What is Spirituality, actually?

A quest for genuine spirituality.

 

 

 

 

 

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I remember 1968, the early 1970s.

The world – at least the Western societies – have been in upheaval. 

The late 1960 swept the world with a youth revolution like a tsunami. Old structures were questioned or simply abandoned, rigid values were swept aside by the euphoria of freedom.

Freedom from organized religion and societal norms of “right behavior.” 

A massive number of young people “dropped out”, tried to go “back to the land,” and tried experiments in communal living. 

Long hair, endless music jams, free love and sexuality and the mind-expanding drugs of the day seemed to be the enough to guide the way to a better future, less restricted and dictated by institutions and authorities.

 

It has been quite a beautiful, exciting dream …

 

All of that dreaming came to a halt for many in the later 1970s, because mind expansion without knowledge, sex without commitment, communes without structure, and the – often unintended – arrival of babies forced some of us to a reckoning with the harsh reality – that we were really just a bunch of inexperienced and often confused youngsters in need of grown-up guidance.   

Many people that I knew went to India in search for a teacher or guru in what became something like an initiation period:

 

The Search for Truth.

 

I did not go east back then, I found meditation right there in Europe. As well as the company of like-minded people on “The Spiritual Quest.”

 

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Now, after so many years of walking my own inner path, the pathless path – sometimes with companions, more often than not alone – I am still surfing the same irresistible wave that I caught back then.

 

 

A powerful cosmic wave of consciousness
that is hard to really define:

 

Spirituality

 

 

Once I asked a wise woman to explain to me what true spirituality is. And she just laughed and declared that there is no “true” or “not true” spirituality.

She said that spirituality is the inborn motion of the manifest universe – us human beings included – back to the source of All-that-is.

And in the process of that, enriching the Source with all that can be experienced in this dance of evolution/devolution, the outbreath and inbreath of Brahma.

Since I did not exactly understand, she gave me a very down-to-earth metaphor:

After a long day running and playing on the meadows, the young horses are heading home. The closer to the staple they come, the faster they run. 

 

Smelling home.  

That is genuine spirituality, she said.

You don’t do it, you simply surrender to it.

 

Sure, I have been a bit confused then, but I understand now.

I guess in the 50 years since, I have seen and experienced many ways and forms of the spiritual quest that looked promising and turned out superficial.

 

In my work with people I often sense a lot of confusion in people about spirituality, because out there is a seemingly endless supermarket of offerings, of groups and seminars and cults and belief systems. 

A whole multi-million-dollar industry of commercialized spirituality, wellness, and esoteric entertainment.

 

I try my best not to judge – remembering the wise-woman teacher of my youth – and see that all is part of the movement of consciousness back to the source.

So, with that said, I still wish to offer a few guidelines that might be helpful. 

 

Gently defining genuine spirituality and pointing to sources and teachers that I came to respect and listen to.

 

 

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Genuine Spirituality 

 

 

What It Is Not (in my humble opinion)

 

In the end of the day, genuine spirituality is not the accumulation of peak experiences — however luminous, however real those experiences may be. 

The mystical opening, the kundalini awakening, the ayahuasca vision that rearranges your cosmology – these may be important and can be genuine thresholds. 

 

They can also become the most exquisite form of spiritual materialism, what Chögyam Trungpa called the ego’s tendency to co-opt even the sacred in service of its own status. 

In that way, the collection of experiences replaces the transformation of character. The seeker becomes a connoisseur of transcendent experiences — and remains, in the daily nitty gritty of their life, essentially unchanged.

 

Genuine spirituality is not the performance of some kind of holiness – the correct vocabulary, the right books on the bookshelf, the right poses on Instagram . . .

Spirituality is not escape – also known as “spiritual bypassing.” Not from the body, not from relationship, not from the unescapable difficulty of being a finite creature in a world that includes both Bach and genocide. 

 

Any spirituality that helps you feel better about not engaging with the suffering of the world has, somewhere along the line, made a wrong turn.

And – this one is important for our current age – genuine spirituality is not the same as wellness. 

Wellness is fine. I have nothing against sleep hygiene and herbal medicine and morning routines. 

But wellness is fundamentally self-improvement: optimizing the individual persona. 

 

For me, genuine spirituality is something more radical and essential. 

It calls into question the nature and boundaries of the self that is being improved.

 

 

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What spiritual traditions have said about Genuine Spirituality

 

 

Across the world’s contemplative traditions, certain similarities and patterns occur consistently. 

 

 — Genuine spirituality begins with honesty. 

 

Not the performance of spiritual activities, but the willingness to look at what is actually here at this moment – with clear and compassionate attention. 

This is why serious spiritual traditions almost universally begin with some form of ethical foundation. 

Honest self-inquiry and self-reflection. 

Because you cannot see clearly through a mind that is clouded by self-deception.

 

 — Spirituality involves a fundamental shift in the sense of self. 

 

Not the negation of the persona — your personality, your preferences, the particular way you express yourself — but a loosening of identification with the ego as the center and scope of existence. 

The discovery, through direct experience rather than intellectual conclusion, that you are something larger, something more interconnected, something continuous with the life around you.

 

 — Spirituality is tested and verified in relationships and in action. 

 

This is often the real test. I can sit in meditation for decades and still be, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in political discussions — a real ass: a reactive, self-protective creature. 

The traditions are pretty clear about that: genuine transformation shows up in how you treat the people who irritate me. In the way how I meet my own mistakes and failures. What I do when no one is watching.

 

 — Genuine Spirituality includes, rather than tries to transcend, the body and the Earth. 

 

The old dualistic model — spirit up there, matter down here, and spirituality means moving from the “lower” to the “higher” state  — this is called spiritual bypassing (the Earth, the future generations). 

Genuine spirituality deepens one’s intimacy with embodied, earthly existence. The practice of meditation never leads me away from the awesomeness of the Pacific at sunset or the beauty of a tree on the wayside or the forcefulness of a thunderstorm in October. 

It leads more into them.

 

More fully present.

More in awe the ordinary,

the mystery of everyday reality.

 

 

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What the Wisest Have Said – a few examples.

 

 

Krishnamurti:

 

Jiddu Krishnamurti defined a spiritual life as a state of total freedom from sorrow, fear, conditioning, and the ego.

He asserted that true spirituality is not found in rituals, dogmas, or organized religion but in the direct observation of the mind without judgment.  

He stated that “truth is a pathless land,” meaning no teacher, guru, or system can lead one to truth. Instead, it requires an inner revolution where the mind becomes free from the influence of thought and the ego.

The sacred is found in the ordinary and everyday through the observation of one’s thoughts, emotions, and relationships in the present moment. 

Fundamental change in society and life can only emerge through a radical transformation from within, driven by insight into the layers of one’s own consciousness.

 

 

Alan Watts

 

Alan Watts defined spirituality as the direct experience of the “eternal Now” and the realization that the individual self is an illusion within a unified cosmic whole. 

He famously argued that true spirituality is not thinking about God while peeling potatoes but simply peeling the potatoes, emphasizing that mindfulness must be integrated into everyday actions rather than separated from them. 

Watts was critical of formal spiritual practices and “spiritual exercises” like meditation or yoga when practiced with the ulterior motive of “getting” a result, believing that such striving only strengthens the ego.  

He preferred the concept of “discipline in nonverbal perception,” urging people to stop competing, justify themselves, and simply be in the present moment without seeking future attainment. 

He taught that humans are not separate entities trying to connect with the universe but are the universe experiencing itself. 

He rejected the separation of spirit and matter, asserting that the divine is found in the physical world and ordinary life. 

Watts described himself as a “sensuous mystic” who indulged in life’s pleasures, rejecting the idea that spirituality requires asceticism or the suppression of human nature. 

He defined faith as “openness” and an act of trust in the unknown, rather than intellectual belief in dogma.

 

Meister Eckhart

 

Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328) is a nondual Christian mystic who taught that the soul’s ultimate goal is to realize its direct, non-dual union with God within the present moment. 

He emphasized a “wayless way” of pure contemplation, rejecting rigid methodologies in favor of detachment (Gelassenheit), which involves emptying the self of all aspirations, images, and even the concept of God to allow the divine to be born within. 

“The soul must lose itself,” he wrote, “if it would find God.” 

Not self-punishment – as it was very much en vogue in the Middle Ages in Christian Europe – but a loosening of the ego’s grip on its own central position. 

What remains when you stop defending the ego self so frantically? 

Eckhart’s answer: something far larger, far more alive, far more intimate than the defended self ever was.

 

Gautama Buddha 

 

The Buddha did not define himself as a god or a saint but explicitly stated, “I am awake,” meaning he was an awakened human being who saw through the reality of existence.  

His teachings focus on spiritual practice rather than belief, emphasizing that the spiritual life begins and ends in the training of the mind to end suffering rather than following specific doctrines or philosophies. 

The core of Buddhist spirituality is the quest for wisdom and compassion, which are intrinsically linked. Wisdom reveals the interrelatedness of all things, while compassion is the natural response to that wisdom. 

Spiritual training follows the Eightfold Path, a set of eight interrelated disciplines covering moral behavior (wholesome action, speech, livelihood, and effort) and mental development (wholesome concentration, mindfulness, thinking, and understanding). 

The Buddha refused to answer metaphysical questions about the origin of the universe or the soul, viewing such speculation as a distraction from the immediate goal of liberation from the suffering produced by the mind.

 

He taught that wisdom and compassion are innate qualities obscured by conditioning, and the spiritual path is a gradual training to recover these true natures.

 

Ramana Maharshi

 

Ramana Maharshi taught that spirituality is the direct realization of one’s true Self, which is pure consciousness and the only reality behind all experiences.  

He emphasized that Self-enquiry (“Who am I?”) is the primary method to dissolve the ego and return to this natural state of inner peace. 

He taught that existence is consciousness; the world is like a movie projected on the screen of the Self, where the screen is real, but the pictures (world) are mere shadows. 

By persistently asking “Who am I?” and tracing the source of the ‘I’-thought, all other thoughts vanish, revealing the unbroken awareness of the true Self. 

The Self is beyond the three states of waking, dream, and sleep; Beyond that is the forth state – turiya or pure being. 

Ramana Maharshi stated that renunciation of the world is unnecessary if the mind is renounced. One can achieve liberation in any environment by eliminating the ego rather than changing external circumstances.  

He viewed happiness as the inherent nature of the Self, which is always present but obscured by mental agitation.  

His final instruction was often to be still and listen to the silence.

 

 

Simone Weil

 

Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic who died of voluntary starvation in solidarity with occupied France.

Simone Weil viewed spirituality as a rigorous discipline of attention and decreation, where the self must be emptied of illusions to allow divine love to pass through.  

She believed that God is not a separate entity but the ultimate reality and ground of being, present in all things yet transcendent, requiring a “sacred longing” to encounter Him. 

She said that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” meaning that fully focusing on reality—whether a mathematical problem or a suffering person—is a form of communion with God. 

Her spirituality demanded concrete action, asserting that loving God requires loving one’s neighbor and all beings.

 

 

Chögyam Trungpa

 

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche defined the core danger of spiritual practice as spiritual materialism, the ego’s tendency to use spirituality for self-improvement, security, or identity enhancement rather than liberation.  

He famously stated that “the problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality,” warning that meditation should not be a means to achieve ecstasy or tranquility but a way to see reality as it is. 

Trungpa taught that true awakening involves “unbecoming who you are not” by stripping away illusions rather than adding new spiritual achievements.  

He emphasized that fearlessness is the willingness to face reality directly without hope of a savior or escape, asserting that “hope is simply a form of neurotic confusion.” 

His approach to warriorship and mindfulness required discipline and ruthless honesty about one’s own neuroses.  

He believed that compassion naturally arises when one stops regarding others as a threat and that the path is not about escaping life but engaging it fully with courage and awareness.

 

Aurobindo

 

Sri Aurobindo viewed spirituality as a concrete evolutionary process aimed at transforming human life on earth rather than escaping it.

His teaching is centering on the concept of Integral Yoga which seeks to manifest a supramental consciousness in the material world.  

He taught that the divine is not separate from the universe but involved in matter and that the ultimate goal is to replace the limited human mind with a higher Truth-Consciousness or Supermind, thereby creating a divine life characterized by unity, harmony, and joy. 

Key aspects of Aurobino’s teachings:

Unlike traditional paths that seek liberation from the world, Aurobindo’s method involves a descent of higher spiritual forces to transform the mind, life, and body, making the physical existence itself divine. 

He synthesized Eastern mysticism with Western rationality, asserting that the soul is an eternal portion of the Supreme and that all beings are united in one Self and Spirit despite the veil of separative ignorance. 

His teachings, detailed in works like The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, emphasize that this transformation is a long process requiring the surrender of the ego and the gradual opening of the inner being to a higher reality.

 

 

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A few personal notes

 

 

– The alpha and the omega of every genuine path is awareness

 

– Genuine spirituality is the practice of becoming more real.

 

– Humility and effortless authenticity, ease and laughter.

 

– Genuine interest in the other, in humanity’s struggles & joys.

 

– Delight in the world’s wonders.

 

 

For me, genuine spirituality is the cultivation of the capacity to pay close and uninterrupted attention – to myself, to others, to the living world, to the mystery that underlies and permeates all of it.

 

 

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