What is Spirituality?

What is Spirituality?

We’ve all grown up listening to the platitude: “Health is wealth.” As we grow even older, it sounds more and more true. As we enter a new phase in the history of the world with the Covid-19, both the terms, namely ‘health’ and ‘wealth’, demand to be rethought, and brought into discussions about sustainable living. While thinking about the word wealth, I keep thinking about another line: “Some people are so poor, all they have is money.” When I googled this line, images of Bob Marley were thrown up, so perhaps it is attributed to him. What is the greatest wealth in the world? Religious teachings and holy scriptures tell us that it is love. But love is not one thing: there are different kinds and manifestations of love. In Ancient Greece, at least six variants of love were extant: gápe, éros, philía, philautia, storgē, and xenia.

Philosophical inquiries into the nature of love are so diverse and large that it is not possible to talk about it in a monolithic, one-dimensional kind of a way. What is more convenient and worthwhile is to understand the relation amongst health, wealth and love. The idea that the poor can be ‘wealthy’ presupposes interpreting the word ‘wealth’ in a metaphysical, non-materialistic way. One of the many functions of material wealth is to make a person secure and protect them from poverty. An abstract formulation of the word wealth would define it as something that protects us against poverty of any metaphysical entity like happiness, morality, values, rationality, etc. However, there is an increasing poverty of these entities today, owing to reasons that are too many to enumerate. Physical health depends on the stability or homeostasis that is maintained by continuous modification of biochemical and physiological aspects. Mental health, or a person’s psychological and emotional well-being, is not detached from their physical health. Physical health and mental health are complimentary and one cannot be sustained, in the long run, without the other. A culture of commodification and rampant consumerism makes us believe that we are not healthy enough either mentally or physically and that there is no way apart from relying upon ‘experts’ or health-products for our well-being.

We live in a kind of world where happiness is bought and sold as products. It is not that the awareness about mental and physical health has not increased over the last few years, but professionals who claim expertise in these fields have tried strategically to sustain the illusion that one cannot ensure their wellbeing on their own, and that one is basically perpetually in need of treatment or aid of some kind. This has created a needy population who live in constant fear of lapsing into illness, either physical or mental or both. Of course, it is not possibly to be well mentally and physically all the time, but our chances of recovery from either physical or mental ailments is considerably dependent upon how we are doing spiritually. We may go so far as to add a third dimension to our being: spiritual health. The way I understand it, spirituality has little to do with religion. It is perfectly possible for a person to be spiritual without believing in God or without being religious. It suggests a particular metaphysical disposition of the mind which convinces a person of the interconnectedness of things. Spirituality, it seems to me, lies in, more than anything, the ability to identify with and relate and respond to everything we are surrounded with: people, animals, change of seasons, food, etc. The more connected one is to one’s immediate surrounding, the less likely he is to feel sad and dejected.

However, it would be nearer the truth to say that we are already connected. Spirituality lies in the ability to realize and to remind ourselves of this fact from time to time. The eater and the eaten, the producer and the produced are all connected and the more mystified this connection or relation becomes, the greater the chances of us falling ill, either physically or mentally or both. Spirituality is characterized by a certain kind of openness and attentiveness to the messages that the visible world seems to contain for us. These messages are non-verbal and can be felt only when we are available in the present and attentive to moments.  The more we are able to realize this, the more facile it seems to distinguish spirituality from the regular and the more ‘practical’ considerations of life such as money, family, career, etc. There is no discontinuity between finance and spirituality. The awareness of material forces that govern our life does not make us any less spiritual. One can be good with money and be spiritual at the same time. Neither is spirituality something to be practiced in isolation. It is about the recognition of human labour and struggle and the sense of humility, empathy and gratitude that comes from such recognition. Human beings have been endowed with the faculty of not only reasoning and self-introspection but also the recognition that if they must survive as a species, they should do so collectively, by helping each other, and by being sensitive to nature. All this may sound very idealistic and impossible. But it goes without saying that each moment of spiritual realization in our life connects us to others; each act of tenderness brings us closer to ourselves and makes us realize that one cannot be truly happy unless one’s spiritual health is good, for the connection among the spiritual, the mental and the physical is organic and natural.

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