Spirituality is a personal choice

Choosing to walk the spiritual path is a very personal decision. It is a decision that only you can make. No one can, nor do they have the right to, compel you to make this choice. It is a personal matter – a personal choice. Our modern lifestyle is too focused on materiality. If you are fine with that, that is OK too. However, sooner or later, and especially as you grow older, you will start to seek something more than material wealth. Perhaps you will question your existence and your mortality in the face of friends and relatives passing away, or in your own illness. Perhaps you encounter a unique spiritual experience. Many people discover spirituality in the midst of their failures. Whatever the case may be, at some point in your life, spirituality will become important. That would be a good starting point to seek out spirituality. What is spirituality? The word “spirituality” can mean so many things to so many people. Some find spirituality to be daunting and mysterious because it has been made out to be such. In fact, spirituality is simply the aspect of our life that is not perceivable by our five physical sense organs – the eyes, the ears, the nose, the tongue and the body. All of life is made up of spirit and matter. Even our own existence is a combination of mind and body. It is the immaterial that is spiritual. Judge Thomas Troward, who gave the famous Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science, said it best when he said that the only real difference between the dead matter and the living spirit is intelligence, or consciousness. Thus, spirit and mind are intimately related. Here is where we have to be very careful with the use of words, for they can sometimes be the cause of confusion. In fact, in your own search for spirituality, you will come across similar words that are used in different religions. Some of these same words refer to different things. On the other hand, sometimes different words are used to refer to the same thing. It is important to be aware of this limitation of words. It may be more useful to look at what the word represents and remember the nature, qualities or values that it represents instead of the word itself. Then you can see the similarities in the different words used, or the differences in the same word used by different religions. Seeker of Truth The seeker of spirituality is essentially the seeker of truth – the absolute truth. The nature of this absolute truth is that it is unchanging. It exists in the past, in the present and in the future. It exists everywhere. It is beyond time and space. In any point in time and space, it is there. It is there even before time and space. This being the case, anyone who seeks it, regardless of where or when he starts out from, he should eventually arrive at the same truth – the unchanging truth. Thus, no one has an exclusive claim on spirituality – not Christianity, not Islam, not Hinduism, not Buddhism, not Sikhism, not any religions. In fact, you will find that genuine spiritual seekers will not compel you to believe in what he himself believes in. True spirituality is not about beliefs. It is about knowledge. Beliefs may be a starting point but it must never end there. Your beliefs must eventually lead you to the absolute truth through your practice. Therefore, there is no compulsion in spirituality or in any true religions. Compulsion is only for the fearful and the faithless who seeks strength in numbers. They are not genuine spiritual seekers. My Spirituality So, this is how I have come to see my own spirituality. I do not see a personal God, who favors one group of people over another. God does not play favoritism. God does not say, “If you are a Christian/Muslim/Hindu/Buddhist, you go to heaven. The rest will go to hell.” I do not believe in such a God. What I see is an impersonal creative force – a natural force. You can call it Divine Intelligence or Divine Mind. It is impersonal. It creates everything, following natural laws. Thus, it embraces everything and it is impartial. This is unconditional love. This is true justice. After all, how can one be fair when one is partial? So, my spirituality is a path I am taking to recognize this Divine or Universal Mind. It is to purify my own Personal Mind so that it can then re-experience this Divine Mind, this Original Pristine Mind. The goal is to remove all impurities - all negativities, all unwholesome motivations, all limiting views or beliefs – from my Personal Mind, and make it pristine again. Some people called this the merging with the Divine and considered this to be the ultimate attainment in a spiritual path. I do not know if it is the ultimate but I do know that this is the path I am taking. And I invite you to join me in this beautiful journey.