Spiritual awareness is different from religious awareness. Spirituality has nothing to do with religion and religion has nothing to do with spirituality; they are two different paths altogether. People believe that by following a religion one can become spiritual, but that is not right. Spiritual awareness or spiritual realization is a personal experience. It is a personal effort to improve the quality of life.
Therefore, a distinction must be made between spirituality and religiosity. From the tantric and yogic perspective, to be spiritual means to become aware of the luminous qualities inherent in you. People believe that they can become spiritual if they practise meditation. Wrong. People believe they can become spiritual if they follow a religion. Wrong. People believe they can become spiritual if they practise a mantra or think of God and worship God. Wrong. All this is not spirituality.
You cannot acquire spirituality through meditation, contemplation, worship or any other such effort. Spirituality has to be discovered within yourself, and that is the process of yoga and tantra. The spiritual nature is beyond the world of senses and sense objects. The spiritual experience transcends the body and mind experience. The understanding of spiritual life or the spiritual quality is acquired through a process of observation and modification of the normal behaviour patterns of life.
Remember that one does not become spiritual by contemplation, meditation, ritual or worship, but by following one’s dharma. That is one point that everyone misses. Nobody follows their dharma, but everybody tries to meditate. People come to me and ask, “How can I become spiritual?” I tell them, “First stop criticizing others. First stop being destructive in your own mind, stop being aggressive in your own nature.”
They look at me in disbelief, as they have always heard, “Meditate and you will experience divinity, luminosity.” Everyone has been told that the aim of life is to attain self-realization or God-realization. It is this expectation that motivates people to discover the God inside. The God inside cannot be discovered, at least not by people mired in the material life of this age.
People don’t have that character, that sankalpa shakti, that zeal, that fixity of mind. Therefore they can meditate but never see God or realize the Self. This indicates that there is a big flaw in their understanding of how to integrate and incorporate the practices to attain the higher experience.
What I am saying applies to everyone, whether they are sannyasins or sadhakas. Sannyasa does not make anyone spiritual; yoga does not make anyone spiritual. It is understanding one’s own nature, modifying one’s behaviour patterns, understanding one’s dharma and adhering to the precepts of dharma that makes one spiritual.
From the book “Head, Heart & Hands, Yogadrishti Series”, pg.5-6, Sw. Niranjanananda Saraswati