Spirituality, again!

This is not the first time someone asking me this or me blogging about it - what you mean by spiritual and not religious?. I was asked this question recently when somebody read one of my profiles in internet. I thought I say something new than what I wrote before. 

Take this for example:

"You shall love your neighbor as yourself" Mark 12:31

What does that mean? Well, it looks kind of self explanatory unless one hates himself. Why should one do that?, love our neighbor as ourself? It is not that difficult to find an answer for that 'why'. (note that we are not asked to check our neighbor's religion/faith before we love them)

I personally think Mark 12:31is worth meditating. 

Let us look it closely.  When I read "YOU shall love YOUR.." it becomes "I shall love MY…", if that message is for me. Isn't it so? Then comes this big question - Who am I? There starts the spirituality or the spiritual journey. Don't you think Jesus is asking us to find who we really are?

When we look around and observe those religious people, we can see that, for them, religion is all about God or finding God or blindly following a scripture or attending a place of worship or considering themselves as a servant of God, speaking of 'their' God, following some customs, marketing 'their' God etc etc It happens so because their perception is different, when they read scriptures (when/if they read). I personally know some people who used to visit some particular temple on some particular day of the week. What if they miss a day and something went wrong? They would say it is because they missed the visit and God is angry..then they offeres some extra pooja to please the God. This will not happen with a person who has spiritual inclination though he has this habit of visiting a place of worship and miss a day. A spiritual person do not believe that God sits only in places of worship. 

Take the Hindu scripture Bhagavat Gita. There are over 500 translations in my mother tongue itself. Millions around the world read it, study it and many of them can recite it without referring the scripture. Who is Krishna? and Who is Arjuna? If anybody thinks Lord Krishna is  just a King (or the avatar of God) who lived 5000 years ago and he gave this pep talk to his buddy Arjuna before a fight and he is going to come again (even Jesus for that matter), I think they did not really get it. Of course Gita can be viewed that way. It is a HIStory book and it is a sanskrit text book too. But the spiritual way of looking at it is bit different. If we say Krishna or Jesus is not going to come again to save the world (the whole universe is HIS creation then who is coming to save whom?), it will create a big indigestion/anger/rage  for the religious people not to the spiritual ones.

At one point Jesus says he is the son of God and then we can see him saying he and the father are one. That is spirituality.