Religion and spirituality

Oasis

Many of us follow a particular religion or other which comes with a set of beliefs, attitudes and concepts of God. There are conventional ideas of heaven where those following a path set out by religious precepts are likely to achieve and those who violate these precepts will experience the rigours and terrors of afterlife. Religion is a deal but spirituality is a journey. Spirituality sends you on a quest to know yourself and others better. Religion demands that you believe a sacred story, or belief, without doubt or question. Spirituality is about questions; religion is about answers.

Religion has predetermined goals for happiness and salvation whereas a spiritual journey deals with the larger questions of life. It is a journey to mysterious destinations in the quest for truth. What is the meaning of life? What is good or evil? Readymade answers are not satisfying. It is not as in the academic world where questions might discover possible answers and you are rewarded with a degree of proficiency or social approbation. You will learn the answers yourself whether in the ashrams, or the lonely mountains or in the midst of streaming humanity. It is to understand humanity, it is to grasp life with all its pain, sorrow and even ecstasy.

A spiritual journey is always tragic, a lonely path, a spiritual travail that challenges laws and beliefs of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is stated “ If you meet the Buddha on the road kill him" which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism you must free yourself from them.

To those who try to find God in temples and houses of worship alone it would be worthwhile to remember one of our greatest spiritual seekers, Kabir who says: I laugh when fish in the water are thirsty/ I laugh when I hear people go on pilgrimage to find God/ For God is here and everywhere if we only know how to find him.

Swami Vivekananda says: Spiritual knowledge is the only thing that can destroy our miseries forever; any other knowledge satisfies wants for a short time. It is only with the knowledge of the spirit that the faculty of want is annihilated forever. God is beyond religion. He is a quest.