The science of Knowing and understanding the nature of Existence

There is such a general disagreement about what constitutes the spiritual or spirituality. But because none can agree at least in the Western world, the fallback position is judgement and morality based on beliefs that are impossible to substantiate.

Perhaps we need to revisit the meaning of the word as 'moving in accord with the spirit of life' whereas many who have a spiritual hankering plunge in to the esoteric and occult, the phenomenology surrounding the spiritual?

Image: Akshardham or Swaminarayan Akshardham complex is a Hindu mandir, and a spiritual-cultural campus in New Delhi, India. Also referred to as Delhi Akshardham or Swaminarayan Akshardham, the complex displays a millennia of traditional Hindu and Indian culture, spirituality, and architecture.

Yet while the West wallows in its moral and economic quagmire, spiritual traditions from the east continue to thrive and inspire a relatively small number of people to find a genuine peace and happiness that that endures regardless of external circumstances.

Spirituality is not a question of faith or belief, it's about knowing, about recognising one's self as part of this amazing environment that we inhabit and doing what it is required to get along peaceably not only with other people but all of life. In contrast, the religious people while recognising some basic truths such as our need for food, for companionship and reproduction have zero respect other forms of life and indeed people of a different class.

The religious have created a world of morality and judgement coupled with bigotry based on their own self-centredness and self-importance which in the modern era has given birth to neoliberalism and removed all controls from the financial systems that have come to govern our lives. This will result in increased social divisions, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the justification for endless war leading to an anticipated extermination of all life on earth.

The religious and believers while they know that they have body and mind only believe they have a soul so body and mind becomes central to their existence. Further than this, they have institutionalised and enshrined this ignorance in their churches and mosques with a hierarchy designed to prevent the believing population from knowing the absolute truth and feeding them morality.

In contrast, those who are recognised as being spiritual see themselves as indistinct from all life on earth. There is knowledge that our bodies come from the earth, they are stardust and while body and mind represent physical nature, the soul is most important, not as something to believe in, but the aspect of self that is most important to know. Instead of believing in the soul, the spiritual person seeks to identify her/himself as a soul with a body and mind.

The religions are political movements preoccupied with managing people's beliefs for economic and social control, and in some ways it's rather like farming with every individual having some social or economic value that can be made use of. In contrast the spiritualists require no churches and no priests yet there is a great tradition of sharing and passing on the aggregated wisdom accumulated over many millennia which serves to guide people to know themselves as spiritual beings.

Belief systems are fragile and over the past ten thousand years of history many have fallen by the wayside or as in the case of Buddhism that once held sway from the Caspian to the Pacific, the swords of Islam exterminated tens of millions of people and those who survived were forced to become Muslims. In contrast the spiritual traditions of India survived not only the Muslims, Christians and colonialists, they are sprouting all over the world because they represent rational step-by-step practices with technologies that give verifiable results and the individual's following these rough guides come to know peace, happiness and joy.