Is Krishna consciousness spirituality or spiritualism?
Transcript
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Hare Krishna question is there any difference between spiritualism and spirituality answer yes there is a huge amount of difference although some people use the two words interchangeably and even some devotees in order to just use some more fancy sounding word use the word spiritualism instead of spirituality but Srila Prabhupada as far as I could search in the Veda base, he has not used the word spiritualism at all so it is best that devotees don’t use that word better prefer spirituality so spiritualism generally refers to spirit, in other words spirit is often used to refer to disembodied beings to ghosts and the like so spiritualism refers to the branch of knowledge which studies spirits and whether they communicate with us and how they communicate so spirits here basically is a word which is equivalent to ghosts for all practical purposes so Krishna consciousness is not spiritualism it is spirituality spirituality refers to the subject, it refers to the whole branch of knowledge that deals with spirit, spiritual reality so the word spirit can be used often especially in terms of spirits it is used to refer to the disembodied beings, the ghosts but spiritual and spirituality refer to the spiritual reality that which is beyond matter and so spiritual and spirituality is generally used to refer to that which is contrasted with matter so Krishna consciousness is primarily spiritual although Krishna consciousness explains incorporates the material also and includes what is called as spiritualism also because it is also a part there are three levels of reality there is spiritual reality, subtle mental and there is gross material of physical reality so spirituality is primarily about the soul but ultimately the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedic philosophy talks about all three so Krishna consciousness involves using matter and mind in the service of spirit and ultimately the supreme spirit that is Krishna so in contrast with that when we have spirituality we have spiritualism spiritualism is often used to refer to that which is connected only with, largely with spirit so that is not a word the devotees should use while referring to Krishna consciousness so the essential difference is the disembodied beings is what spiritualism refers to and spirituality refers to the reality that is opposite to matter the higher spiritual reality in which we as souls exist, in which Krishna exists and which is the eternal abode of endless love the spiritualism refers to generally the transitional existence of ghosts which is temporary and which is miserable thank you Hare Krishna