Religion as the Antithesis of Spirituality:The Meaning of Meaning

          The pursuit of spirituality is a phenomenon found in every culture in the world. From Christians to Native Shamans, this quest holds a multiplicity of methods and dynamics too varied to mention. But what is this pursuit in understandable terms? Spirituality, on its own, is an indefinable, ambiguous word with as many definitions as there are paths pursuing it. Nonetheless, it can be viewed as the quest to reconcile fear and life so as to find peace and contentment by mitigating the unknown and the unknowable through faith and experience.  It is finding happiness regardless of physical or environmental circumstance. It is holding on to meaning despite mortality, chaos, suffering and strife. It is enabling a moral bond between people and the world that surrounds them. It is the awe that is inspired by the complexity and beauty of reality. It is all these things and more.
          Religion is the antithesis of spirituality.
          Our first spiritual experience begins before we can communicate. Can you imagine the epiphany of birth? These early spiritual experience are individual. They require no collusion, directive or confirmation from others.  It is not until we begin to share these encounters that we start to assume these occurrences to be communal and transmitted from a mutual, exterior source from ourselves. We come to this collective conclusion from a lack of ability to explain our personal experience. Humans like to exhibit the ability to provide normative answers, for fear of being viewed as abnormal. The simple explanation at our disposal is the religious paradigm within whatever culture we come from. We are handed answers to unanswerable questions. If no one had told us there was a Jesus, we would never have considered his story. If we didn’t have to relay our experiences to each other, we would never assume it was controlled by any source exterior to ourselves. For someone approaching spirituality in a religious sense, this source is defined in a multiplicity of ways. Whether your source is a metaphysical being, nature or a religious icon, in any religious context it is still a power outside of yourself in control. This act of allocating power to an imagined being acts to belittle, confuse and retard spiritual development. It is no longer our experience; it is someone else’s.
           Spiritual experience is borne of the profound. It derives from moments where simple reason and other limitations of the mind cannot sufficiently explain the power and significance of an emotional event, an intuition, an outcome or the rationale for simply being. For example, the contrast between night and day and the elements instigated the moments that inspired the idea for the first gods. The change of seasons, war, celebration, strife, birth, death and sickness followed with many more. To understand and communicate epiphanies required a shared understanding; a medium for explanation. The gods as a cause was the best way for two or more people to normalize these experiences. The difficulty with this modus operandi is that it does nothing to further the pursuit of spirituality. It only acts to provide explanations to another. Those explanations, drawn from nothing more than imagination, hinder the paradigms revealing themselves to the individual. By superimposing false, superficial meanings and definitions to the experience, personal revelation becomes confused. Conclusions are made where none are naturally meant to exist. The magic and power of the beautifully unexplained becomes common and shared; clarified without substance. Further truths are no longer pursued. It wasn’t until man gave up on the idea that a god gave him fire that the revelation of combustion was possible.
              In conclusion, the true path to spiritual enlightenment comes from an acceptance of ignorance and a willingness to forgo attempts to explain. The real epiphany is that you are simply a section of a never ending trail that winds through generations of unlimited experiences, each unfolding a new facet of reality. Most importantly, it is the awe of that unfolding that offers spiritual growth, not the explanation of it. Enjoy the influence of nature, the fear of death, the wonder of birth, the ecstasy of song and dance and the rewards from goodness and conscience living. As soon as you begin to offer explanations, the power of these personal experiences becomes diminished.