Religion and Spirituality – What’s the difference?

Aum Namo Bhagavte Vasudevaya.

So, the topic I was asked to speak on: Religion and Spirituality, What’s the difference? It’s a little bit challenging, because when most people think of these two words, “religion,” and the word, “spirituality,” they have like a meme, things have been just reduced to something quite superficial, in one sense, and a bit of a meme. Do you agree with that? Or not sure?

Audience member: Yeah, right.

Acharya das: I mean, when you use the word religion now, probably a good percentage of people react to it in somewhat of a negative way. Would you agree with that? Yeah, pretty much? People have—and yet, many people have never actually met a genuine religious person. They’ve heard about some guy molesting young people, or they’ve had some experience with some controlling cult like situation or heard something about it, or they’ve encountered people that might be somewhat fanatical and closed minded, or very controlling. But many people have never really met, and what I would call, an average religious person who is kind of not like any of those actual things.

Similarly, with spirituality, people have all different kinds of ideas about what spiritual means. And many of the ideas that people had, or have, are not actually accurate in terms of defining what is spiritual. I saw this interview with this woman, and the guy speaking with her said, “Oh, your daughter tells me you’re quite a spiritual person,” and her immediate response was, “Yes, actually my auntie is a medium.” And so, she immediately starts talking about contact with spirits or whatever. And that was her idea of what spirituality is. And then you have the whole range of kind of new agey stuff, where people are sort of pulling from different traditions and different ideas and mixing it up into a sort of a hodgepodge, almost, of ideas. And I don’t mean that in a negative way, but just a practical reality.

So, it’s sort of like you have different sorts of ideas. I mean, some people say, “Oh, I’m really into nature because I’m a very spiritual person.” And if you say to them, “Well, nature is material. It’s the material energy. Why do you think that if you’re into that, it automatically qualifies you as being spiritual?” And of course, it’s difficult for somebody to respond. And it’s quite often people have these, as I said, memes of what they think is religion and what is spirituality, but many of us have not really taken any time to really explore what these things mean.

So, before we get started, I just wanted to—Boy, I better look at the time. I’m famous for talking a lot. I’ll try to control myself.

Many people don’t really—because they look at, for instance, religion in a somewhat superficial way, and many people that engage in different forms of religion or religious expression also are somewhat, I’ll use the word—not meaning to be demeaning in any way—but somewhat superficial about what they’re doing.

There is a higher appreciation. That higher appreciation is that every single human being is drawn by the, what psychiatrists would call, the religious impulse. That is a drawing to that which is true, objectively true, that which is of a higher nature, that is aspirational. People are drawn to a higher appreciation and concept of love. People are drawn to that which is infinitely beautiful or extremely beautiful. This is fundamentally, a pulling, an urging that is coming from really deep within and is generally referred to as a religious impulse. Some people direct this towards some understanding or idea of what—they may use the term, the word God. But if you do not direct that impulse towards some higher spiritual thing, you will direct it towards that which is lower.

I mean, it just blew my mind: I watched the news and Taylor Swift’s new album dropped. And then they had some clips, and it’s just like, my gods, just thousands and thousands of worshipping and adoring fans. And people just engaged in constant discussion and thought about the person and deeper meaning of the lyrics and…

People have this strong tendency to seek out something that is worshipable and higher. It may even be a sexual orientation, people, money, power, position. People have gods that they worship and aspire to and meditate upon and seek. So, to not recognise that makes for a not a very good understanding of this deep impulse.

Before we go any further, I just want to state, the things that I’m going to discuss, these are not my opinions or my ideas. They are from a very ancient spiritual tradition that I am very fortunate to be connected with.

The foundation of what we are going to discuss are these two words: that which is material, and that which is spiritual. The foundation of materialism and material life is the singular idea that I am material. And what does that mean?

Well, if I think that this body that I’m currently inhabiting, this body which I am wearing around is me, then I am a materialist. I may be engaged in religious practice. I may put forward the idea that I’m spiritual and I’m engaged in some spiritual ritual or whatever. But if the foundation of my life is the idea, the wrong idea, that the body that I have on is me, I’ve got a problem, because this is not true. And it is because of this idea that the majority of the suffering in this world takes place, because of this notion, or thought, that I am material: I am male, I am female, I have a particular ethnic extraction, or I identify with a country, I identify with a tribe, I identify with or all these things which are material, which have a beginning and an end. Your body had a beginning, it will also have an end, but you are eternal. You are an eternal spiritual being. But we have lost sight, we have become disconnected with our spiritual identity of who we truly are. And this is the source of all unhappiness and heartbreak, not having this perspective. Because from it will come so many wrong ideas about what I think the world is about, what I think my life is for, what I think is my purpose, those things that I will value and chase, the nature of relationships that I have. If they are based upon a material idea, the idea of the body as being the self then we’re in trouble.

Okay? We’re good with that? Everybody’s very quiet. It’s okay or what? Okay.

In your life there is nothing more important than the discovery of this truth, and then the journey to realise and experience my own true spiritual identity. Okay.

When we think of religion in the common terms, people often frame it in the context of something that is sectarian. Right? Sectarian meaning I belong to this group, you belong to that group. This group and that group are different. We may be seen as friends or enemies based upon a group identity.

One of our spiritual teachers from the 1800s, Srila Bhaktivinode Thakur, he stated that sectarianism is the enemy of spiritual understanding. And so we see, in terms of what the Vedic teachings are, these very ancient teachings, where they really fostered in everyone an appreciation of our spiritual identity and the fact that we are all connected, we are all eternally brothers and sisters. We have a common father, as it were. And this is really something that should really underpin our life.

Just referencing for a moment—you know how many negative sort of things are often attached to religion? I would just like to state that the religious impulse is fundamentally a spiritual impulse. However, based upon what people think and what people practise and the nature of the consciousness that they cultivate, it is possible to completely undermine a wonderful impulse and to become—to subvert it with a dictatorial tendency or an exploitive tendency. The dictatorial tendency or the manipulative tendency is not part of the religious impulse, but it can overtake it. And people not only can, it is unfortunately too common that people utilise or prey upon the religious impulse to exploit and sometimes hurt others. But one should not equate what someone does in this regard as being part of the religious impulse. It is not.

So in Vedic teaching they have two terms which I think will help us to appreciate the concept of religion and of spirituality. One word is dharma, the other word is sanatan-dharma.

Dharma can mean righteousness, religiousness, religiosity, right living, duty. It can mean all of these types of things. And it was encouraged in Vedic teaching because when people embrace right living they cause less harm to others, and they have a greater opportunity or chance to become happy in this world, that possibility exists. When people dispense with morality and a higher form of living, then we tend towards being more self-centred, towards more selfish, to be more focused on taking rather than giving; and that is harmful. The Vedic teachings were progressive. Progressive means that they addressed different types of people in the condition that they were in and pointed a direction to try and gradually elevate people to an actual spiritual platform. And so while dharma was fundamentally right living, it can also be pious but materialistic living.

You will see that a lot of religious practice, people are very much influenced still by the idea, the concept, of the body as the self. They have a strong desire to enjoy in this world and perhaps be able to enjoy in the next. This is the fundamental focus. And so people engage in ritual, they engage in activity for the purpose of trying to improve their experience in this life and cultivate a hope that after death they will have some very heavenly happy experience. That is not profoundly spiritual. It may be righteous, it may be pious, but it tends towards the direction of self-centredness, as opposed to a very elevated spiritual condition of being selfless, to be able to love everyone, even those who regard you as their enemy, to have such a generosity of spirit, to be able to manifest such profound kindness, to find great peacefulness in life even if I am confronted with adversity and great difficulty.

The four things that people focused on in religious traditions—and in the Vedic tradition, they really categorised it very clearly. They considered the four goals of life, they call it dharma, artha, kama, moksha Dharma meant religiousness. Artha was economic development—work hard for the money, acquire wealth, live in prosperity, but do it not in a bad way. Kama was the idea of pious enjoyment of the senses, to eat well, to live comfortably, to enjoy uplifting experience through the body and the mind. And then the 4th item was called moksha, which means liberation, liberation from the material experience into some higher spiritual experience.

So this is all covered by what is called dharma, or righteous, or religiosity, righteous, pious living. This other word—

Well, I’ll just add one thing. And the way it was acted out was really people were very attached to the idea of the body as the self. And so, I saw my own family members as extensions of myself and I loved them more than I could love anybody else. And I’m not saying this is bad or this is unnatural. It is simply a product of a certain type of consciousness.

The word sanatandharma, the same word is used “dharma”, but it actually means something slightly different. The word dharma has many meanings. One of the meanings is the intrinsic nature of something. What do I mean by that? If I have sugar and I taste it, what do I taste? Sweetness. Right? So we can say the dharma of sugar is sweetness. If I remove the sweetness, then what is it? It’s like sand or maybe plastic or whatever, but it’s a whole different experience. Similarly, the dharma of water. Is wetness. If I touched water and I didn’t feel wetness, it’s kind of like, whoa, what’s that? We can’t disassociate or separate these things.

And so this word, “sanatandharma”: sanatan means eternal, and it addresses the eternal nature of the soul itself, the eternal nature of the atma, the self, the living being. And real spirituality was focused on the eternal nature of the soul, of the atma. This is what real spirituality means.

When a person cultivated spiritual understanding, then it begins to alter the way that they look at the world. It alters the way that we look at others and the way we engage, the nature of relationships with all others. And it affects what I conceive to be the highest truth, or the greatest reality, or God, how I will see that, how I will approach, how I will interact with these things, the world, others and any higher spiritual reality.

In the Vedic texts they explain the characteristics of what I will simply term as worldly religion. Worldly religion means somebody that is responding to this spiritual, this religious impulse, but they may not be cultivating a higher understanding or appreciation. When people are in this state, they were referred to— in Sanskrit the term is kanistha, kanistha adhikari. Adhikara means your qualification, and this word kanistha means on the lowest level of spiritual development.

So, in the Bhagavat Purana, it characterises a person who may be religious but actually not very spiritual at all. And it states:

“A worshiper who faithfully engages in the worship of the Lord in the temple [This could mean a church, it could be a mosque, but they go to a temple to engage in some form of worship] but does not behave properly toward other worshipers or people in general, such a person is described as a prākṛta-bhakta, a materialistic devotee, and is considered to be in the lowest position.”

So this is kind of a pretty extraordinary observation, because we see when people have this consciousness, within the structure of a temple, a mosque, a church, they will behave in a certain way, but as soon as they go out, they behave in a different way. This is a characteristic of very low spiritual development, and it applies very specifically to how you deal with and interact with others, even people that may attend the same kind of congregation or come to the same temple or church or whatever, even there I can be sort of engaged in ritual and prayer, but then I see somebody that I have a business disagreement with, or I don’t like, or there has been some family, or personal quarrel, immediately [Does a bad tempered angry face.] And it’s like, how can you do that? How can you walk into a place and behave so piously, and even within the confines you manifest this type of reaction. It means that there is no actual spiritual vision.

We are not saying that churches, temples, mosques, they shouldn’t be there. No, they are required for people who are not very spiritually developed. For a person that is more spiritually developed they are optional. But for one who is not too spiritually developed, at least they serve as a way to guide people and to remind them of where their gaze should be, what the direction should be, that they that they are looking at or considering.

Within the confines of these buildings or structures, people adopt different types of ritualistic activity which they see as being what you should do. And if somebody is practicing something different or behaving differently in another environment, then there is a tendency to be critical of them, just based on something that is actually very superficial. A real spiritually developed person sees all others with an equal vision, feels compassion and love for all, and is encouraging of whatever path you have chosen, to walk that path, but to do it as perfectly as you can, knowing that it will be uplifting for people if we are steered towards a higher manner of thinking and of living.

One of the great teachers in our lineage from way back, Madhvacharya, in the 12th century (this is the 1100s) he composed a commentary that was really quite amazing, and in it he spoke that people with this type of materialistic but religious consciousness often become very proud of the way in which they are conducting worship. And they often cannot, they don’t have the ability to look upon another person and know where they are situated in terms of spiritual advancement. In fact, they often cannot even imagine that somebody else could be more spiritually advanced. They often cannot even comprehend that, because they are simply looking at how much money they’re giving, how much engaged they are in ritual and everything, and they feel themselves to be superior.

This is a very unfortunate quality, because real spiritual advancement, one of the underlying characteristics, is of great humility, where a person does not look down on anyone, that they feel themself to be in a low and humble position and actually look, without being critical, at others.

When a person has this low state of consciousness they are often very attracted to material opulence. They think highly of anybody that is powerful or rich. They will show them enormous respect, just on the basis of something extremely superficial that cannot last more than that current life that they have. They are motivated by this type of thing.

So what is the product, or the result of actual spiritual living? How do we know that somebody is actually spiritually developed? I’ll read one verse from a very famous text called the Bhagavad Gita:

“He is a perfect yogī who, by comparison to his own self, sees the true equality of all beings, in both their happiness and their distress.”

So, this is a characteristic of spiritual development, that because I am cultivating the appreciation and the vision of myself as being an eternal spiritual being, I will also be cultivating that appreciation in others, and not feel higher or better than anyone.

In another verse it states:

“That person by whom no one is put into difficulty and who is not disturbed by anyone, who is equipoised in happiness and distress, fear and anxiety, that person [states Sri Krishna] is very dear to Me.”

So this becomes one of the qualities that begins to manifest as a result of spiritual growth, one becomes less disturbed by positive and negative experience of this world. The nature of this world is that there will be some happiness, there will also be some, probably more, distress; there will not be great fulfilment, no matter how hard we try; but that I become unperturbed by this, because my focus is on something else, something that is more important than this fleeting world.

In the Bhagavat Purana, it states:

“The Supreme Soul is very satisfied with the transcendentalist when they greet other people with tolerance, with mercy, friendship and equality.”

I mean, when we hear these things, do you find it striking? I mean, is it like a serious sort of wake-up call? Because when I think in my own life; we may feel that we have enemies, we may feel that we have friends, we may feel people that we are attracted to and want to be around, we may feel that there are people that disgust us, and we don’t want to be anywhere near them, and it’s kind of like, oh… But here it talks about a person greeting others, meaning all others, with tolerance, mercy, friendship and equality. If you can ever begin to approach this place, this condition, you will be so relieved, of anxiety, of stress, of fearfulness, the things that actually do plague our lives.

I’ll just read another couple real quickly, from Bhagavad Gita:

“The humble sage, by virtue of true knowledge, sees with equal vision a learned and gentle brahmana, [brahmana were meant to be the priestly class responsible for spiritually directing society] to see with equal vision, a gentle brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater [meaning an outcaste, someone who was considered very low on the social ladder.]”

There was the appreciation that life is sacred. Life is a symptom of the presence of a spiritual being, and all spiritual beings are equal, even though their bodies may not be. And this was considered intelligent, to see things in this way. But if on the basis of somebody’s body, what it looks like, how a person behaves, their condition, I am discriminating, I am saying I like or I don’t like, I’m attracted or I hate, this was considered very low understanding, a lack of actual spiritual vision and appreciation.

“A person is considered still further spiritually advanced when he regards the honest well-wisher, the affectionate benefactor, the neutral, the mediator, the envious, the friend and enemy, the pious and the sinner all with an equal mind.”

Far out or what? This is what we are called to. This is actually our true inner, spiritual nature. All the opposite of these things are manifest from the body and the mind, and overwhelm the pure spiritual being.

In relation to the world, a spiritualist doesn’t see it as a place to exploit for my enjoyment, to abuse to say, “I can own it.” The world was here before we showed up in this lifetime, and it will remain here after we leave. The idea that we can lay claim to it is not a spiritual idea. It is the opposite.

In one of the ancient texts, one of the Upanisads, the Sri Isa Upanisad, in the first mantra it describes the vision of the transcendentalist.

“Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord, Isvara [is the word that’s used]. One should therefore accept only those things necessary for oneself, which are set aside as one’s quota, and one should not accept other things knowing well to whom they belong.”

So, we live in a terrible time. It was decided in the very early 1930s, when they developed new ideas of what a consumer economy was, and what it would look like, and why it was beneficial to the entire world—the leading economist of that time, Lord Keynes, who developed many elevated, very advanced economic theories, he proposed that the two great driving forces for economic growth and development, for prosperity, was greed and envy, and these qualities need to be cultivated in the population.

Greed means I am never satisfied. I always want more. And I must question how infected with this quality am I? It’s overwhelming. And envy means I look at what others have, I envy it and desire to have it too. The single principle of advertising is to show you a product or an experience, and somebody enjoying it, and how they’ve become perfectly happy and fulfilled by that; and the message to you is, “You should have this too.” Because there is a recognition by all advertising, that everybody feels emptiness within their heart, and there is the offer of products, services, experiences to fill up that emptiness.

The highly developed psychological manipulation that goes into advertising and media and social media—it’s unbelievable how people are so controlled by these things and manipulated. Because they understand how the brain works, how the body works, how the mind works, and they manipulate it. So the idea of being peaceful and easily satisfied, even with little, means you would be a danger to consumer economics.

Like everybody talks about, you know, when the economy’s not doing very well, and what’s the gauge? They talk about consumer confidence: when people are going for it and spending money, that’s like, yeah! But when people, for whatever reason, begin to slow down their spending, this is considered, whoa, we’re putting our whole society in danger. We need to do things to stimulate them, whip up this frenzy of consumption.

The foundation, as I said, of all spirituality is the development of the appreciation of my spiritual identity. But this is not something you can impose, or you can force upon anyone, or build a religious so-called structure and make it a tenant that must be accepted and that—No! The spiritual understanding is everybody has free will and that free will needs to be respected. Respected doesn’t mean I have to approve of, endorse, or celebrate everything everyone does, but I should recognise that everyone has the freedom to make choices.

And what is intelligent is to understand, there are consequences to all of my choices and all of my actions, and what I am experiencing right now in life is the result of my choices, the result of my actions. If I am unhappy, depressed, if I am feeling dissatisfied and lonely, I can do something about that, and it’s learning to make really good choices in life.

But the cultivation of spiritual understanding of the nature of the soul itself, the atma, cannot be forced upon anyone. In the Bhagavad Gita it says that:

“Some look on the soul as amazing, some describe the soul as amazing, and some hear of the soul as amazing, while others, even after hearing about the spiritual being, cannot understand it at all.”

So, there’s this great acceptance that everybody’s going to be in a in a different place, and one should not act prejudicially towards someone who may not be making good choices.

From the Bhagavat Purana: is it okay when I’m reading these things? I mean, I find them extraordinary food for thought. Bhagavat Purana:

“In this way the conditioned soul living within the body forgets his self-interest because he identifies himself with the body. And because the body is material, his natural tendency is to be attracted by the varieties of the material world, and thus the living entity suffers the miseries of material existence.”

This is not pessimism. You know, one of the big problems that we have today with, particularly with  social media is—and the performative nature of social media, where everybody’s got to put on a big act: [Mimes taking selfies and videos] “I’m so happy.!!” “Oh, this is amazing!!” “Can you see it? It’s amazing!!” Everything is a performance. Everything’s a big act. I have to take like 20 pictures before I decide which one I’m going to use, and even then I might use a filter. And it’s just like, ohh, come on, get real! This is not really what life is about. But we have so many elevated and false expectations.

This world is not your home. It is not eternal. You cannot live happily ever after. You can experience happiness, but the nature of material happiness, it comes and it goes, as does miserable conditions and difficulties. That’s just the nature of things.

How do we live in this environment and not be overwhelmed by this? It’s the cultivation of this appreciation of my actual spiritual identity.

“One who is enlightened in self-realization, although living within the material body, sees himself as transcendental to the body, just as one who has arisen from a dream gives up identification with the dream body.”

That’s amazing. When you see anybody that’s really in a nightmare, and they may be, “Aah, aah, aah,” calling out, there’s something terrible happening, and then you gently wake them, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s just a dream,” and they, “Oh, oh,” and then as soon as they wake up, there’s an instant recognition of that thing I was experiencing is a dream. And while my heart is still beating fast, and I may be still feeling some fearfulness, I’m gonna have a physiological and a mental reaction, here’s a simultaneous recognition, “Oh, it was just a dream. OK, calm down. Calm down.” I can kind of take control of the situation. So, for one who is grown in spiritual understanding, this is how they look upon the events that we will experience in living out life in this world.

The last thing that I will touch on is the fact that we all have a soul mate. I’m not talking about another materially entrapped living being. We actually have a soul mate, we have a source from which we have come. In the Mundaka Upanisad there’s one verse that states:

“This is the truth: As sparks of similar form spring forth by the thousands from a strongly blazing fire, so from the Absolute Truth are produced the various living beings, O gentle one, and there also do they go.”

And another one of the Upanisads:

“As tiny sparks fly from a fire, so all the individual souls have come from the Supreme.”

But there is an appreciation and understanding that becomes developed in the Vedic presentation, and that is the connection between the individual soul, the atma, and the Supreme Soul or Paramatma, that there is an eternal—let me just find it here and read it. From a text, very very ancient text called the Brahma-samhita, and it states:

“The same jīva is eternal and is for eternity and without a beginning joined to the Supreme Lord by the tie of an eternal kinship. He is transcendental spiritual potency.”

This aching that we have for perfect love, for perfect relationship, this aching that we have for a transcendent soul mate, it’s not a fantasy of the mind. It is part of our eternal spiritual nature. And when we recognise and begin to cultivate an understanding of our eternal being there will automatically awaken an attraction, a draw, a pull towards our eternal soul mate. And the cultivation of that connection of that relationship is the most foundational and important part of actual spirituality.

So, I’ll just close out with one other verse. This is also from the Sri Isha Upanisad:

“He who sees systematically everything in relation to the Supreme Lord, who sees all living entities as His [meaning the Supreme Soul’s] parts and parcels, and who sees the Supreme Lord within everything never hates anything or any being.”

One exists in a state of infinite love and affection. One’s life is a manifestation of transcendent goodness, of compassion and kindness.

That’s about all I got. What do you think? Was this—it may not have been what was expected, perhaps, but is it pretty profound food for thought? You know, we are called upon to greater things. Our eternal spiritual nature is that we are perfect beings, we are completely lovable, that we can be actually fearless even while residing within this body within this world. We can be, not just guided, but live by the principle of doing the highest good to all others.

It doesn’t mean you become foolish, doesn’t mean that you go around like a space cadet and allow people to abuse you or anything like that. That would be a—that would not be a good understanding. But these principles, when they are learned and applied in the right way, is the ticket to limitless happiness, freedom from all suffering and all fear. OK?

So I think what we’re going to do is we’ll have a little chant for a few moments. And then I think they’re going to serve a meal. And during that time, if you have some questions, please do ask. I will do my best to answer your questions honestly and truthfully. And don’t feel inhibited, feel free to question. Feel free to challenge. I mean, what is being laid out is pretty far out. This is absolutely transformative. It could be, in your life, completely transformative.

Thank you very, very much. Namaste.

So I will—I will also chant the mahamantra.