Spirituality vs. Religion

[Photo by Shen Shi'an]

In a recent conversation with my friend over at Jesusfollowers Journal, he had responded to a comment of mine regarding spirituality and religion with the following thought (I'm paraphrasing):

The difference between spirituality and religion is subtle, and arguable.

Actually, there is a very sharp distinction between spirituality and religion, spirituality being the much more important of the two. In order to describe spirituality, let me borrow a term utilized by C. S. Lewis. Spirituality is mere compassion, mere love, mere patience, mere forgiveness, mere harmony, mere concern for others' well-being and happiness.

"Mere" is a key term here, and the primary reason why spirituality trumps religion. The true purpose in life is to develop untainted compassion for all beings, love others as yourself, be patient, caring, helpful, and calm. Work toward others' happiness, and thereby your own happiness as well. By "mere" I mean "essence" or "nature." When one practices spirituality, one practices reaching toward the heart of true compassion, true love, true forgiveness. To be able to display mere compassion for another is not just to be compassionate toward another, but to BE compassion itself. Touching that true nature, that suchness, that essence, that mere-ness of compassion goes beyond just surrounding oneself in compassion. Instead, one becomes the heart of compassion altogether. That is the practice of spirituality.

Religion is different. Religion is concerned with faith in one tradition or another, with an acceptance of some definition of reality. The practice of religion is not necessary to the practice of spirituality. That phrase is so important, let me say it again.

The practice of religion is not necessary to the practice of spirituality.

Of course practicing the right religion for you can enhance the development of your spirituality. For people who truly practice their faith with their entire being, maintaining openness and love for others, religion enhances their compassion, their love, their patience. For many people religion seems to have the opposite effect, fostering intolerance, conflict, and aggression. The point here is that we have a matrix of possibilities:

Spiritual and Religious	Spiritual and Non-Religious
Non-Spiritual and Religious	Non-Spiritual and Non-Religious

I think the upper left quadrant--spiritual and religious--is the ideal, not because it is inherently better than the others (which it's not), but because people in that quadrant tend to have the greatest number of tools available to them to live well for themselves and for others. Not only can they draw on their spirituality, they can draw on the lessons of their religion to help them improve their spirituality.

The spiritual and non-religious person is in the second best position--second only due to the fact that they do not have the myths and practices of a religion to use toward developing their spiritual qualities. However, this by no means reflects on the people falling into this category. Many spiritual and non-religious people are much more compassionate, loving, caring individuals than those in the upper left quadrant.

The lower left quadrant comes next. This is stereotypically the quadrant of fundamentalists. To have religious belief, but to not have that reflect into your life as a stronger level of compassion, love, tolerance, acceptance, and patience shows that you are off-track. Any religious practice that does not result in increasing compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, love, patience, and caring is either (a) worthless and harmful, or (b) being practiced incorrectly.

The lower right quadrant is last, and stereotypically houses materialistic, egotistic individuals, people for whom caring and love are a foreign concept.

Bringing us full circle, we all must work to develop our spiritual qualities. If we find a religion that suits our nature, we can use its teachings to further our development. But if not, that's ok. We don't have to drape a mental model over reality in order to develop our spiritual qualities. We can simply practice mere compassion, mere love, mere patience, mere acceptance, and thereby touch, become, converse with, see, or merge with God--whichever of those understandings resonates with your being.

Is A Physical Expression of Spiritual Practice Necessary?

[Photo by Patrick Rioux]

I've been thinking about this topic recently because I've begun to feel that something was missing in my practice. When I first started my Buddhist practice, I was concurrently training in Aikido, a Japanese martial art. While my meditation practice is stronger today than it was then, I'm finding that its effect on my life is reduced. One cause is undoubtedly a more complex life today than I had then. However, the more I examine the situation, the more I see that another primary cause is my lack of a physical expression of my practice.

In Aikido, training centers around control of one's self. Aikido is based on a sphere, with the practitioner at the center. As attackers enter that sphere, aikidoka must maintain their awareness such that they can touch, and thereby redirect--with the minimum possible force--the attacker around that sphere. When one watches high-level Aikido, it often appears as a sort of dance, with the practitioners feeling the attack and moving WITH said attack, never forcefully AGAINST it. Furthermore, Aikido trains you to feel what others are doing to you, and teaches you how to go with that flow to avoid personal injury. If you are about to be thrown, and there is no true way to avoid that, it is healthier to allow yourself to be thrown and focus on protecting yourself than to strain to avoid the throw.

The only way to succeed in such practice is to lose your ego. Ego causes you to think, "Resist! He's not going to get the better of me!" Then when you do, you sprain your wrist in the process. Without ego, you realize, "I've recognized this throw too late for a skillful counter; therefore, I must bend like the willow tree and absorb the throw, landing with minimal injury." Ego causes you to think, "Strike harder! He deserves to be hurt!" Without ego, you realize, "He is striking me out of his ego; there is no need to inflict major injury. Respond with the minimal force necessary." Beyond philosophy, however, you learn very quickly when training in Aikido that when you use muscular force, your moves are ineffective. So not only does Aikido philosophy teach these principles, the physical component provides proof. To be blunt, your Aikido will be completely ineffective and worthless if you respond to force with force, to attack with defiant resistance. In other words, Aikido acts as a physical expression of the value of egolessness, compassion, and wisdom.

Having not trained in Aikido for 5 years, I find that loss to have had an effect on my life. Such physical expression of one's practice helps to bring one's practice "out of the dojo" or "off the cushion" into everyday life. What good is meditation and Buddhist training if you leave your practice in the temple after service? The Buddha did not teach any particular physical expressions of the practice. Therefore, to me this indicates that such practices are not strictly necessary. However, in that they involve the physical body your mind inhabits in this life, I think they provide a skillful means by which to "practice in motion." Walking meditation is often touted as a great means to bring your meditation to physical activity. A lay person's life involves much motion, and if he cannot figure out how to bring a meditative mind to his actions in life, his practice will be worthless.

Therefore, I have begun studying Yoga at a highly respected studio here in Chicago, Yogaview. So far--and it's only been 2 weeks--I've already noticed an increase in my ability to carry the mental state of mindful awareness to my motion-filled life. So while I don't think such physical expression of training is required to achieve Awakening, I think if you are disposed to such practice, it can act as a skillful method to improve your practice dramatically.

Technorati Tags: Buddhism, Yoga, practice, spirituality, meditation, motion

A Different View of Spirituality

[Photo by Rob West]

Strange that in our time there's so little interesting poetry of religious belief, especially since world events more and more are driven by belief (or the fanaticism of Eastern or Western Fundamentalism). Somebody asks me what I believe. I believe in the suspicion of transcendence, in the capacity of consciousness to imagine a transcendent order as an objective reality. I believe in my own unbelief.
(Poetry. W.S. Di Piero. October 2006.)

I just read an essay in my most recent issue of Poetry, from which the above excerpt was drawn, and found it to be a very creative approach to spirituality that I've never considered. Just some interesting food for thought, and some insight into another's view of life.

Technorati Tags: spirituality, views, Poetry

Go Where There Is No Path

[Photo by Margaret Maloney]

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson was a brilliant man and a wonderful naturalist. His essays display a calm insight that is as penetrating as the Midsummer sun. Very few people would argue that blazing one's own trail, as Emerson exhorts above, is excellent advice. But I want to examine it from another angle--can this be applied to spirituality? Are our traditional religions the only beneficial spiritualities? Or can we maximize our relationship to the world, the three great kingdoms (Plant, Animal, Mineral), and our spirit through a path of our own making?

Following a traditional religion has many advantages, the primary one being that they are philosophically sound, having evolved through cultural immersion over thousands of years. They have a certain consistency by which contradictions are rare. That, to me, is quite interesting because we have a number of traditional religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and others, and while they are built upon greatly different underlying philosophies, each is internally consistent and logical. Sometimes they're based on a slightly different system of logic than Western Aristotelian logic, but regardless, they have a logical congruity. An additional benefit of a traditional religion is its track record. These systems of belief have repeatedly proven effective for many of their followers, giving meaning to their lives and a guide by which to live.

But all is not perfect in our land of traditional religion. The primary problem of religions today is dogma. Our traditional religions provide a great backdrop for life. But all too often, followers don't expend the energy to think critically about life and the meaning given to it by their religion. Rather, they fall back on the word of their chosen religious authority figure and close their minds to real wisdom--learning to see for themselves the truth of their religion.

Emerson's quote comments wisely upon our spiritual lives. If you create your spirituality out of your experiences and the meaning YOU see in life, then you will likely have to deal with philosophical inconsistencies. But is that really a problem? I don't think so. We can never know everything from our tiny place on this tiny planet orbiting our tiny sun in one tiny arm of the spiral of our tiny galaxy. We have to learn to accept paradox. And even if you end up in a traditional religion after making your own trail, you will have discovered the truth of your religion yourself, by creating your beliefs through your life rather than accepting them as hand-me-downs from our ancient past. So I argue that Emerson's way is the only way to true spirituality, regardless of where you end up.

The people who come to religion from the outside, who choose a religion and then adopt its beliefs, are in real danger of losing the greatest thing we have on this planet--our capacity for wisdom. Blaze your own trail. Observe your life in mindfulness and see what presents itself. If nature calls to you as divine, sacred, then treat it as such. If God reaches down to you from the heavens and makes contact with your heart, grab hold of his hand and don't let go. If the wonderfully interdependent nature of all things becomes apparent to you, penetrate with unwavering insight their original nature. Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

Technorati Tags: Buddhism, spirituality, Ralph Waldo Emerson, religion

Spiritual Seeking and Buddhism

[Photo by Alena]

"There are some cases in which a person overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, grieves, mourns, laments, beats his breast, & becomes bewildered. Or one overcome with pain, his mind exhausted, comes to search outside, 'Who knows a way or two to stop this pain?' I tell you, monks, that stress results either in bewilderment or in search." (AN VI.63)

This is the classic cause for spiritual search. Many people go through their lives not caring about spiritual pursuits ... until something very painful happens to them. As the Buddha noted here, one of two things tends to happen at this point: either the person begins searching spiritually, or he becomes confused and has trouble handling the situation, often resorting to repression and other such coping mechanisms. But what can come of the spiritual search? One can find solace looking outside oneself, as in devoting oneself to a god, or one can see that one need only take refuge in oneself. In the Dhammapada (160), the Buddha said:

Your own self is
your own mainstay,
for who else could your mainstay be?
With you yourself well-trained
you obtain the mainstay
hard to obtain.

But how can we be sure of this? When we observe closely our body, our feelings, our perceptions, our mental formations, and our consciousness, we see that (Dhp 165):

Evil is done by oneself,
by oneself is one defiled.
Evil is left undone by oneself,
by oneself is one cleansed.
Purity & impurity are one's own doing.
No one purifies another.
No other purifies one.

Initially, we may need to have faith that the practice will reap such rewards. However, faith is only the catalyst. Soon, with true effort, one will experience for oneself the self-evidence of these two verses by the Buddha. One will know for oneself that they are true, thus faith is dropped in favor of knowing. This knowing is the basis of the path of Buddhism.

Technorati Tags: Buddhism, faith, seeking, spirituality, Dhammapada