What is Spirituality?

What is Spirituality?

What is the Divine?

What is the Source of life?

What is the Truth of our existence?

Who am I in Truth?

These are the deeply searching questions that we've asked as we gazed into the night's sky, throughout all of time. Entire civilizations have developed through our intuitive response to these questions, which we have also explored through the great traditions of knowledge, through the arts, and in most recent history, even through science.

In my internet research I've found that many people these days are researching answers to the question, What is Spirituality? In asking this kind of question throughout history we have prayed for Divine Help, which we have been Given through the Gifts of Spiritual Teachings. These Teachings formed the basis of all of our Spiritual and religious traditions.

Each one of the great Spiritual traditions of humankind, have their origins in the lives and teachings of great Spiritual Realizers. In Sanskrit, the word Avatar refers to One who has taken human birth and crossed to here from the Divine State, for the purpose of teaching and liberating humankind from the non-Realized, or un-enlightened state.

These great Teachers, of different degrees of Realization, have come again and again throughout our history, and gifted civilization after civilization with Spiritual Truth, and answers to our deepest questions including the question asked by so many in these times, what is Spirituality?
However, in this time of scientific and materialistic thinking, we have lost touch with the life-meaning that comes with Spiritual understanding.

Many of us have lost faith in the religions of this time, or have lost the intuition of the greater Truths of these religions.

And not only have we lost touch with this understanding, faith or intuition, but we have become skeptical. It is very important for us, as scientifically-minded individuals (which we are, having been deeply influenced by the trends of thought of the last few centuries), to understand that our thinking, our understanding, and our intuitive knowing on Spiritual matters have been hugely reduced.

We have not always suffered the limitations of acceptance of the mere physical plane only. It is only in these recent times of industrialization, technology and scientific mind that our daily lives have become divorced from perception of the Spiritual nature of reality.

Avatar Adi Da Samraj teaches that we must re-awaken to the etheric, to the psychic, and to the intuitive, before we can awaken to the Spiritual.

So, what is Spirituality? It is the Real. It is the Context of life and the Force of life. We must understand this, change in our thinking and perceptions, and awaken to this Reality. A Spiritual life is the process of that awakening.

What is Spirituality? The Spiritual is that which is related to the Spirit of the Divine - which sadly our global culture has largely dismissed as myth. We have forgotten that mythology is based in a depth of reality; a reality that is different from our normal waking perception which we hold so preciously to be the only state of reality. Adi Da teaches that the sleeping state, for example, is just as real as the waking state, but that in Truth, neither of these states is real! The State of Reality or Truth is Consciousness, Love-Bliss and Light. These States are intuited and experienced by individuals in deep meditation, and they are the constant experience of the great Realizers.

The analogy of waking from sleep, has been used countless times throughout the great Spritiual traditions, to describe the process of Spiritual Awakening.
(It is interesting to note that the Australian aboriginal people hold the intuitive state as a sacred state, and refer to it as the Dreaming. I have stories to include at some point, on my interactions and lessons given by Australian Aboriginal spirits.)

In the following essay, Adi Da Samraj describes the ordinary world and the ordinary state of human consciousness, as a sleeping state. This beautiful essay titled The Boundless Self-Confession, is from The Aletheon, Adi Da Samraj's primary text which most fully answers the question, "What is Spirituality?"

The 'world' does not want to be Awakened.
Does the dreamer ever try to awaken anyone or everyone in his or her dreams?
It does not occur to the dreamer to do so.

Those who appear in dreams are not there to be awakened.
They are asleep.
They come from sleep.
That is where they come from.

That is what this 'world' is.
It is the manifestation of sleep.
It is unconscious.

Consciousness must be uncovered at the 'root' because what is otherwise the case is unconsciousness.
Unconsciousness is the sleep of Being - manunfacturing dreams, diversions and illusions.
Unconsciousness is deluding itself in its reverie.
That is the world.

The 'world', in all of its wanting to persist, is not entirely wanting the Divine Avatar to Appear, and thus to Awaken all... from the dreaming sleep of Being.
Nevertheless, I Am here.

Click here to read more about The Aletheon

From the first moment of meeting my Spiritual Teacher, Ruchira Avatar Adi Da, I intuited His State of non-separation from the Divine Being which is Consciousness Itself, Love-Bliss and Light. There is no doubt in my being that He is the One He claims Himself to be. It is with this heart knowing that I speak of Him and quote Him. He has shown me that I am also not separate from that One, and with His help I am in the beginning stages of waking from the dream - and I've found that it is only in the waking that one becomes aware of the dream. The qualities of simplicity, heart contentedness, joy, love, as well as heart woundedness in the place of fear, sorrow and anger, are growing in my awareness.

Adi Da Samraj spoke in detail about the seven stages of life, which could be seen as the seven stages of Spiritual Awakening.
This link will take you to the Adidam website to read two amazing pages on Bhagavan Adi Da's Teaching on the Seven Stages of Life.

To read about the seven stages of life, and more fully answer the question, what is Spirituality, click here.Please note that this page will open in a new window on your browser.

How do we define Spiritual health in this time of disconnection from Spiritual Truth?
What is Spiritual wellness or Spiritual wellbeing?