What is Spirituality?
8 Apr 2024 HYN Himalayan Yoga Academy
Start dying each moment to the past. Clean yourself of the past each moment. Due to the known, you become available to the unknown. With dying and being reborn each moment you will be able to live life and you will be able to live death also. And that’s what spirituality is really all about: to live death intensely, to live life intensely; to live both so passionately that nothing is left behind unlived, not even death.
If you live life and death totally, you transcend. In that tremendous passion and intensity of life and death, you transcend duality, you transcend the dichotomy and you come to the One. That One is the truth. You can call it God, you can call it life, truth, samadhi, ecstasy, or whatever you choose.
Spirituality is not a question of morality; it is a question of vision. Spirituality is not the practicing of virtues — because if you practice a virtue it is no longer a virtue. A practiced virtue is a dead thing, a dead weight. Virtue is a virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is a virtue only when it is natural, and unpracticed.
And then, what is spiritual?”
To be in a relationship with truth or God is to be spiritual. Remember, to be in a relationship — not to talk about spirituality, not to follow a certain creed, dogma, church, or temple, but to be in a direct immediate relationship with existence is spirituality. To be in tune with the whole, to feel the harmony and the joy and the absolute celebration of being here, that is spirituality.
It has nothing to do with going to the church or the temple, it has nothing to do with reciting the Koran or The Bible or the Gita. It has nothing to do with any kind of worship ritual, it has something to do with communion — communion with the trees, communion with the stars, communion with the rivers, communion with all that is. It is communion with this multidimensional expression of God, it is having a dialogue with the whole. The quality of mad love is needed, and then you are spiritual. Spirituality is not a head trip; it is a heart-to-heart dialogue, and ultimately a being-to-being dialogue.
They escape into loneliness. Their loneliness never becomes aloneness, it remains loneliness. Loneliness is a negative state; it is utterly empty, it is sad. One can be solitary, but that does not bring solitude. Solitariness is just physical aloneness, solitude is spiritual aloneness.
Written By Swami Padmasattva