Practical Spirituality – Overview
This blog is a layman introduction to Spirituality and why it's essential in our everyday life. Spirituality is an eternal concept and not just a temporary phenomenon. This blog is based on my experiences in learning Dhamma (Vipassana) and ISKCON's Bhakti way of life. Any human being's core desire of leading a peaceful and healthy life, doing good to oneself and society can be achieved only by practicing spirituality in the right way. For this, the human being has to understand what is spirituality and how it can be practiced in our day to day life and then apply it gradually which will start fetching the right rewards.
What is the end goal of Spirituality?
The end goal is to achieve Moksha/Nirvana, Mukti/Nibbanic peace, Heaven, Jannat as various religions put it. This is a very tough concept to understand.
At the cost of over simplification, let me explain this way. Mukti/Nibbanic peace means a mental state where that particular human being is liberated from sufferings. It’s a state where the realized human being will devote his time, efforts and energy to 'only' think good, speak good and do good. This goodness can be anything but the important thing to understand is that the mind of such an 'awakened' person is pure and is passionless. He does good without any expectations of outcomes. Hence, there is no ego but pure bliss.
When such an 'awakened' person dies, he frees himself from the cycle of birth and death and merges into the infinite energy. This is called Moksha/Nirvana.
A brief summary of the path to achieve Nirvana/Moksha is that
1) We should lead a life ideally without passions. Practically this means reduce your passions as they lead to Cravings and Aversions which make the mind impure and out of balance.
2) We should spend more and more time in good thoughts, good words and good actions. It's fine if we think of 1000 good thoughts that translates to 100 good words which may translate to one good action.
Following the right path is Dhamma as Buddhist call it or Dharma as Hindus call it.
To start on this long path which might take several lives/'Janmas' (i.e several births and deaths) to achieve the end goal, I strongly recommend you to go to a 10 day course of Vipassana which is a free course with centers all over the world. You don’t need to convert from your existing religion and hence, it's just a way to understand spirituality in a practical way.
If time does not permit you to get 10 days out of your busy life immediately or if you wanted a theoretical overview, this blog will help. But, understand that practically experience and validation helps your mind to remain committed to Dhamma/Dharma path.
One has to understand that the law of nature (law of Dhamma/Dharma) is eternal and it acts on every human being to provide mental clarity to that person. Hence, following Dharmic practices (good habits, good thoughts) is at most important leading to mental calm and peace which is the default nature of the mind. Without Dharma, mind becomes impure, engaged in too many passion activities and is the root of all diseases as Buddhism/Hinduism explain.
There are 3 sections/parts below –
1) In Part 1 , What is passion and why we need to reduce it? is explained.
2) In Part 2 , has explanation of What is Dhamma/Dharma? , and the point that it is universal and eternal and not just an optional interest in human life.
3) Finally, Part 3 , details men who led a Dharmic life. This will help understand that recognition in society is not the ultimate goal (which we always think as success) but our own mental purity which helps us be mentally calm and peaceful thus leading a healthy and peaceful life.
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