Life and Death: The Spiritual Type You Think You Are

By A Srinivas

The spirit is free, light and beautiful as a bird. “Hail thee blithe spirit, bird thou never wert,” wrote Shelley. Poets and mystics would contemplate on riverbanks and groves on the finer truths of life.

Or, like Adi Sankara and Guru Nanak, they would travel through forest and desert in search of wisdom. But are these distillations lost on today's world? Not really, for the life of a professional is not necessarily antithetical to spiritual pursuits.

An academic can be a spiritualist, if he realises the limitations of the intellectual realm. As Jiddu Krishnamurti says, mind and thought are the source of evil. T S Eliot, inspired by the Gita, celebrates stillness amidst movement, fixity amidst fluidity, silence amidst music. The throbbing of the mind is the origin of alienation from life - the intellectual tends to divorce mind from body, but unity can be achieved through the pursuit of yoga and meditative techniques.

The spiritual interlocutor interacts without preconceived notions. The good discussant receives without barriers and responds in a heightened state of understanding. The shedding of constructs becomes at once a spiritual and humanist pursuit.

Most of us, by force of sub-conscious habit, introduce our experiential and intellectual baggage into our interactions with people. This not only distorts our understanding of the material reality, but inhibits our spiritual growth as well. We stew in our 'here and now' boxes, unable to elevate ourselves as a bird would.

Yet, the validity of experience should not be discounted. Experience should be assessed with a certain heightened objectivity for one to draw the right lessons for one's actions. So detachment should be seen as a means to arrive at that state of balanced understanding. It does not preclude pain and compassion; but it discards obfuscation and hypocrisy. The Bhakti tradition sees no reason to regard love for God and fellow humans as two distinct phenomena.

Creativity is said to spring from the angst of experience. Often the outpourings of a tortured mind make for great literature and painting. Ironically, existential pain can bring about work of transcendental quality. The beauty and simplicity of Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet is testimony to the literary virtues of spiritualism. The spiritual world is a rich, fulsome, loving nothingness that opens up the heavens, not a musty blankness.

Compassion could liberate us from the boundaries of the mind. The house-holder looks after the family out of a sense of duty and affection which in due course becomes second nature. The mental and emotional universe of such an individual is able to accommodate reality in virtually all its dimensions. Psychologist Eric Fromm points out that love must be all-encompassing by nature for an individual to be spiritually liberated. To love some people and resent others is not real love.

Then there's the spiritual sensualist: Osho celebrated sensualism, and for some good reasons. Sensualism can debase an individual if he is entirely possessed by it. However, it can be liberating if the individual is anchored in an overarching detachment and benign warmth for all humans.

But sensualism is not something to be abhorred or shunned. There can be no spiritual uplift when sensualism is suppressed. It has to be dealt with frankly, and without fear which should find no place in any pursuit of liberation. The mind cannot, by mere instruction, be calmed when the entire being resists that instruction.

Mind and body are one, just as the individual is one with the universe, no matter where he is or what he is doing.

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See also: Life and Death, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)