Hello Everyone,
Today I came across a thought. While walking around a hospital, I saw a person who was there for de-addiction, and the funny part was that he said he did not even regret going down that path.
For him, it was a land of pure ecstasy, one that could not really be defined in words.
Instead of rejecting his thought outrageously just because he is an addict, it made me think. That is what my mother used to say about spirituality. And I found myself wondering how he could compare, or even place in the same space, a feeling so pious with something that can take you down in life, destroy families, ruin innocent lives, and make young souls leave this world simply by walking on a path that perhaps should never have been there at all.
It later got me thinking about something similar in the hippie culture we saw in the 60s, or perhaps I should say the second half of the twentieth century. We mostly associate that culture with drugs, trance, rebellion, war protests and freedom, while some also tried to fit spirituality into the same room.
Well, that is where the conflict arises.
People enjoyed getting high and sometimes tried to match that highness with the zone of ecstasy spirituality takes you to. And spirituality does give you wings. But perhaps the existence of wings does not mean the destination is the same.
The path to that kind of highness, at least the kind of spirituality I have seen, is a very different path. And before you think that one can be a yogi only if he or she wears bhagwa, I find that thought rather specious. One does not need the label or the dress to be on the path of spirituality, and it definitely does not have anything to do with drugs or intoxication.
I am not saying I am a yogi. I am not even close to one. But I did have a glimpse of pure ecstasy for a moment through my mother's spirituality, and that was something ineffable.
My mother had her own way of explaining it. She used to say that trying to describe spirituality is like asking a mute person, who has just tasted jaggery for the first time, how sweet it was. He knows exactly what he has tasted. He may be overwhelmed by it and may desperately want to tell you how sweet it was, but he has no words to hand that sweetness to you.
That, more than anything, is why I keep reaching for the word ineffable instead of simply pure.
Pure describes the nature of a feeling. Ineffable describes the wall you hit when you try to give that feeling to somebody else.
That glimpse of mine came in Jaipur, seven or eight years ago now. I still do not fully know what to call it. I only know that it has not left me since.
And maybe that is where the real difference begins.
Intoxication surely loosens you. It helps you escape the realms of reality for a while. It can make you feel free, perhaps even completely free, but only for as long as the high lasts. And I don't think I need to deny that experience simply because I disagree with the path that produced it. If someone tells me that what they felt was extraordinary, I can believe them.
But experiencing ecstasy and walking a path of spirituality cannot be the same thing merely because both experiences are difficult to describe.
One gives you an altered state for some time. The other, if it is truly spiritual, should slowly alter the person you are.
For me, spirituality is freedom from the fetters of life's race and from the things that keep pulling us back into it. Greed, lust, anger, attachment, jealousy, ego, the constant desire to possess more, prove more and become more than someone else.
And perhaps that is why spirituality cannot merely be about how high you can go. It has to be about what happens to you when your feet are back on the ground.
Are you kinder?
Are you less consumed by anger?
Do you need less?
Can you love without constantly calculating what you will receive in return?
Can you surrender some part of that endless struggle to control everything?
For me, surrender is where spirituality begins to separate itself from intoxication.
And when I speak of surrendering to the Lord, I am not speaking about any particular religion, name, symbol or form. I simply mean surrendering to something greater than our own ego, with purity in ourselves and love for others. I don't think something as vast as spirituality needs to be confined inside the divisions we human beings have created for ourselves.
Perhaps this is also why I hesitate to dismiss what that man in the hospital told me.
Maybe he really did experience ecstasy.
Maybe for those moments he felt free from fear, worry, responsibility and even himself. Maybe there really was something indescribable about it.
But the beauty of an experience does not automatically make the path beautiful.
That, I think, is where I finally find my difference between the two.
Intoxication can give you freedom from yourself for a while.
Spirituality, from whatever little I have witnessed, asks you to become free within yourself.
One may ask you to return again and again to recreate the feeling.
The other should slowly teach you not to need the feeling at all.
And perhaps the real measure is not the ecstasy itself, but what remains after it.
I still cannot describe what I saw in my mother's spirituality. Maybe I never will. Just like the person who tasted jaggery knows its sweetness but cannot explain the taste, perhaps some experiences are meant to remain beyond language.
But I did see what it left behind.
And maybe, after all these years, that is enough for me.