What is the purpose of spirituality? Why do I have to be spiritual? When there’s so much to do in the world, so much to achieve, why should I be spiritual? Why bother?
Let’s say, one morning, you wake up and check your temperature, and your thermometer shows 101° F. What does that mean? You have a fever. It means something is not right. Suppose you ask everyone around you what their temperature is, and everyone says 98.6° F. That’s how you know for sure that you have a fever. But now imagine that when you ask around, everyone says their temperature is 101° F. Do you still have a fever? Yes, of course you do.
In the first case, you know that something is off and look for a solution. But when everyone’s temperature is 101° F, what happens? You think that it’s normal and don’t go to a doctor. The fever is still ravaging your body, but because everyone else has it too, you don’t look for a solution.
Most of us experience a more or less regular state of stress, worry, anxiety and depression. But when we talk to our friends, we find that they’re also stressed, worried, anxious and depressed. This has become the new normal.
We’re stressed about so many things. Spirituality helps bring that temperature back to normal. It’s what helps us get grounded, centred. It helps us stay afloat when riding the waves of life.
What is there on the surface of the ocean? Waves. And what do waves do? They go up and down, up and down. If I live on the surface of the ocean, I’m going to go up and down with the waves. If my life, happiness, peace, centring, joy and emotional state are based on something that someone else does—how they talk to me, how they treat me, how they act—whether it’s a friend, a boss, a colleague or a loved one, I’m going to go up and down. If my happiness, joy, peace and meaning in life are based on interest rates or the stock market or my weight or how popular I am, again, I’m going to go up and down, because these things keep changing. When they’re up in the right direction, we feel really good. But what does physics tell us? Everything that goes up has to come down. This is the very nature of nature. So, if I’m attached to something on the superficial level, I may love the ups, but those downs will cause stress and depression.
This is what happens in our lives. When I’m rising, I’m always worried, what will happen if I fall? When I’m dipping, I’m always stressed, always depressed. The answer lies in spiritual practice. Spirituality doesn’t say: ‘Get out of the ocean. Don’t live, don’t enjoy, don’t get wet.’ Instead, it says: ‘Anchor yourself in the depths of the ocean.’ The depths of the ocean are always very still, very calm. There is no high tide or low tide in the depths of the ocean and no stormy seas.
Also, there’s more life in the depths. When you look at the surface of the ocean, it looks just like water. When you put on a snorkelling mask, you start to see all the beautiful colours, the coral, the fish.
The same is true about life. We stay on the surface because we think that’s all there is, but we must dive deep. The deeper you go, the more stillness, calmness and grounding you will find. The deeper you go, the more beauty, the more life, the more colour. That’s where the real excitement is. It’s on the inside, not in going up and down with the waves. The joy of life is in that connection with the depths of your Self.
I want to devote some time of my life every day to move ahead on the spiritual path, but how do I know that this path actually leads anywhere, how do I know that there is actually a Self beyond the physical body? If I’m going to dedicate some of my time to something, I want to make sure that there’s going to be some returns.
Here’s the dilemma you face—your tool of knowing is the mind. That’s how you know things, how you process information. But the mind cannot know about something beyond the mind. And so a question like this puts us in this very interesting position—you need to convince a part of me which, by its very nature, cannot understand that which I want you to convince me about.
When I’m sitting here, I know that there are people sitting in front of me. How do I know that? My eyes can see them. If I had a mask over my eyes and I couldn’t see them, they would still be there. Maybe one of them would speak, and with my ears I would know they’re there. But if I was wearing earplugs, I wouldn’t be able to hear them. Maybe then I’d reach out and identify them by touch.
This brings us to our dilemma because we cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel with our fingertips God-realization or God. Most people demand proof of God. But when they say ‘prove it to me’, what they mean is: prove it to me through the methods that I have deemed acceptable, prove it through my five senses, with the tools of science. So we find ourselves tragically disbelieving simply because God is not provable in the same way as a tangible object or a mathematical calculation is.
Interestingly, neither is love. Try convincing a young child who comes home from school and proclaims, ‘I’ll never fall in love, I’ll never get married.’ Try to convince him that love exists. How are you going to convince this eight-year-old boy that there’s going to come a time in his life when he won’t think girls are gross and he will fall in love. You cannot convince him at that age of this thing called love. All you can do is pray that his life should be blessed in such a way that he also experiences love.
Once you’ve experienced love, the fact that you can’t see, hear or smell it is irrelevant. Nobody can convince you that love doesn’t exist if you’ve ever been in love. And this is where, when we look at our spiritual practice and our spiritual path, we have to use a means of knowing other than the five senses. As long as we relegate our knowing to those five senses, we limit our entire lives.
This is where the practice of meditation becomes so important. Meditation puts you in touch with what you can call a sixth sense, or another way of knowing. Anybody who has experienced God, the Divine, the Universe or spirit—whatever word you want to use—has that understanding, just like anybody who’s been in love has that understanding.