What Actually Is Spirituality?

We speak of ‘spirituality’ and we have a conception in our minds about what it actually is. We vaguely sense that it encompasses a devotion and focus on something other than our daily external life and relationships. Many people state that they are ‘spiritual, not religious’. We sometimes conceive of it as a deep devotional sense in our being. Others may conceive of it as the ability to put aside all worldly concerns and cares and focus one-pointed attention on the Infinite, by whatever name, and in whatever form, we may conceive of the Infinite. We may associate it on occasion with the deeper movements of the religious temperament when we have an experience of a sense of consecration or a flame of aspiration welling up from our heart-centre.. Or we may sense that it is some kind of dedicated, selfless work that we do for the benefit of the larger whole, whether that is conceived of as the entirety of humankind, or something wider and more encompassing even than that. We have unusual or even extraordinary experiences of consciousness which we quickly identify as spiritual experiences, whether it is a sense of existing outside the body, or having the descent of a deep and immovable peace into our being, or the opening up and activation of a force, whether from below moving upwards, or from above moving downwards, opening the energy centers, chakras, actualizing powers of knowledge, insight, consecration, devotion that are normally quite absent.

To the extent we conceive of spirituality as any of these things, we may believe that by our mind’s attention and acceptance of a particular idea or formation, that we are being ‘spiritual’. Even having spiritual experiences from time to time does not, however, make us spiritual. These mental formations and special experiences are essentially there to awaken us to the reality, the need, the opportunity and the path before us. It is then up to us to take those next steps and work on the transformation of human nature that represents the next stage in human evolution and thereby helps us embody, in our thoughts, our words and our deeds, in our very perceptions, reactions and impulses, the essence of spirituality.

Spirituality brings with it the experience of oneness, transcending the fixation we have on the ego-personality and the body-life-mind complex we inhabit during our current short lifetimes. This transcendence removes the barriers of space, time and circumstance. We respond entirely differently than the ego-consciousness, as we are no longer centered in that small, and artificially distinct (through the illusion of separation), nexus of experience. From this basis, it is possible to effectuate real change in human nature, an evolutionary change that impacts every aspect of our lives.

Sri Aurobindo notes: “Talk of surrender or a mere idea or tepid wish for integral consecration will not do; there must be the push for a radical and total change.”

“It is not by taking a mere mental attitude that this can be done or even by any number of inner experiences which leave the outer man as he was. It is this outer man who has to open, to surrender and to change. His every least movement, habit, action has to be surrendered, seen, held up and exposed to the divine Light, offered to the divine Force for its old forms and motives to be destroyed and the divine Truth and the action of the transforming consciousness of the Divine Mother to take their place.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 125-126