If you ask your grandfather or grandmother or your father, “Why do you believe in God, Papa?”,
then they will say, “Oh, I believe because…”﹘ so many reasons –
“my shastras, my literature, my culture says so,
my mother says so.”
But when you ask further questions, “Why?”, there is no real answer to it. Often, I get bombarded
with this question, “What is this spirituality you are talking about?”
I say, spirit and spirituality are two different things.
With spirit, you can get drunk and lose your awareness.
With spirituality, you become fully aware.
It is a drastic difference. With spirituality, you experience things.
Personal experience is more important than stuffing our minds with knowledge that
God is Sarvagnani, Sarvavyapi, Sarva, Sarva, Sarva:
so many things, Omnipotent (Sarvasakthimaan), Sarvagyani (Omniscient).
But it adds value.
This knowledge becomes valuable when I experience.
And this experience is possible only through spiritual practices..
Think for a moment when we grew up, we were bombarded with this conditioning of our mind
by our parents, grandparents, societies.
If you ask your grandfather or grandmother or your father, “Why do you believe in God, papa?”
then they will say, “Oh, I believe because…”
﹘ so many reasons
– “my shastras, my literature, my culture says so, my mother says so.”
But when you ask further questions, “Why?”, there is no real answer to it. Through spirituality,
such a knowledge that has been shared by our elders with a lot of love can be actualized,
and that is all about spirituality.
In religion what do we do?
We light up a lamp, burn some incense sticks,
that too also rushing.
You are always waiting for the next moment and when you are too busy, you will perhaps surrogate it
to some priest.
You know my father, when he was about sixty or something, and some pandits told him,
“Your life is nearing its end.
You better do some homam, some sacrifices”, and things like that.
So he chose to do one lakh or two lakhs of Shivalinga and some Mruthyunjaya Japam in the temple.
So he hired a pandit, who stayed in our house for the entire month of Sravan and did all these things.
I said, “Papa, how are you going to benefit when somebody does this practice on your behalf?
Would your stomach get filled and you will be satisfied if I eat on your behalf?” Meditations and
something that we become out of all these things,
no one can do it on my behalf.
I have to do it myself.
Somewhere along, we have gone wrong. There has been some kind of curvature set in
the religious practices, world over.
In religion, we externalise the practices, all these rituals. In spirituality, fortunately,
it is always inward;
you experience it and as a result of this experience,
you become something as a result of those experiences.
So there is a big difference and I wish more people will be spiritual.
Religion, you know, they have been killing each other.
Religions, the factions because of religions have killed more people than this virus.
Who is dangerous? Think over it, please.
Spirituality unites us but what sort of a practice must I have?
It should be universal and when you experience God within yourself,
you will experience as Original God, Absolute God.
You will not experience God as that you see in photographs or in some institutions
where they hang the photographs. Nothing of that sort. You will have the fragrance of Reality perfectly,
an experience in an unforgettable way. You cannot miss it and you cannot lose
such an experience because it becomes part of us, it starts breathing in us.
So spirituality has a greater promise; unity is the minimum thing.
Greater things would be realization of God, where you totally merge yourself
and if I have to put the culmination of spirituality in one sentence, I will have to use Kabir’s explanation:
it is like a raindrop falling in the ocean becoming the ocean.
So this process of raindrops becoming ocean can happen when you adopt spirituality.
When you adopt religion, you become your own islands
I am a Hindu, I am a Muslim, or I am a Jew or I am a Catholic.
So many other identifications can be given because of all that
but you will never be what you ought to be – Universal.