Spirituality is a process of understanding oneself beyond the obvious. It is a process of understanding what makes us happy or unhappy in life. It is a process of bringing about a fundamental shift in our paradigm of living. It is like going to the root of the problem and changing old patterns of your life based on this new understanding. Leading a spiritual life is like living a life with full awareness, instead of mechanically.
We have a lot of knowledge of so many objects on the outside. But we lack the knowledge of our own inner self.This knowledge of our inner-most being is spirituality.
How does spiritual knowledge help us?Everyone in this world wants to be happy and peaceful. But, happiness and peace are found by us, only in bits and pieces.When we achieve something, we are happy. When we eat good food or see a good movie, we are happy.But our bouts of happiness are inter-mixed with a lot of sadness, dejection, gloom and periods of restlessness. The net result is that even if we have all the money or resources, we end up feeling sad and insecure.Real peace of mind and happiness deludes us all the time.
Spiritual knowledge helps us diagnose this problem of our life.We need to first understand the process of how and with what we become happy.We need to find out the root cause of unhappiness and try to remove that cause permanently.
Patanjali Yoga Sutra, which is believed to have been authored about 4000 years ago, discusses, beautifully, the five main causes of unhappiness in life.It is a marvelous proof of how our ancient sages understood psychology so well. The five main causes of unhappiness given by Patanjali are attachment (raga), aversion (dwesha), ego (asmita), fear of death (abhinivesha) and ignorance of truth (avidhya).
Attachment is our strong preference for people or things which are perceived to be favourable.We all have strong attachments for money, name, fame, relatives, etc. We love these things so much that we do not even realise whether they make us more happy or unhappy. Most of the time attachments bind us to those objects or people. Also, we tend to ignore the minus points of things or persons to which we are attached. Because of strong attachment, our own people cause maximum grief to us.
Attachment is quite different from love. Love is a positive quality of giving someone positive emotions without any expectation. But attachment is getting tied to a person with the expectation that the person will make us happy. Love never fails, but attachment causes bondage as well as disappointment and ultimately makes us sad. Most of the time, we confuse attachment as love and therefore do not want to get rid of attachments in spite of being unhappy in life.
— The author is an IAS Officer of Gujarat cadre
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