CONTEMPLATIVE SPIRITUALITY
According to the German philosopher, Nietzsche, the secret of bringing a developed man into existence lay in self-thinking. But in my opinion, that is a half-truth. The whole truth is that the secret of producing a developed man lies in anti-self thinking. The reason for this is that everyone lives in some society or the other. This society continually exercises formative influences on his mind, until finally his thinking becomes totally conditioned by those influences.

The process of spiritual or intellectual development in fact begins with the de-conditioning of this conditioned mind. The more one de-conditions the mind, the more one will gain in spiritual or intellectual development. Everyone is born spiritual. Everyone is Mr. Nature or Mr. Spiritual by birth. But, after birth, he lives in a society, which continues to condition him. Contemplative spirituality makes it possible to erase this conditioning and allows the individual to revert to the natural state in which he was born. Spiritual science is, in effect, another name for the de-conditioning of the mind. There can be no spirituality without this.

Now the next question is that how can this de-conditioning take place? There is only one formula for this: Learn to say, “I was wrong.” Many times in our lives we are confronted with situations in which we realize that we were wrong in our thoughts, speech or actions. However, in almost all such situations, we do not have the courage to say that we were wrong. This stops our de-conditioning process. It is only when we openly say that we were wrong and accept the truth that our de-conditioning continues. This is the process of developing one’s personality through the intellectual process of deconditioning.