How do we respond to people who self-identify as spiritual but not religious?

Anwser Podcast

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. Yeah, it’s a good question. Yeah, so the question is that some people who say that I am spiritual, but I am not religious.
So how do we help such people come to a proper understanding? So this is a whole, is a very large group of people who call themselves as SBNR. SBNR is spiritual but not religious. So they identify themselves like that for a specific reason.
What has happened in today’s world is that in many places religion has been the vertex of conflicts. Now actually if you look at it specifically, it is not religion that has caused the conflict, this is people’s own desires for power and prestige and position and they have used religion as a means. But still the perception is that religion makes people narrow minded and people say I don’t want to become narrow minded, I don’t want to become intolerant, I don’t want to become a cause of bigotry or hatred.
So religion is associated with all these things, narrow mindedness, fanaticism, violence. On the other hand, spirituality, that word is associated with an openness to experience, openness to various experiences in life. Something non-material, people are ready to experience that and eager to experience that.
So in today’s usage, the word religion is often associated with narrow mindedness and spirituality is associated with open mindedness and that’s why people feel I want to be spiritual but not religious. So the sentiment is perfectly understandable. Nobody should be narrow minded and dogmatic and imposing their own ideas on others or there are some religions which say ours is the only way.
If you are not following us, you are going to go to hell and there are some extremist versions of these religions, they say that not only are you going to go to hell, we will help you get there faster. So because of this, naturally thoughtful people feel alienated. So we have to see that actually religion and spirituality are related as health and medicine are related.
Health is a state which a person who is sick wants to get to the healthy state. Now for getting to the healthy state, there may be different forms of medicine. There may be say allopathic medicine which is mainstream in today’s world, there may be ayurvedic medicine, there may be naturopathy, there may be Chinese medicine, there may be Native American medicines.
Now if these medicines, medicine systems, whatever they are, if they lead people to health, that is good. Now health is an objective state. A person is not coughing, their temperature is normal, their body parameters are good, but that indicates they are healthy.
Now people can be cured by allopathy, people can be cured by ayurveda, people can be cured by naturopathy. There are many ways in which people can be cured. The point is that people have to come to healthy state.
So religion is like the, is meant to be like the curative process and spirituality is like the healthy state. Somebody who says I want to be spiritual but not religious, in effect if that means that they simply reject all religions and don’t practice anything themselves, then they are like saying I want to be healthy but I don’t want to take any medicine. Well medicine is the way to become healthy.
Now what should not happen is, imagine there is ayurvedic doctor and there is allopathic doctor and they start fighting with each other and they start pulling patient from the allopathic hospital to ayurvedic hospital or ayurvedic hospital to allopathic hospital and then the whole purpose is defeated. The purpose is to cure people. So unfortunately in today’s world, people forget the purpose of religion.
The purpose of religion is to develop selfless love. Selfless love for god and love for all living beings in relationship with god. But when that purpose is forgotten, then people start thinking my religion and your religion, which religion is better? And I try to prove my religion is better than your religion and then it leads to conflict.
Now there are statements in certain religions which say that this is the only way. Now we have to understand the purpose of those statements. Just like if a patient goes to a doctor and the doctor tells him to take this medicine and the patient says no, I went to this doctor and this doctor said this and I went to that doctor and he said that and I went to that doctor and she said this.
Now the doctor will say just forget all that you have heard, just take my medicine, you will get cured. Now when the doctor is saying just forget everything, take my medicine, that does not mean that the doctor is saying all other doctors are bogus. The doctor is simply saying that at this stage, you just take this medicine, you will get cured.
These kinds of statements are meant to create a focus. They are not meant to reject every other system of medicine. Unfortunately in today’s world, some religions, they become narrow minded and they claim to have privilege, exclusive monopoly to god, to higher consciousness, to higher reality and that sort of narrow mindedness alienates people.
So Srila Prabhupada, you know when he met Christians and Christians asked him, what do you think about Jesus? He said Jesus is our Guru. He gave up his life for the service of God. One who has so much selfless love, that person is actually saintly, that person is worshipable.
So he saw the same goal of rising to spiritual consciousness. So when people say that we want to be spiritual but not religious, what we can explain to them is that yes, we should be open minded, we should not be narrow minded. At the same time, spiritual is also a state that is to be achieved.
It is not that we can simply, we may be open to exploring spiritual aspects of life and that we may call as spiritual, that is fine. But spiritual is also a state of consciousness that we can experience constantly. Spiritual need not be just some occasional experiences that we have when we see a sunlight or when we go to some beautiful place or when we go to some holy place.
Yes, at that time we may have some spiritual stirrings of our soul. But by the process of, if we follow a process for raising our consciousness, then spiritual can become the steady state of our consciousness. And for that to happen, for a person to become healthy, they have to take medicine.
So we have to follow a process for raising to spiritual consciousness. So the process for raising to religious consciousness, the process for raising to spiritual consciousness, that is what we call as religion. So religion does not have to be narrow minded.
If religion we see simply as a process for individual transformation, from selfishness to selflessness, from materialism to spirituality, then we can be spiritual and we can be religious. We can be open minded and still we can be focused. We can be open minded, yes, there may be different ways by which one can become elevated towards higher consciousness.
But I am following this process and by following this process I will get myself elevated. So the whole spiritual but not religious, that kind of phenomena has come because of religious narrow mindedness which has alienated many people. But if we can present religion philosophically, logically, as a means for self transformation, then these people who want to be spiritual, they will also be willing to follow a process for deepening their spirituality.
In that way, they can be both spiritual and religious also. Does it answer your question?