It is fashionable for people to say, “I am not religious, I am spiritual’. For most, this means they do not go to the temple, church, mosque etc. They do not participate in the rituals and practices of religion and do pretty much what they want without feeling the need to conform or be confined by religion.
What then could be the difference between religion and spirituality?
I have listed here some prominent differences –
▪ Religion is not just one, there are hundreds; Spirituality is one.
▪ Religion is for those who sleep; Spirituality is for those who are awake.
▪ Religion is for those who need someone to tell them what to do and want to be guided; Spirituality is for those who pay attention to their inner voice.
▪ Religion has a set of dogmatic rules; Spirituality invites us to reason about everything, to question everything.
▪ Religion threatens and frightens; Spirituality gives inner peace.
▪ Religion speaks of sin and guilt; Spirituality says, ‘Elvove, learn from your errors’.
▪ Religion represses everything and in many cases it is false; Spirituality transcends everything, it brings you closer to the truth!
▪ Religion speaks of a god; It is not God; Spirituality is omnipresent and in everything, therefore, it is in God.
▪ Religion invents; Spirituality seeks and discovers.
▪ Religion does not tolerate any question; Spirituality questions everything.
▪ Religion is human, it is an organisation with human rules; Spirituality is Divine, without human rules.
▪ Religion is the cause of divisions; Spirituality unites.
▪ Religion demands that you believe; Spirituality, asks you to seek, discover and then believe.
▪ Religion follows the precepts of a sacred book; Spirituality seeks the sacred in all books.
▪ Religion feeds on greed and fear; Spirituality feeds on trust and faith.
▪ Religion lives in thought; Spirituality lives in Consciousness.
▪ Religion deals with doing as do the masses; Spirituality has to do with doing as per the awakened Self.
▪ Religion feeds the ego; Spirituality transcends the ego.
▪ Religion makes us renounce the world to follow a god; Spirituality makes us live in God, without renouncing, living in harmony with self and the Universe.
▪ Religion is a cult; Spirituality is meditation.
▪ Religion fills us with dreams of glory in paradise; Spirituality makes us live the glory and paradise here and now.
▪ Religion lives in the past and the future; Spirituality exists in the present.
▪ Religion creates cloisters in our memory; Spirituality liberates our Consciousness.
▪ Religion makes us believe in eternal life; Spirituality makes us aware of Eternal Life.
▪ Religion promises life after death; Spirituality is to find God in our interior during life and death.
We are not human beings who go through a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings that go through a human experience.
Interesting Notes:
- There are currently 3860 known religions in practice today.
- Known as Abrahamical religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions. They have vast and highly codified practices and are useful to keep the flock together.
- Indic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Jainism the children of Sanatana Dharma (the eternal way) are not religions as is commonly understood, and in the context of this article. They are spiritual guidelines and philosophies with little or no codification of laws. Spirituality grants the individual freedom, to directly interact and harmonise with all of Creation without needing either middlemen or complex institutions.
The challenge is that individual wants freedom, but either do not know or are incapable of knowing what to do with their freedom so they seek refuge in religion. In the bargain, the individual is no more, he or she becomes part of the mass itself from which they sought freedom.
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