I know you are wondering why I used the word “authentic” in the title and I also know that the first image that would come to your mind after hearing the word “spirituality” would be of a person sitting close-eyed in a locked room or under the tree. Why is it so?
That’s because the word “spirituality” has been corrupted and misused so much that merely hearing this word makes you think of different kinds of superstitions, blind faiths, etc. Much of what we see as spirituality today has nothing to do with its fundamental teachings. You would see any random person who doesn’t even know the ‘s’ of spirituality label himself as the spiritual guru and what makes me crazy is that people don’t waste a second accepting him to be. It’s like going for a surgery to any random person who calls himself doctor without having read a word in medical science. Yes, it’s stupid to consider such gurus and doctors as real, but what’s even more stupid is to declare spiritualty and medical science to be illogical after tragic experience with the fake ones. So, if you see any person or “guru” doing illogical things in the name of spirituality, the right thing to do is to walk away from such a guru not to walk away from spirituality itself. Walking away from spirituality by conflating it with superstitions is like throwing away a diamond by conflating it with stone.
If spirituality is not what you’ve been told by the mainstream pundits or TV then what exactly is it?
Spirituality is a journey towards experiencing the Truth, not the truth in the context of the material world, but the Truth that reflects the entire cosmos, the Truth that not only stays unchanged with time but transcends time. What we consider to be truth in the material world can’t stand the onslaught of time; it keeps on changing. What is truth for you in one country may not be the same for other person in a different country and what we think of as real today will not exist in the next 1000 years or did not exist a 1000 years earlier. Anything that falls within the framework of time can be a fact but never the truth because truth is eternal, it is beyond time. This means that anything we see in the material world is not Truth, which brings us to what the ancient Indian scriptures call maya.
Anything that appears to be real but is not is called as maya. When you take a closer look at your life and the outer world, you come to conclude that everything you believe to be real is not so; your ideologies, social status, relationships, identities, what you call ‘I’, money, etc. are all an illusion that keeps you shackled in the material world and prevents you from experiencing the higher reality.
“My body is real,” “My family is real,” “My money is real,” “My identities are real,” and so on. But if you’re being honest with yourself, you’d know that all of them keeps on changing with time i.e., they keep on deceiving you by appearing as real. It’s the job of maya to keep everyone asleep and engaged in their manufactured worlds. And spirituality is when you work to break all those bondages and consequently, get liberated.
Anyone who tries to explain spirituality in any other is either lying or being ignorant of the true meaning of it.
Whatever you believe yourself to be; whatever your identities or opinions are: “I am this” “I am that” either come from your body or from the society, both of which are subject to change with time. If the outer world keeps on changing, that means the identities we take from it and think to be real also keep on varying. Therefore, it can be said that we don’t even know who we are.
It’s pretty inconvenient to hear that what you believe yourself to be keeps on changing because our deepest inner-being years for stability and how can you be satisfied knowing that your identity itself is not stable. So, this discontentment makes us want to strive for something that doesn’t end with time, which is endless. This urge to be something that doesn’t change with time is spirituality.
Spirituality is not a brand new philosophy, or a religious concept, or a superstition, or a cult, or unscientific, it’s an eternal knowledge of leading a fulfilling life in tune with reality.
In one aspect, spirituality and science go hand-in-hand, which is of observing the outer world. Both spirituality and science agree on how the world emerges, how it functions, how does one perceive it, how does it change, etc. But the thing with science is that it’s limited to observing the outer world, it doesn’t go beyond it, and that’s what makes spirituality so special - it doesn’t limit itself to the outer world. After examining the outer world, instead of stopping there like science, spirituality examines the thing that experiences the outer world i.e., the ‘I’, and tries to find the relation between I and the world.
A spiritual person would see how his sense of ‘I’ is influenced by the changing world around him, therefore, he would look for something that goes beyond the world. This is the second aspect of spirituality called faith; a spiritual being has faith that there has to be something deep into everything, beneath the fat layer of I, that transcends the ever-changing world. Science misses this aspect.
Science observes the outer world, but not the one doing the observation - the ego. You’ll never see any chapter on ego in the science book. Spirituality observes the world and then observes the observer to examine the way observer is influenced by the outer world - which gives us suffering. Science gets stuck at mental abstractions or the sensory perceptions, while spirituality goes beyond both of them. It has a deep faith that the world can’t be limited to our mind and our senses, there has to be something beyond which is eternally blissful.
For example, for science, if something can’t be detected with our sensory organs or the intellect or the emerged tools from them, then that thing doesn’t exist. In spirituality, being unable to detect something doesn’t mean that the thing doesn’t exist, it means that the tools we use to detect things are limited. A scientific person goes to the desert and sees a mirage, he would say, “Desert has water. My eyes can see it.” On the other hand, a spiritual person would see the mirage and say, “Are my eyes capable enough to tell me the Truth?”, “Do my senses have enough capability to differentiate between illusion and reality?” Therefore, spirituality doesn’t have the superstition of science, which is that my sense would tell me the Truth.
Spirituality is so scientific and logical that it goes beyond science and logic and going beyond something doesn’t mean anti-something. Just like engineering in the outer world is a way to make society more efficient, spirituality is am inner-engineering to dismantle the ego-centric mind and unveil an efficient way of examining reality.
The writings and lives of numerous sages and saints like Buddha, Mahavir, Acharya Shankar, Guru Nanak, Kabir Das, Rumi, etc. are a testimony to the Ultimate Truth that unites us all. In the words of J. Krishnamurti, spirituality is a life of total freedom; freedom from the mental prisons of our own making - the prison of fear, lust, ego, greed, attachment, etc.
Spirituality isn’t about locking yourself in a room, closing your eyes, and performing breathing practices or other kind of practices propagated as spirituality. If someone preaches spirituality like this, discard him in the same way you would discard someone who says running is about sitting in one place. Authentic spirituality is about observing the world around you and how it influences your thoughts, and then examining the root cause of your suffering. As you break your shackles, authentic spirituality teaches you to go out in the world and fight everything that causes suffering to anyone.
Some more insights that are worth adding at last are:
Authentic spirituality won’t talk about bliss, it will talk about suffering.
Authentic spirituality won’t talk about liberation, it will talk about slavery/bondages.
Authentic spirituality won’t talk about love, it will talk about attachment.
Authentic spirituality won’t talk about atman, it will talk about ego.
As Buddha used to say, don’t ask me what health is, tell me about your diseases and we’ll work towards curing all of them, and then whatever left in the end can be called health.
Thank You for reading the entire article. I would love to hear feedback from you.
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No mention of Jesus???