On Religion and Spirituality

image credit: Christiaan Huynen on Unsplash

 I've been getting questions on religion and spirituality or religion vs. spirituality. Or the relationship between religion and spirituality.

Let me, from the very outset, say that I don't really subscribe to oppositions. I don't really believe things must be paired either. And I certainly don't think things must be associated with each other.

In my considered opinion, therefore, religion and spirituality are not mutually exclusive. They are not opposed to each other. They cannot be paired together and they may or may not be associated. One may be caught in the process of becoming the other or it may not be.

I make no pronouncements and would not like to either credit or discredit anybody's personal beliefs and experiences. I think what I do and I feel what I do and would encourage you to do the same.

Talking about myself, I do see a distinction in my mind between “organized religion” and “spirituality.” A religion teaches a creed, inculcates a dogma, and propagates certain fixed ideas about God. It is a human institution and thus, like all human institutions, it must fail at times.

Religions are born of other individuals’ experiences with that god-head and their individual experiments; their own discovery of the mystic bond.

Religions are born of those individuals’ desires to share their adhyatma-vidya (the mystic knowledge) with others and make others’ journeys easier by manipulating the economic and socio-political environments and provide the character-strength necessary to recognize and answer to the “long cable tow of God.”

Therefore, religions are the expressions of the spiritual man’s organized aspirations; his desire to look beyond his own individual self and into the commonality of the human condition; and his need to propagate the recognition of the “long cable tow of God” from “heart to heart” in his community of human beings. I say "man" and "his" with intent, not gender insensitivity.


Spirituality, as far as I'm concerned, is the individual realization of what has been called the "mystic bond;" the visceral, umbilical tug of whatever it is in the wild that calls to all the wild things; the individual process of aparallel evolution, of "becoming other," whatever the religious path followed—or not followed.

Deep in us is something that understands what brains cannot think; something which knows what our minds cannot comprehend. This is the "mystic bond" that, according to St. Augustine, “I know until you ask me—when you ask me, I do not know”