When we think of spiritual people, the images of Mother Teresa, Popes or Christ comes into our mind. We feel that being spiritual means sacrificing all the pleasures of the world and living a life of poverty and charity. Most of us have a common notion that spiritualism is related to after-death or other-world and associate spiritualism a matter of personal faith that is only for self-satisfaction having no application in the real-life world.
Spirituality is often associated with old age. Young people often think that they are too young to be spiritual. They often associate spiritualism with other-worldly believes and wonder if by being spiritual, they would lose all the fun and the pleasure they are having from the worldly things. They, therefore, prefer to postpone spiritualism to the later part of their life when they would perhaps no longer be able to enjoy the world due to deterioration of the body hence that would be the right time to become spiritual.
We are more concerned about real life problems of the world. We have to earn our livings, achieve our targets, manage a family and take care of our children. You don't get paid for being spiritual. You can't make a living by following a spiritual path. Why must you bother to become spiritual until your worldly needs are satisfied?
Nothing can be farther from the truth. Spiritualism is an attempt to understand the "true reality" of life and human beings. It is like any other branch of knowledge that helps us know the world better. If you know your body well, you can surely avoid falling sick, if you know driving well, you can avoid accidents. Same is true for the true knowledge of the people.
If you have the true knowledge of people, you can achieve your targets by motivating your team, make your bosses and subordinates happy, bring up your children well by guiding them to the right path and make yourself happy by avoiding the conflicts with other people and enjoying the life of happiness and peace. Therefore, spirituality is the key to your success in all areas of your life whether professional or personal. Spiritualism is, therefore, the road of lifetime, happiness and bliss provided we know the truth of the spirituality.
What is Spirituality?
Spiritualism can be defined as "the philosophy, doctrine, or religion emphasizing the spiritual aspect of being". Thus the key to spirituality is the " knowledge of spirit" which can enable us to understand the spiritual aspect of beings?
In order to understand spiritualism, let us take the example of any person or our own selves. A person is born as infant and passes through the stages of childhood, teenage, youth, adulthood, middle age and old age in this world. The body of the person is constantly changing and it can't remain same at any two moments of his life. Yet there is something in all of us that does not change with time and age. We call this non-changing reality as our "True Self" or "Soul".
Soul can't be seen or measured yet none of us can deny its existence as we all know that it is the core of our being that is present in us throughout in our journey of life even when every cell of the body has changed.
When we pay "close attention" to the world, we find that the world too is changing every moment. People are getting older, new people are born every day. People are continuously changing their habits and behavior with times. The culture of the country and the society is under continuous transformation. Yet there is something in all human beings that does not change with time. It is for this reason that the nature of the person described many thousands years back in Bible, Koran, Vedas, Upanishads or Gita continue to hold good for the people of the twenty first century. Our intuition also tells us that even after many thousands years, the core of human nature shall not change.
Similarly, in our day to day life, we encounter thousands of people in our professional and personal capacity. All people looks different, come from different economic, cultural and religious background and practice different profession. We attempt to understand people from their profession, religion, country, culture, age and their physical appearance. Our understanding of the world is, therefore, based on the attributes of the person that are visible and known, which can be defined and measured. Here we find everyone as different and we wonder, how can we know such a vast variety of people? Knowing people is too important for all of us as only by knowing people we can hope to perform our jobs well and succeed in life.
The scientific method to deal with such diversity of people is by applying the principle of uncertainty and probability. According to this theory the attributes of the people are distributed in random manner. Hence your relationships with the people fail or succeed by chance and there is hardly anything you can do about it.
Eisenstein ridiculed the principle of uncertainty as he firmly believed that everything in this world can be understood given proper understanding of the same. He expressed his thoughts in his famous quote when he said, "God does not play dice with the world."
The events look random only due to our limited understanding of the event. Randomness is only due to the lack of knowledge about the true reality. Once, we acquire the complete knowledge of things, everything becomes predictable. Today the solar or lunar eclipse can be predicted many centuries in advance within the accuracy of seconds since we have understood the motions of the planets. However, we are unable to make even a vague prediction of earthquake due to lack of our knowledge in this area. For a "casual observer" of the world, everything looks random and every thing happens by chance while for an "attentive observer", everything happens by design and predictable.
If a person pays "close attention" to the happening of the world, he start noticing a pattern in all the diverse things of life as everything in the world happens due to a common force, common rule or a common entity that is called "spirit"
Logical Understanding of Man
The knowledge of "self" and the "human beings" is inevitable in the life of every "thinking" person as everyone seeks to understand people and the world to achieve his goal. When, we interact with any person, we judge him based on a mental model of the person made by our mind. We use our model to understand and manipulate the mind the person in order to get the things done or achieve the objective of the self or the organization. When the results are as per our expectation, we develop faith on that model while when we fail; we revise our model so as to get better accuracy next time.
Similarly, we make a model of ourselves too. We believe that certain things will bring us happiness while other would bring us pain. We either achieve our goal or fail. When we achieve success, we expect the happiness while when we fail we expect the pain as per our model. If we don't get the feelings we expect, we change our model. Thus the "knowledge of self" is also continuously evolving.
Therefore, with experience in life, people continuously change their model or perspective of the world and the self. Those who focus only on the material nature of the things tends to develop different models for each person. Such people often find fault in every person as they find the mental model of every person different from their own model. Since they consider their model as "right", they obviously find everyone else "wrong" as they are all different from him or her. This give rise to conflict as each person views his world in a different manner. Thus a logical person who tries to understand the world scientifically and rationally gets frustrated from the world as they find that the world is not like it should be "based on their model" and full of "wrong people". They are also not happy and satisfied themselves because their own models are faulty and all material and worldly achievements fail to give them happiness.
The models of the worldly person never converge as they never pay any attention to the realities that can't be seen, felt or measured. Therefore, the logical model of the world often fails to provide any satisfaction and happiness to the person in his life.
Spiritualism: One Model for the World
However, when an observer sees the world more closely using not only his mind (the logic and reason) but also intuition and intelligence, he notices that there are two types of "realities" in this world. Once that is visible, perceptible and measurable which is changing every moment while the "other reality" is unseen, unknown and unchanging that is the cause of all action.
The "invisible reality" may be compared with "the gravitational field" or "the magnetic field" that produces the force of attraction or repulsion, yet it can never be seen or measured except by observing its effect on the other material things. Interestingly the knowledge of this "unseen reality" only caused the birth of science, when Newton first noticed by observing an apple falling on the ground that there must be a force (field) that attracts everything to Earth.
While our attention is usually focused on the "effect" i.e. on the things that are changing, we miss the "cause" why they are changing. Understanding this cause is like understanding the "gravitational field" as you can then realize that the force of attraction or repulsion is not random but affects in the similar way to everything on this earth or even in the universe "following the same rules". This rule is perennial and does not change with time and object.
Similarly, the attention of the spiritual person is focused on the "common rule" or "common reality" that governs everything. Thus he, instead of finding all events as random, understands the "rules" that governs the world and does not change with time and place. Therefore, instead of viewing the world as made of random events, a spiritual person understands the design of the world and discovers "unity and diversity".
Once a person understands the spirit of the world, he finds that the models of all people and every creature of the world are not different but same. Fortunately, these models are very same as his own model. This solves his problem as now he can understand the whole world simply by understanding himself. He can now understand the feeling of any person and predict every person from his own felling and intuition. In short, a spiritual person knows the world from the knowledge of the self. This knowledge of the world paves the way of his success in life.
Success by Spiritualism
The knowledge of self is, however, not as easy as it seems. We always believe that we know ourselves quite well. However, in the journey of life, we always rediscover ourselves and find that our earlier perception was not correct. We then realize that we have never paid sufficient attention to know what we are.
Many thousands years back, Upanishads, the great scriptures of the East echoed the same views when it was said, "I am the Universe" (Aham Brahmasmi). Many thousands years later Pythagoras, the great scientist and mathematicians in the West too discovered the same truth independently when he sated, "Man know thyself; then thou shall know the Universe and God".
There is no doubt that the key to achieve all type pf success lies in the knowledge of the self and the world. Therefore, being spiritual is beneficial to self and the society. Don't wait to first become old then to become spiritual as then therefore would be no use of being spiritual. There is old couplet of famous Indian Sufi poet that says
Everyone pray Him only in distress,
None in his happiness,
Pray Him in your happiness
Why must you ever have distress?
So why not become spiritual now, and enjoy its fruits for rest of your life? The earlier to become, the more time you have to enjoy its benefits.
Mr. Awdhesh K Singh is a government of India officer. He is an Engineer by education and philosopher by passion. He has published several papers in International Journals and Conferences on the subject of E-governance and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools like Fuzzy Logic (FL) and Expert Systems (ES) for E-governance. He also has keen interest in the study and application of Indian Philosophies for solving the real-life problems of the modern world.
Many of his articles are published on the website of Aatmic Science Forum http://www.aatmicscience.com and Science of Soul http://www.scienceofsoul.com
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