RELIGION AND SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality is a term that has various meanings depending upon your belief system and cultural background. A simple definition is "devotion to metaphysical matters, as opposed to worldly things." Another is "Activities which renew, lift up, comfort, heal and inspire both ourselves and those with whom we interact." Spirituality may include belief in supernatural powers.

In recent years, spirituality has come to mean a personal quest for divine knowledge that is direct and non dependent on belief in a dogma or creed. Spirituality is a way to God that is personal, less dogmatic, open to new ideas and pluralistic when compared to the faiths and dogma of established religions.

Religion is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the moral codes, practices and institutions associated with such belief. Religion is an organised system of belief that generally seeks to understand purpose, meaning, goals, and methods of spiritual things.

Some individuals draw a strong distinction between religion and spirituality. They may see spirituality as a belief in ideas of religious significance (such as God, the Soul, or Heaven), but not feel bound to the bureaucratic structure and creeds of a particular organized religion. They choose the term spirituality rather than religion to describe their form of belief, perhaps reflecting a disillusionment with organized religion  and a movement towards a more "modern" , more tolerant, and more intuitive Religion and Spirituality are often confused with each other, yet in many respects religion has very little to do with spirituality and everything to do with the attainment of secular power and wealth for rather base and venal reasons.

Religion invariably presents an oversimplistic and narrow view of reality, is intolerant of contrary views and demeaning to the basic tenets underlying spirituality in that it attempts to present a finite and limited interpretation of the infinite.
Spirituality on the other hand is usually a far deeper personal experience associated with an individual's personal quest to re-discover his or her essence and who he or she really are. (i.e. the essence of one's identity so to speak) This quest invariably involves entering into some form of holotropic state and experiencing a life-changing spiritual event associated with the person's reconnection with the Creative Principle (or God, for want of a better name) This 'reconnection' has no real counterpart in everyday human experience, so very few people who experience it ever talk about it.
This inability to see the lag between science and technology, spirituality and religion, springs from the varying pace of growth of and misplaced emphasis on the two. While science, including the science of spirituality, is the outcome of immense labour and head poured into clarifying one genuine concept, its application afterwards is a matter of simple logistic and a matter of time.
The lag between the two must be corrected, and this can be done, as was the case with the global application and spread of physical sciences, by finding the universal basis for all religions. Every religion is a necessary outcome of partial truth discovered by a prophet or a seer; the idea of universalization and finding harmony of religions is to accept the unitary principle behind each one of them. The physical sciences have done it, but the science of spirituality is far from such attempt. It would be futile to claim that then the world would become Heaven to live in, but at least the intellect of spirituality would attain some conformity with its applied aspect, the religion. This bridging the gap between the basic science and its applied aspects in the field of spiritual science itself would bring peace and harmony in the societies world over. And even the misfortunes and dissensions in the field of physical sciences and their applied technological aspects shall find some respite in the process of bringing spirituality and religion in conformity they deserve. Advaita Vedanta can indeed act as the basic source to offer such unifying building material and the foundation for such an edifice. The reason to bring in Advaita Vedanta as the basis of all religious expressions is the fact that all the seers of various religions have had realized their experiences and their concepts on the basis and at the plane of Advaita alone.