MIND-BASED SPIRITUALITY
Spirituality is about being a devoted servant of God. It is to lead a God-oriented life, to make God one’s central concern.
A mother is generally thought of as the symbol of love. However, perhaps it is more accurate to say that a mother symbolises pampering. Pampering is just the name of an emotional relationship, whereas love is a lofty human virtue. However, because of not distinguishing between pampering and love, the mother has been considered the symbol of love for thousands of years. It is because of this that a mother intensely loves only her children. She does not have the same intense feeling for other people’s children or human beings.
The same is valid for spirituality. Man has been engaged in spiritual activities for more than five thousand years. Despite this, knowledge of spirituality could not advance through man’s efforts. The reason for this was a vague concept of spirituality. Generally, spirituality is thought of as heart-based, whereas, like other sciences, spirituality is a mind-based science or discipline. In this situation, spirituality knowledge could not advance because its advocates did not know the appropriate reference point for spirituality. It is like someone trying to study the phenomenon of light, considering moonlight to be the source of light. Despite the hard work of even a lifetime, this person will remain unable to understand the reality of light. He wrongly thought that the light source was the moon, whereas the sun was the source of light.
Spiritual development is but another name for intellectual development. There are two things in this world of ours—consciousness and matter. Development in the realm of matter may be called ‘material development’ or ‘worldly development’, while the development of consciousness is called ‘intellectual development’ or ‘spiritual development’.
The Creator of this world has created two things. One inanimate world, the material or physical world, and the conscious world of man. The Creator created both worlds in raw form. It is man’s task to develop the ‘raw world’. He should actualize the potential for progress hidden inside the ‘raw world’ of both the material world and the conscious world of man.
A man engaged in this process on a vast scale in the physical or material world, leading to the creation of a ‘modern’ civilization or the ‘developed’ world. However, as far as the world of consciousness (or man’s actual being) is concerned, it is not progressing.
What can be called man's progress, of man’s conscious existence? One must note that the Creator created man as a conscious being in a raw or natural condition. The task is to transform that ‘raw’ conscious existence into a high-level progressive conscious existence.
The same process is desired in man's physical and conscious worlds. It is the process of conversion. It means converting a ‘raw world’ into a ‘developed’ world in the material world. As far as conscious existence or man is concerned, it means transforming character, moving from a ‘raw’ character into a truly ‘developed’ character.
By birth, man possesses what can be called a ‘raw’ character. ‘Raw’ character means accepting influences from every external thing. For example, you get angry when someone says something harsh to you. Someone insults you, and so you are filled with hatred. You saw someone you thought was ‘bigger’ than you, so you felt inferior. Somewhere you think your interests are in danger, and so you lie. And so on. All such emotions are, to put it simply, negative thoughts.
Every person is born in a particular society. In many cases, their whole life is spent mainly inside this society. Challenging experiences in social life often create negativity in a person, so much so that his whole character may become negative. This process can be called the process of conditioning. It happens with everybody. No person is exempt from it. Thus, every person is Mr conditioned. This conditioning results from almost every person living in jealousy, revenge, and other negative emotions to a lesser or greater degree. Practically every person becomes a case of negative conditioning. There may be a difference in degree among individuals, but the primary condition is the same.
The true purpose of man’s character development is that he should decondition his mind. He should find his every weakness and negativity, remove them from himself, and purify himself to convert his negative character into a positive one. Every negative trait can be converted into its opposite, positive form. For example, one should transform anger into forgiveness, hatred into love, greed into selflessness, pride into humility, non-acknowledgement into acknowledgement, violence into gentleness, egoism into modesty, etc.
Spirituality is the name for this conscious process of inner purification. In other words, spirituality is a process of deconditioning. The purpose of spirituality is that man should engage in the process of self-construction and, in this way, decondition himself. He should make himself a person free from every deconditioning, once again established in the natural state that he was on the day he was born from his mother’s womb.
This aim of spirituality has always been there before people. Those who made spirituality their purpose have always stressed that their aim is purification and reform. They want to transform their inner personality into stronger personalities. They seek to lift themselves from being someone who may be filled with base emotions into a being that lives in noble feelings.
However, history tells us that man could never obtain this spiritual goal through mystical, spiritual practices, that virtuous man could not be born which these practices aimed at producing. Therefore, what is commonly thought of as spiritual ‘attainment’ from the mystical perspective is ecstasy: It is not spiritual evolution in the real sense.
The cause for this failure is that people could not obtain the very point of reference of spirituality. Before the scientific revolution, man erroneously believed that his heart was the centre of his thinking and feelings. Thus, since the ancient past, the human heart has remained the centre of all spiritual practices.
Meditation and such spiritual exercises originated in the ancient past and were based on the heart. However, as we know today, the heart is only a means of blood circulation. It is not the centre of thought and feelings. Because of this, all of man’s spiritual exercises became useless exercises. They could not become a means for the development of man’s character.
Man's nature is that if he continuously focuses his attention on something, he experiences a strange joy, called ‘ecstasy’. It is, as it were, a sort of thrill. When engaged in heart-based spiritual exercises, a state of ecstasy is produced. Because of their unawareness, people believed this sort of ecstasy to be the goal of spirituality, so ‘spirituality’ and ‘ecstasy’ became synonymous terms. Because of this, knowledge of spirituality stopped at a low level of ecstasy. It could not advance beyond the stages of higher intellectual development.
In the pre-scientific age, man developed wrong concepts about many things. After the scientific revolution, man acquired a better knowledge of these. He began to live in a new intellectual age. For example, the moon was considered a source of light in the pre-scientific era. However, with the progress of scientific knowledge, people accepted the moon as a satellite of the earth that reflects the light from the sun and is without any light of its own.
The same issue is true regarding the way man understood the heart. In the pre-scientific age, the heart was regarded as the centre of thought and feeling. Because of this, everywhere, spirituality based on the heart became established. However, in the age of modern science, it came to be known that man’s heart is only a means for blood circulation. It being the case, it is necessary to change our understanding of spirituality.
There is now a need to redevelop and redefine the knowledge of spirituality. It is necessary to connect spiritual understanding with the mind and acquire spiritual progress through intellectual processes because the source of intellectual or spiritual progress is mental progress, not some heart-based exercises. It is time to understand that true spirituality is mind-based, not heart-based.
For this purpose, every person should do two things continuously. One is that he should remove the negative items accumulated in his memory bank by converting them into positive ones. It is akin to the process that some animals engage in, in the form of regurgitation or rumination. Moreover, the other is that every day, an individual must convert whatever happens to himself into positive items so that when they go out of the conscious mind and enter the unconscious mind or memory, they should accumulate as positive items.
For example, suppose there is a writer about whom you have a negative image. In this matter, you will have to remove from your mind the negative thoughts that have built up regarding the author. The spiritual process of this would be first to consider the matter objectively and unbiasedly. Suppose you discover that your negative opinion about this author has been made just out of prejudice—because of this author’s criticism of some personality you hold dear. Then the spiritual practice for you in this matter would be to change your concept about this author completely. It would help if you considered the case a case of academic difference rather than deviation.
Similarly, a spiritual person must examine every negative thought that has entered his mind. He should critique himself thoroughly and unbiasedly and accordingly change his views. In this matter, an individual must be so sensitive that even if he considers somebody wrong, he should search for an explanation that would end his negative feelings for the person concerned.
It is necessary to do this for our protection. It does not mean you should start thinking that all other people are right. Instead, the issue is that you should be able to make your personality a cheerful personality in the most total sense. There should not be a single negative item in your memory or consciousness. Your memory should become a storehouse of only positive things.
Spiritual development is another name for intellectual development. This process of intellectual development starts with the re-engineering of the mind. Every person is born into a particular environment. He is continuously conditioned to his environment. Therefore, man’s first task is to decondition his conditioned mind. In this regard, this is the starting point of the spiritual journey.
The fact is that every person is, by nature, a spiritual being. He is born with a divine personality, which has been given to him by God. Because of this, the way to nurture his spirituality is to remove the veils that have fallen over his true nature. After removing these artificial curtains, what is left is called the ‘spiritual personality’ or the Rabbani personality.
Intellectual development aims to develop the mind's capabilities that flow from God's realisation. It is this awakening of God-consciousness which is called spirituality. Spirituality is not any secret or mysterious thing. It is another name for the unfolding of God-consciousness hidden in human nature. It is an issue of conscious awakening in a complete sense and not some sort of vague experience of mysterious ecstasy.
Spirituality is about being a devoted servant of God. It is to lead a God-oriented life, to make God one’s central concern. Spirituality is the condition named when a person’s thinking, emotions and actions all get coloured in God’s hue.
The fact is that spirituality is a conscious discovery, not some vague sort of ecstatic experience. Man’s highest quality is the attribute of consciousness. Therefore, only that thing can become the most important for man, which he discovers at his awareness or consciousness level.
The difference between awareness and ecstasy is that the former is the name for a known intellectual condition, while the latter is for a vague state of the heart. To consider spirituality to be an ecstatic experience is to belittle spirituality. Higher spirituality becomes a known experience at the level of the mind man. True spirituality is obtained by activating conscious awareness—mind-based spirituality. There is no such thing as the experience of ecstasy or heart-based spirituality. Spirituality is an intellectual journey that takes one from the material world to a world of meaning. This journey takes place at the internal level.
