On Spirituality  

By Aju Mukhopadhyaya    

 

Spirituality  

Spirituality is a faith on existence beyond what we see before our nose and a humility that I and my knowledge are not the end of the world, that there are vast things which I have yet to grasp and know, that my past and future neither was nor is fixed. As man guessed by intuition, verified by experiment that there are phenomena beyond reasonable explanation he believed in the beyond with faith on something like God.

     India has given birth to large numbers of great Rishis and Munis who uttered the highest words of wisdom through Vedas and Upanishads as heard and realised by them. “Indian culture has been from the beginning and has remained a spiritual, an inward-looking religio-philosophical culture,” Sri Aurobindo said. (Culture 52)

     Yogi Sri Aurobindo realised that “Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking to a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.” (Divine 857) 

     For the progression from mundane to the spiritual, to establish divine life on earth he depended entirely on spirituality, “To discover the spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race . . . an outward help could succor and alleviate, but nothing or very little more is possible.” (Divine 884-85)     

     In his The Ideal of Human Unity Sri Aurobindo stressed that the ultimate union between the nations would be possible through spiritual means and that would be in a spiritual age but, “The spiritual age will be ready to set in when the common mind of man begins to be alive to these truths and to be moved or desire to be moved by this triple or triune Spirit.” (Unity 244)

     Here is how Self-realised poets expressed themselves. Swami Vivekananda’s vibrant, ever living poems are results of his realisation expressed in simple and direct way. Here he realises God everywhere in Nature as immanent:

And I was searching Thee!

From all eternity you were there

Enthroned in majesty!

From that day forth, wherever I roam,

I feel Him standing by

O’ver hill and dale, high mount and vale,

Far away and high

In Search of God /Other Poems 4

     At another time he feels God nowhere else than in himself, repeating Shankaracharya’s words that the world is a dream, a Maya, telling next that he is God. 

This world’s a dream

Though true it seem.

And only Truth is He the living!

The real me is none but He

And never never matter changing!

My Play is done /Other Poems 9

     And here he finds God in every man, in every living being:

He who is in you and outside you,
Who works through all hands,
Who walks on all feet,
Whose body are all ye,
Him worship, and break all other idols!

 

He who is at once the high and low,

The sinner and the saint,

Both God and worm

 The Living God /Other Poems 20

     Tagore felt the same way as expressed in one of his poems,

Whom does thou

worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open

thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the

path-maker is breaking stones.

 Gitanjali 11/46

Religion

Thirst for beyond and glimpse of it gave birth to religion. It was later distorted with all rules and narrow separatism so much that most religionists felt that their religion was superior to the others and hence they quarreled and fought. Some people of one of the ultra religions aim at eliminating all other religions violently which do not conform to their ideas and faith. Ruinous bestiality has ben perpetrated by them jeopardizing the whole global life. Mother of Pondicherry always condemned religions and spoke in favour of spirituality. The opposite of spirituality is materialism. Religion is in between them. Religion gets rusted through superstition so great people have advised to go beyond religion embracing spirituality which is finer and wider than rules and regulations. This is not to deny the age old spiritual practices called religions. The truth of pure religions remains. Sri Aurobindo asserted that, “Spirituality is much wider than any particular religion, and in the larger ideas of it that are now coming on us even the greatest religion becomes no more than a broad sect or branch of the one universal religion”.  (Culture 427)

Material attitude to life and God

Materialists are mostly atheists.  Most of the divisions are derived from the difference between theist and atheist. And in between are the agnostics who do not matter much.

    

    

     Materialism stands as a contrast to spirituality and communism is the best example of materialism. We have the direct experience of how the communist world butchered millions of men to establish the right of the proletariats but in the process millions of proletariats were ruined and only Dictators surfaced. The inner stories of communist movements have been written by competent writers. Communism has changed faces of countries infected by it but has been banished from most of them. It is awaiting its further banishment with Nihilism, another evil to mankind. 

     In the 1960s Existentialism came to possess the intellect of some people. It was a complete negative idea about human life. Let us see an example of it in Albert Camus’s The Outsider.

     When condemned to death, the hero of the novel, Meursault, narrating the story in the first person, tells us how he most brutally behaved with the chaplain of the Church who came to console him. He tried his best to convince the prisoner about the existence of God and man’s ultimate dependence on him. During his conversation with the chaplain,

     “I explained that I didn’t believe in God.

     “‘Are you really so sure of that?’

     “I said I saw no point in troubling my head about the matter; whether I believed or didn’t was, to my mind, a question of so little importance.” (Outsider 114)

     He finally insulted and physically assaulted the chaplain. From the beginning he behaved very selfishly with all his friends and foes and lived a reckless life feeling no responsibility for what he did. He felt that his fate of being greeted by guillotine had already been fixed and nothing could change it. “From the dark horizon of my future a sort of slow, persistent breeze had been blowing towards me, all my life long, from the years that were to come.” (Outsider 118)

     More famous Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre denied God and thought that consciousness is a decomposition of being. His work was forgotten even during his life time.

 Modern Practitioners of Spirituality   

 Spirituality has been in practice in India and elsewhere by the exponents of it from the ancient time. Some modern clever people have come to acquire parts of this discipline and use them for the benefit of different groups of people including themselves in this digital age. They are professionals; they practice spirituality.  The high-tech Gurus through piecemeal application of the science and art of spirituality make it vehicle of commerce for their own benefit. This does not fulfil the spiritual thirst or attainment of it.

     A newspaper reports, “If we go by ancient lore, enlightenment waits only at the end of a long and arduous path. It is obviously not available in spiritual supermarkets at the flash of a credit card . . . .

     “However, New Age in India is still largely an urban westernised phenomenon. Curiously enough, the urban elite have discovered Indian spirituality through the distilled versions available from the west. . . .” 1

     Large numbers of Doordarshan channels are used for this purpose. Some of the Gurus are caught for their misdeeds and others flourish in business. There is no wrong if snippets of ancient wisdom are used to benefit some but it is not integral spirituality; neither its aim nor its objective. Along with this some intellectuals propagate the teachings and teach the lives of great spiritual personalities in their limited circles of respective groups. In most cases such amateurs other than getting themselves puffed up benefit neither the aspirants nor the past Gurus. Spirituality is a systematic and time consuming effort. For a real success the aspirant often receives a call from the beyond.    

Spiritual attitude to life

A spiritual man on the other hand is usually free from lust, greed, envy, anger, illusion and hatred, at least to a great extent. Their attitude frees them from many an ill of life. A person who by nature is free from many ills of life is already advanced on the way whether he or she goes for spiritual life or not. Here are some examples.

     Here is the story of a 62 years Buddhist spinster of Chinese origin in Singapore, Ms. Sng Mui Hong, owning 12,248 square metre of land which itself constitutes the village or kampong, named Buangkok. As Singapore the city state does not have such luxury land left to constitute a village or country side, it has been called the last village of Singapore. The cost of the land is approximately $50 million. She has some 28 tenants, mostly very old from her father’s time, who pay her rent varying from $6.5 to maximum $30 per month. Some of the tenants have costly cars in their backyards. They live luxuriously. Some who are very needy get material help from the land lady. She is the master of the village but the master is seen sometimes to dig up filths from the drains or sweeping dusty lanes of her village. Whereas she can change everything in her surrounding and live like a real land baron for no one there owns such a chunk of land, she lives most simply with only one bag of rice for a month and vegetables and soup for her daily diet and moving in a seven year old cycle. She feels pain if such a question about raising the rent is posed to her. She gets most happiness in serving others and likes to see her village serene and beautiful. Not so apt to speak in English, she answers to her incredulous visiting interviewers smilingly, “I no care money. I no need so much money. I happy here. I saying my kampong.” 

     She was interviewed by me in 2016. I obtained some material facts about her from her neighbours and from a paper. 2             

     There are people who breathe spirituality without professing it like late A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, the Ex-President of India. From a recent interview in D. D. Podhigai with P. M. Nair, retired IAS officer and PA to the President, we come to know that the President did not take anything from the Government but donated to deserving institutions and individuals from his pocket. He paid for all his guests who ever remained with him in Rashtrapati Bhavan. He never took any gift which he as Head of the State received from other countries. All of us know how he loved the students and remained with them on any occasion. He always, in writing and speech, thought of the well being of his country. He led a most honest and unselfish life, trying and helping his fellow beings, wishing the good of all, leading a simple and benevolent life. He died while remaining with students, going to deliver a lecture to them in Assam.

     Let us think of the attitude of emptiness and gratefulness in the idea that all our happiness and existence depend on the help of all sentient beings; helping us to have a kind of detachment from anything selfish, as Dalai Lama has taught as part of Tibetan Buddhism. We realize that there is something spiritual about this thought process and all actions emanating from it give us freedom from the ill effects of selfish ideas and actions, enough to instill peace in us, an essential ingredient for spiritual realization.

Delight of Spiritual Life

Sri Aurobindo tells us of the charm of spiritual life: “The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the      Infinite eternal and inexhaustible.” (Divine 1069)

 

Notes and References

1 “Merchants of Nirvana” in the Sunday Chronicle, Chennai, dated 31.7.2005

2 “In Pursuit of Goodness” a feature in INDIASE; Singapore, dated August 2015

 

 

Works Cited

1. Sri Aurobindo. The Foundations of Indian Culture. SABCL V.14. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1972. Hardbound.

2. Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine. SABCL V.19. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1972. Hardbound.

3. Sri Aurobindo. The Ideal of Human Unity. SABCL V 15. Pondicherry:  Sri Aurobindo Ashram. 1972. Hardbound.

4. Swami Vivekananda. In Search of God and other Poems. Kolkata: Advaita Ashram. 2009. Paperback.

5. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. Ed. Sisir Kumar Das. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. 2004. Reprint. Hardbound

© Aju Mukhopadhyay, 2018