Skip to main content

Spirituality

A church in Kottayam, Kerala


Frederick Douglas was a slave in in the 19th century America. After emancipation, he wrote a book titled Narrative (1845) in which he mentions his master’s spirituality. His master experienced a religious transformation at a Methodist revival programme. Douglas naturally thought that his master would become a kind and magnanimous person after his religious transformation. What good is religion and spirituality if they don’t make you at least a person with basic human kindness? Douglas found, however, that his master became “more cruel and hateful in all his ways.”

We are living in a time when a lot of atrocities are being perpetrated in the name of gods and religions. Don’t they make you wonder what good religion is, gods are, if they bring more agony and evil into our world? I gave up religion long ago precisely because of this problem. I noticed that religions bring more evil into the human affairs than anything else – with the exception of politics, maybe. (Politics and religion go hand in hand and so the distinction is not worth making.)

Just have a glance at what Hinduism did to its widows, low caste and casteless people, young girls who were dedicated to the temple in the name of the devadasi system, and so on. What did Christianity do to millions of people who were labelled as heretics in the medieval period? What is Islam doing in the name of jihad?

If you still think that these religions are going to save humankind, well, what can I say?

Long ago, I lost faith in gods and their religions. But spirituality is a different matter. I stand in awe at the sight of a flower that blooms in my garden pot. When the scent of jasmines waft in the evenings into my living room. When I think of the billions of galaxies out there each of which has billions of stars and planets and other celestial bodies. Mountains and rivers make me gasp in wonder. I think that wonder, that awe, is spirituality.

Spirituality is a particular kind of relationship with your reality. It is a way of experiencing reality. A non-intellectual way, I’d say. You don’t sit and think intellectually about the majesty or beauty or any other quality of the reality. You just feel it. You experience it somewhere within you and it makes you gentle, kind, noble.

Many eminent people have described spiritual experience as moments of “heightened aliveness.” You feel most intensely alive in those moments. Psychologist Abraham Maslow called it peak experience which he described as “moments of pure joy and elation.” Many others who have studied this in great detail have described it in similar terms. For example: “Peak experiences involve a heightened sense of wonder, awe, or ecstasy over an experience” [G Privette]. “A highly valued experience which is characterised by such intensity of perception, depth of feeling, or sense of profound significance…” [D Leach]

Privette identifies three salient characteristics of peak experiences:

1.     Fulfilment: peak experiences generate positive emotions and are intrinsically rewarding.

2.     Significance: Peak experiences lead to an increase in personal awareness and understanding and can serve as a turning point in a person’s life.

3.     Spiritual: During a peak experience, people feel at one with the world and often experience a sense of losing track of time.

I don’t want to make this post technical and jargonish. In simple words, spirituality is your personal experience. It transforms you into a good individual. It makes you see good around and do good to others. It gives you the feeling that you are one with the whole reality around you.

You can identify a spiritual person by the serene happiness he/she enjoys in life. 


PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

Previous Post: Rand’s Dreams

Coming up tomorrow: Talisman

Comments

  1. I feel exactly the same, religion is a jail, spirituality is freedom.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Too many people mistake religion for spirituality and thus create problems.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Hmm. But the post doesn't seem to be striking a chord!

      Delete
  3. It amazing what people do under the name of religion.
    I look up the word narrative, and I was surprised it came up as a genre.
    Coffee is on and stay safe.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Religion hasn't had an encouraging history at any time. Yet it wields tremendous power over people. Narratives!

      Delete
  4. Wonderfully penned. Wish religions of the world would actually follow their own tenants and realise their folly

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. History shows that yours and mine is an unrealistic dream.

      Delete
  5. People are enamoured with religion because its so convenient. Just pray away. Pray away your problems, ask to be saved. Chant hymns in praise, be a sycophant and of course you will be saved! Offer sticks and rice to statues, paintings and you will be saved! Its the easier path than looking inside correcting our behaviour. Its so much easier than being kind- just live in a bubble. If everyone just PRAYS....everyone will be okay. so no need to be decent to each other! Its a lazy path offered by equally lazy people. All of us beware of Religion.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People always choose the easy way. So there will be no escape from religion.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Koorumala Viewpoint

  Koorumala is at once reticent and coquettish. It is an emerging tourist spot in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. At an altitude of 169 metres from MSL, the viewpoint is about 40 km from Kochi. The final stretch of the road, about 2 km, is very narrow. It passes through lush green forest-looking topography. The drive itself is exhilarating. And finally you arrive at a 'Pay & Park' signboard on a rocky terrain. The land belongs to the CSI St Peter's Church. You park your vehicle there and walk up a concrete path which leads to a tiled walkway which in turn will take you the viewpoint. Below are some pictures of the place.  From the parking lot to the viewpoint The tiled walkway A selfie from near the view tower  A view from the tower Another view The tower and the rest mandap at the back Koorumala viewpoint is a recent addition to Kerala's tourist map. It's a 'cool' place for people of nearby areas to spend some leisure in splendid isolation from the hu...