Spiritual Saturday #1

What is spirituality?

'Just as a candle cannot burn without fire,
men cannot live without a spiritual life.'
~ Buddha.

Spirituality is a simple concept, which can be, and often is, made complicated by people, misunderstood, and is thus disregarded and labeled as just another dogma. In truth, spirituality is the complete opposite; it is an internal journey of realisation and exploration of life as it is.

What it is not - it can be but isn't limited to - is religion. There is often a misconception about the two; religion is a belief based on scripture and a central deity/deities, while spirituality is a boundless term for the search for the unity of all life, the connection to this unity, and to internal freedom. (I touch on this 'internal freedom' in my last 'Freedom Friday' post - link down below - and will dive deeper into it in next week's post.)

In the word spirituality, what is this 'spirit' that we talk about? It is what the Hindus call the 'atman', yet it extends out to the the concept of 'brahman'. Atman is the eternal self which each one of us 'is'. Brahman is the soul of the cosmos; the immortal state of the eternal all.

The body, with which we identify, is but a mere vehicle for consciousness - for the atman. This being the case, we begin to see that what we call the 'me', the 'I', is not the body. (This is a huge topic which I will discuss in great detail in the future.) The fundamental truth is that we don't exist - there is no 'me', no 'I'.

This is what Ramana Maharashi meant when he said,

'Who am I? Not the body, because it is decaying; not the mind, because the brain will decay with the body; not the personality, nor the emotions, for these also will vanish with death.'

Questioning and realising the true nature of what it is that we identify ourselves with is one of the first and most essential steps towards a connection to the truth of all. The thing to notice is that, although it may be called a spiritual 'journey', there is no goal to be reached here, nothing to attain or become; in truth, we already are, and in fact never can not be, the eternal spirit. All that stands in the way of us living this and not just thinking it are the illusions we create ourselves to take refuge in from the truth.

Spirituality is, as I mentioned earlier, boundless, so condensing its nature into an article like this would simply be doing it injustice, but what I have just touched upon here is the simplified version of fundamental understanding which drives people towards spirituality.

'Love is what we are; we don’t get it from somebody, we can’t give it to anybody, we can’t fall in it or fall out of it. Love is our true Being.'
~ Krishna Das.

Love is all there is. It is what we are. Yet there is a disconnection between what we are experiencing and what we are; this causes there to be a longing for something, most of us do not know what, in our hearts. It is like intuitively we know that there is something missing - out of balance. That something is love. Unconditional love that is.

We live on the surface of what we call love, longing for it yet using means of which nature is diametrically opposite in hopes of finding the happiness that we think we need to cure that ache in our hearts. We needn't look outside of ourselves, in fact, we don't even need to 'look'; it just is. Love is the 'is-ness' of our being - the spirit - and this longing for reconnecting with it is what spirituality is.

In next week's post, I will begin looking into different fields of spirituality.

Something to think on:

The body is just a vehicle for consciousness.

Sources -

Image 1 - Buddha

Image 2 - Reconnecting

Image 3 - Ramana Maharshi

Image 4 - Krishna Das & Neem Karoli Baba

Posts you may also want to read:

Freedom Friday #1 - What is freedom?

Namaste!