HOW DO WE ATTAIN SPIRITUALITY?
There are two major schools of spiritual discipline: one based on meditation and the other on contemplation. The former relates to the heart and the latter relates to the mind.

Spirituality of the heart is generally taken to mean the opposite of worldliness. It advocates only one way to preserve one’s spirituality, and that is to retire to a desolate place, leaving behind one’s homes and material lives, where there is nothing to provoke oneself and undertake meditation. It is this viewpoint, which is presented in the well-known book titled, “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari.”

I believe that ‘heart-based spirituality’ takes man to a level, which is, in fact, one of ecstasy. Particular practices and chants produce an ecstatic feeling within the practitioner. There are many methods of meditation for spiritual discipline, which have been prevalent in one form or the other since ancient times. Whenever man raises himself above worldly matters and devotes his life to becoming one with the non-material world through meditation, he experiences a very different kind of feeling. When man enters this state of ecstasy, he experiences an unknown pleasure. On the basis of this experience, people associate ecstasy with spirituality. However ecstasy is nothing but a reduced form of spirituality. Personally, I subscribe to the school of contemplation. Man is an intellectual being. He is endowed with a mind, which is his greatest faculty. Real spirituality or contemplative spirituality is that which has the power to address our minds. Any kind of spirituality attained at a level lesser than that of our minds is not true spirituality.