spirituality & religion

What is the difference between spirituality and religion? I use these words in the following way: By spirituality I mean anything to do with our spirit, our innermost essence. In particular the search, the exploration of the inner world of oneself, of one’s dark recesses in the mind, and deeper into more mysterious parts of our being. This journey is our spirituality. And religion: I use the word religion to mean the organised religions – really spirituality organised into a group activity, structured.

For those of us coming from the West, with our freedom of thought, these organised religions are perhaps not the way to go. For me, the spiritual journey is essentially a unique personal journey. It is an exploration which will reveal one’s own deepest truth and that truth need not be the same as anyone else’s. The important point is that it is one’s own truth and one has discovered it for one’s self, from direct experience. This is the way of spirituality.

The religions can broadly be categorised into theistic and non-theistic. Theistic religions are based on a god, a belief in a god, or sometimes several gods. These gods represent the mysterious forces at play in the universe, in existence. Non-theistic religions, like Buddhism and Taoism, don’t talk about god at all. They are not concerned with whether the mysterious forces at play are somehow given an identity. These non-theistic religions are much closer to the spirituality that I spoke of. They are concerned with the truth in a direct, experiential way. Existential truth is their subject, but not as a philosophy, rather as a lived reality.

So this is how I use the words spirituality and religion, of course others may use them slightly differently. My focus will be that of spirituality, although in talking about spirituality I may draw on the teachings of those great spiritual teachers who became the figureheads of many of the religions: Jesus, Gautam Buddha, the Prophet Mohammed, and many others. Of course these people did not, in general, intend to found a new religion. It is those that followed such teachers who created the organised religions that we know today. So if you are following one of these religions, I urge you to focus on the teachings of those founding figures, for they have realised their own truth and have something to share with the rest of us.