Demystification

The world we live in is an immensely complicated one. There is so much information out there, and even so, we live uninformed on a lot of facets of life. Today, let’s attempt to make our lives a little simpler by understanding the nature of, well, understanding.

What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.

– Alice Walker

I feel like almost all of life is an attempt to understand something better. Now this something changes every minute, but more often than not, we are looking to further our understanding. However, upon understanding, the human mind does something incredibly weird.

We will take a very complicated topic, which almost all of us have had an encounter with at some point in our lives. Spirituality is one of the most talked about terms in the realm of personal development.

There is a host of definitions in the world for spirituality. People connect spirituality with religion, the universe, energy, God, a human being or higher self. All in all, spirituality is an attempt to connect with something bigger than ourself.

Spirituality has the reputation to be somewhat a polarising topic. In India, more specifically in Hinduism, for example, spirituality is very closely tied to religion. There are set practices (daily, weekly, monthly and annually) for people to “prove their faith”.

These practices include elaborate prayers, functions & celebrations on a regular basis. Most of these practices have been passed down from generation to generation, and families follow them for extended periods of time.

Now this isn’t just the case with Hinduism. Every religion has its own customs and traditions. Muslims are supposed to pray 5 times every day. Christians have to visit Sunday mass, and so on.

India is also known for having the youngest population across the globe. India has more than 50% of its population below the age of 25 and more than 65% below the age of 35. And undoubtedly, with youth comes rebellion.

The degree of rebellion has tremendously increased with the latest generations, especially after the millennials. Also, if anyone has ever noticed, generations before us have their own, different mechanisms of communication. So our parents did not necessarily argue with their parents about the validity of the practices.

The younger generations, invariably ask questions which the previous generations have not. I’m sure people in my age group definitely asked questions like “Why do I need to wake up at 6 AM in the morning, take a cold bath and then do my daily prayers?” to their parents.

To respond, our parents try to connect the outcomes to something bigger than us. Now the outcomes, both based on reward or punishment, are connected to how religion impacts us.

Reward: “If you wake up early and pray, God will be very happy with you.”

Punishment: “If you don’t wake up early and pray, God will be very angry at you.”

We think we understand things better, and hence, the increased practicality (read: rebellion) earlier, causes us to say things like “God won’t bless me lesser if I wake up at 10”.

Granted, the way we lead our lives is very different from our previous generations, but I have come to understand that there is solid logic behind what our parents ask us to do.

Why spirituality?

Our parents try their best to make our lives better. However, everyone has limitations, and hence they draw from these large reservoirs of knowledge called spirituality/religions. Every religion, in its own way, intends a couple of things.

1. For building communities of like minded people.
2. To give these communities a sense of purpose or a set of guidelines to live good lives.

Note: This article, in no way is meant to sway anyone to start adopting a religion. I am just writing what my opinion is on this subject.

Why the rigidity?

Again, in my very humble opinion, one of the pillars of a good life is discipline. These practices are passed down and are intended to be followed to the T solely because they help us build the discipline of performing these tasks better. And this discipline has an osmotic effect on other facets of our lives.

Coming back to the point

We initiated this discussion with the effort of demystifying understanding. We looked at two different ways of understanding the purposes of the practices that lie behind the spiritual/religious practices of different religions. The point that I am trying to finally make is two-fold.

One, There are numerous ways of understanding everything out there. None of them are right or wrong, just different.

The second, and I believe more important piece is

One should believe an interpretation of a subject supported by the most robust, and logically consistent information, and your interpretation might not always be that.

The less informed use stories like the 4 monkeys in cages being sprayed with water when trying to ascend a ladder. (Don’t know this one? Watch it here). While this is a great story in certain contexts, I hardly believe this is really applicable to spirituality and religion.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂