Used as substitutional terms for each other, religion and spirituality are not as similar as you think. With rigid beliefs and rituals, religion is the worship of God. Spirituality on the other hand is the connection with oneself, with nature and with the universe.
Holding your parents’ thumbs, toddling on the fresh grass near the temple, you offer your first prayers watching your parents join their hands. The priest smiles at you and places the sweet prasad in your tiny palms. You look up at your parents and they nod with assurance as you smile and chew it slowly. Ever since that first time, religion becomes a deep-rooted belief in you. Be it a church, a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, an agiary or a gurdwara, you make sure to pay a visit before your first exam, before a trip and even on your birthday. Every community has a different culture and concerning your belonging, you inherit similar practices.
As you grow up, between ethereal conversations, you’d hear words like universe or chakras or manifestations. You then try to make sense of what differentiates religion and spirituality.
Spirituality is a practice beyond definitions, it is about knowing yourself and everything that encompasses your being and beyond. It makes you discover yourself and taps you into the level of consciousness you never thought you could reach. It connects you with the universe, with the energies around you and within you.
Conventionally, the universe is a term we use for the solar system, the stars and the uncountable galaxies it holds within itself. That same universe embraces a myriad of energies and those same planets we learnt through acronyms from our textbooks, define the very constitution of our personality and fate.
Religion and spirituality have always walked different paths. While religion bows down to idols and books, spirituality meditates its way into the experience of the soul. Both religion and spirituality are practiced with love and gratefulness but there are times when religion becomes a symbol of fear. To protect themselves from a dreadful destiny or a gruelling punishment, believers practice religion with a scare in their hearts. Spirituality on the other hand is practiced with love, it is practiced with a conscious intention for the good. In religion, responsibility comes as a consequence of fear but in spirituality, it comes with love.
Nevertheless, dawns and evenings echo with the mellifluous chants of the temple bells and religious believers clapping in love for their God. It is when you can detach fear from religion and express a compassionate feeling in your prayers that you’re truly worshipping with love.
Within religion, come various faiths that might separate us, spirituality, however, unites everyone who comes under it. Every place of worship has its own rituals, spirituality includes discovering the divine truth of one’s soul. Along the residential lanes of your city, you would find an array of mosques, temples and gurdwaras with a large crowd of people covering their heads and walking closer to their creator. Along the same lane, you would find a large garden caressed with grass and flower beds. You would notice people sitting on the ground, eyes closed and meditating positive energy to the universe, breathing slowly as they get a soulful response. With just a few steps away, religion and spirituality differ so much from each other but still rest in the same lane of purity.
To some, walking in a temple is a relieving hug that frees them of their stressed nerves while to others spiritually walking within themselves, enchants them with a knowledge of their difficulties and their solutions. Full of gratitude towards your creator, you bow in love, thanking him for all the comfort in your life. To the universe, you meditate to align with its energies and manifest in peace for the life you want. You allow the universe to take over you and guide you within yourself, to create your own destiny. Ever since birth, the planets of this ever-evolving universe guide the chakras within you and regulate your days to brightly dawn on you and for the nights to dusk under the tender light of the moon.
Both religion and spirituality are beautiful by themselves, they complete the lives of their believers. They bring a guiding light into your soul that makes you rush in excitement for your passion and imbues a calmness in you that leads you into self-discovery.
In religion, we try to find our beloved creator within and beyond ourselves who allows us to detach our souls from our bodies and connect to his/her divine energy. In spirituality, we become one with the universe, with its energies, planets and stars that align with our thoughts and actions. The formless universe that we try to find beyond ourselves brings us back to the one within ourselves. It acquaints us with the one deep within ourselves waiting to be enlightened. Be it chants or prayers, meditations or manifestations, both religion and spirituality converge halfway in faith and diverge in practice.
