By SADHGURU, Isha Foundation
A HUMAN being does not turn spiritual because he thinks about God. If you think about God, you are usually only thinking about survival. Ninety-eight percent of the prayers in the world are ‘Dear God, give me this, give me that, protect me.’ This is not spirituality, it is just plain survival. It is just that you are routing your survival through heaven and that is the biggest problem in the country. To take care of simple survival, people are calling upon God and India is a living proof that it has not worked.
If you want to survive well, you must just learn to use your four limbs and a few brain cells. If you do not know how to use these and if you do not understand the physical reality and see what you can do about it, it does not matter how much you pray, you will not survive well in the physical world. But somewhere along the way, people got their religious beliefs and the physical realities all mixed up, which is why it is such a mess. It does not matter how much you believe in God, if you walk off the terrace you will break your legs. That is a physical reality. If you don’t understand that, you will pay a price. That is why this culture is paying a huge price by not understanding the distinction between physical realities and spiritual possibilities. So don’t think you are spiritual because you think about God. If you think about God when you feel insecure or hungry or when you feel something is going to be lost, that is survival not spirituality.
You think about spirituality only when you are faced and confronted with death. When you know and realize that you are a mortal, when you become aware that tomorrow morning you may be dead, then you wonder what this is all about. You look like a whole, complete human being, but tomorrow morning you may evaporate and nobody is going to miss you. Everything will be fine in the world without you. The flowers will bloom better because you will be manure.
So what does this mean? You want to know what is the nature of ‘Who I am.’ You want to know where you came from and where you will go. Now a spiritual process has started. So it is always in confrontation with death that a spiritual process starts.
Everybody should visit the cremation ground once in a while just to understand that this is where you will eventually go. You may think at you are going to so many places, you may think that you are educating yourself or that you are working or doing this and that, but your body, without any change in its direction and destination is going straight to the grave. That is the nature of the body. If all that you know is physical, you are going straight to the grave, nowhere else. From the moment you are born, every step that the body takes is just one step closer to the grave. ‘Oh isn’t it a pessimistic way of looking at things?’ It is not pessimistic or optimistic, it is a reality that you have to face.
Only when you realize the mortal nature of who you are, do you want to know what is beyond this. When the urge to know what is beyond this arises, the spiritual process is on.