Spiritual longing
If you look at the human experience, everything that human beings know right now is because of what they have seen, heard, smelt, tasted and touched. What they can gather through the five senses is bound to be physical so their experience of life right now is limited to the physical. So, if you take yourself as an example, what is physical in you — the body that you carry — is essentially something that you have accumulated and gathered.
What you gather can be yours, but it can never be you. What you call body or what you experience as “myself” right now is an accumulation of breakfast, lunch and dinner — it is the food that you have eaten. It is just a piece of the planet.
Your mind and your emotions are physical. The fact that they can be measured on machines means that they have a physical basis. Your body, which is an accumulation of essences of food and your mind, which is an accumulation of impressions and information, is full of stuff you have gathered. They are what you have “gathered”, they are not “you”. So there must be something more fundamental; whatever that is, it is beyond the physical.
If your experience of life transcends the limitations of physicality, then we say you are spiritual. Spirituality does not mean that you have to believe something or that you have a philosophy. Essentially, spirituality means you have enhanced your basic perception and understanding beyond the limitations of the physical. Only if you experience a dimension beyond the physical can you truly be free from the limitations of what you are right now.
Every human being is longing to be something more than what s/he is right now. Even if you become the king of the planet, you will still look at the stars because the very nature of being human is such; there is something within you that does not like boundaries. The moment you feel a boundary, you want to go beyond that. So there is something within you which is seeking to become boundless; which is constantly longing to become spiritual. Every human being has a deep-seated longing to be spiritual. The choice is only whether you give expression to this longing in a conscious or an unconscious manner.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an internationally renowned spiritual leader, is a visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org
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