mountain is a spiritual experience because they are there all the time. If you bring them to the city, they may think it’s a spiritual experience. It is the breaking of the barrier within you – something broke within you. You were in a shell. This broke and became a bigger shell. What I’m saying is, if you get used to the bigger shell, it feels the same way as the previous one.

So if you want to become boundless and you are trying to attempt it through physicality, you are essentially trying to go towards boundlessness in installments. Can you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and one day count to infinity? You will only become endless counting. That’s not the way. Through physical means, you can never reach towards boundless nature. Every human being is looking to become boundless. If you give him whatever he wants, for three days he is okay. The fourth day he is looking for something else. Somebody may label it as greed, I just say this is life process in the wrong direction. If you want to know boundless nature, you must experience, you must perceive something which is beyond the physical. Something you might have touched when you jumped into the ocean, when you saw a mountain, when you sang a song, when you danced, when you closed your eyes, in so many ways it could have happened to an individual. You touched it, but now the question is of sustainability.

A Simple Practice

One thing is, we can put you on to something very simple, which is subjective. Any subjective technology cannot be taught to you in uncommitted atmospheres. So if you are willing to give yourself a small space of time that is very committed and focused, we can put you on a simple practice, where investing just 21 minutes a day (Inner Engineering), you can start your day with a very phenomenal spiritual experience within you. A very powerful experience that leaves you peaceful and joyful throughout the day.

Apart from that, to sustain it, one simple thing every human being has to do is, make your sense of involvement indiscriminate. If you look at a person, a tree, or a cloud, you are equally involved. You are equally involved with your own body and the breath. If you have no discrimination as to which is better, and you are equally involved with every aspect in life, then you will be constantly spiritual. Nobody needs to teach you what is spirituality.

Editor’s Note: Sadhguru offers Isha Kriya, a free, online guided meditation that helps bring health and wellbeing. Daily practice of this simple yet effective 12-minute process can transform one’s life.

Source

http://isha.sadhguru.org/blog/yoga-meditation/demystifying-yoga/what-is-spirituality/

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