Ever since I’ve woken up to the consciousness of myself I have always curiously questioned the ways of the world. Of course all along I’ve had stories from the Bible answering my many questions. But being an inquisitive, scientific person, very argumentative by nature, it really is a hard job convincing me. About anything. So how did everything we’re living in come into existence? God created it all. Sure he did. But where is God? I’d love to meet him, I’ve often thought to myself at those Sunday School classes (Bible study classes that Christian children attend).
And hence the concept of religion is one I have a huge question mark in my mind about. But that would require a dedicated, full fledged post by itself. What I want to talk about here however is, Spirituality - a word that is today overly used since each of us seem to have our own ways of defining it.
So what is spirituality for me? For me it is about setting up a personal belief system for myself. It could be anything, there are no pre defined rules or ways of practicing it. Spirituality is what comes to the rescue of people like my self who are lost and confused in the big world of religion. The way I see it if you want to be religious, you must be able to follow everything that a particular religion preaches. If you can pick and choose what you want to believe in and only practice what you feel suits you, then wouldn’t the very purpose of religion be defeated?
Hence spirituality.
If there is anything that you do with the discipline that it requires, and it breeds self-development giving you pure happiness and gratification, that might just be your spiritual object. And spirituality is the relationship that you, the subject have with this object. For me, for example, it’s writing. There is a serene kind of peacefulness and joy that I experience when I put things down in writing. My ability to express my self through words is I feel, one of my most passionate powers. It could be anything from simply putting down words on a greeting card to putting together the feature article for my magazine before the deadline, to this, the rather infrequent postings on my blog about things I personally feel for. There’s probably one person out there who actually reads this. Despite all that, writing gives me a sense of self actualization, which most people feel their religion gives them.
Writing is my tool of self purification, of contact with a feeling above and beyond other normal feelings. For someone else it could be the music they are involved in. For a dancer, it could be his dance. Being keenly interested and trained in both music and dance I completely understand the divinity in terms of the feeling, of them both. For an artist, her paintings. What I’m trying to say is that spirituality does not necessarily have to be related to religion. If it’s a film maker’s film that gives him/her the divine satisfaction, so be it.
It’s as simple as this – if you can attain peace with yourself and others through your ways of self-expression, in whatever form, with self-discipline, that is spirituality for you. You don’t need to go searching for a definition or live with notions in your head of it (spirituality) being an extreme, out of the world feeling that will literally blow your mind away. Coz for all you know you are probably living it and you don’t know because you are not giving it, or your gift of self-expression the due credit they deserve.
