Spiritual but Not Religious? - Swami Medhananda

[Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] good morning everybody bright and sunny morning it's nice to see some familiar faces and some new faces as well I'll be speaking today on an interesting and very current topic spiritual but not religious question mark the question mark is significant as well we'll see why there's been a lot of research done recently on this phenomenon called spiritual but not religious it's actually it's become a movement and there are a number of studies that have been done showing that up to about 30 percent of Americans identify as spiritual but not religious it's a range actually if you want to get technical it's between 17 and 30 about but it's it'sing the number of people who identify as sbnr spiritual but not religious is increasing especially among the younger Generations in one survey they found that 72 percent of Millennials defined as 18 to 29 year olds consider themselves to be more spiritual than religious so this is a growing movement and I want to explore this phenomenon so what do sbnrs let's call it let's use this acronym for now otherwise after it's going to become very long-winded repeating it so sbnr spiritual but not religious people people who identify as spiritual but not religious they all have three things in common seems to me the first is they're disenchanted with traditional religion institutional religion religious fundamentalism this is common across almost everybody who identifies as sbnr second another commonality they have a spiritual hunger they're not atheistic they're open to spirituality but they're disgusted with religious hypocrisy with religious fundamentalism and the third is and this is I I don't want to say it's uh Universal among espionrs but it's you find it frequently they're often deeply interested in and open to Eastern religions um that could be Hinduism vedanta Buddhism taoism Native American spirituality you name it but they kind of they're able to think outside the box spiritually and religiously now before I get into more details about this movement and the philosophical dimensions of the movement strengths and weaknesses of the movement I wanted to address a different question briefly when did the phrase spiritual but not religious first become popular and how did it become popular and the reason why I want to mention this is because there's a very interesting connection with the very place we're all standing and they're sitting sitting here today Trabuco Canyon ramakrishna Monastery what is the connection please bear with me this is kind of I'll draw a link here first of all how many of you are familiar with Gerald Hurd good yeah a few of you are he's the one who founded this place which at the time was founded as Trabuco College in 1941 with his own funds built in 1942 and Gerald Hurd learned about vedanta he studied vedanta practice vedanta under the guidance of Swami prabhavananda Ji who was the founding head Swami of the Hollywood Center vedanta Southern California in Hollywood where I'm currently based now so that was 1942 when it was built seven years later the College closed down for various reasons and he donated Trabuco College to prophet's society and then it got renamed programs you renamed it the ramakrishna monastery but while it was Trabuco College in the 1940s many great intellectuals and spiritual aspirants came to study spirituality with herd underheard and to meet other spiritual aspirants and so on one of these sincere spiritual aspirants was a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous Bill W Bill Wilson he met Gerald here in Trabuco in the 1940s and had a lifelong friendship with him and because Gerald heard was a vedant and you know a very sincere practitioner vedanta he taught Bill W idanta as he was starting to think about developing this Alcoholics Anonymous program the 12 Steps the underlying philosophy so Bill W under the influence of Gerald Hurd was strongly influenced by vedanta and it would take an entirely different lecture to explore in detail the tacit vedantic underpinnings of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement but I think it would be very interesting an important lecture um but to come to the point William Parsons he's a scholar who's who edited a scholarly volume a few years ago in 2018 called being spiritual but not religious and in his introduction to this book he asked this question when did the espionr phrase spiritual but not religious first become widely known widely used and this is what he has to say page 18 of this book it was Bill Wilson Bill W as he is usually referred to and his 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program that most successfully disseminated the phrase into popular parlance Bill W referred to AAA as quote not religious but spiritual as early as 1940 this is a continuation of this quote from Parsons he later described so Bill W later described A.A as quote a spiritual rather than a religious program okay so it's very interesting and that's why I thought this would be an especially appropriate topic here in Trabuco Canyon now for the remainder of this lecture I want to address three main questions the first why is it that more and more people are identifying as spiritual but not religious not just in the U.S but especially in the U.S second how would Swami Vivekananda have reacted to the sbnr movement this is a kind of speculative question he's not here to tell us but it's an I think an interesting question to ask and that's gonna this is gonna take the majority of the time in this lecture today I'm going to spend most of the lecture exploring uh the sbnr movement from the standpoint of vedanta and specifically ask from Swami Vivekananda the standpoint of vedanta what are the strengths of the espionr movement and what are the weaknesses in maybe potential pitfalls or dangers of the sbnr movement and third and finally I want to address briefly what is the future of the sdnr movement how might it evolve if at all so first question so these three questions that's my attempt of my goal first question why are more and more people identifying as sbnr I've already mentioned some of these but one of the main reasons I think is that more and more people are becoming very legitimately disenchanted with traditional religion for all sorts of reasons and I'll just mention a few first the rise of science Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory uh many other scientific theories make it much harder for contemporary people to swallow some traditional religious doctrines to give you one simple example of creationism which is uh not accepted by all Christians but by some especially more fundamentalist Christians it's very difficult to accept creationism while also accepting modern scientific theories like evolutionary theory but there are many other examples you I'm sure you have your own examples of this so but the rise of science is a in critical thinking is one of the reasons I think why more and more people are moving away from traditional religion and identifying as spiritual but not religious second reason is one I already mentioned too which is that they're fed up with religious fundamentalism every day we hear about religious violence violence and killing committed in the name of religion and people are just disgusted this is the result of religion I don't want to be religious right and and that's that's Justified or at least to some extent it's Justified and they see efforts throughout the world still they're missionaries going out to different countries trying to convert people from one religion to another there's so much ego involved in all of this ego and violence a lack of openness to other people's ideas and these people who identify as sbnr also tend to be disgusted with religious hypocrisy this is also on the rise and they find that people who talk big about religion may not be leading very spiritual lives I mean I only need to go into specifics here but there's all sorts of corruption and abuse and all sorts of stuff happening in different religious organizations they're covered in the news and so what will people think if this is what it means to be a priest or to be a you know a monk or whoever then I don't want to be a priest or a monk I don't want to be religious at all so it's a kind of reaction to what they see is the Deep problems with traditional institutional religion I think Hawkins some of you have probably heard of him he's a professor at Oxford a biologist but who's written books attacking religion he's got a book called The God Delusion and he claims that religion has to be false and Charles Darwin's evolution theory has proved religion to be false and so on and so forth and so but people identifies espionage are they're atheists I think they've recognize that atheism is just as dogmatic as fundamentalist religion in some ways prove that God doesn't exist good luck actually it's not very easy to prove that God doesn't exist um so they have a spiritual yearning they have a spiritual hunger they may not even believe in God but that they still have this genuine spiritual longing desire interest so that's with regard to the first question why are more and more people identifying it as sbnr I think they're very legitimate reasons um and I think we should understand what those reasons are at the same time later in the lecture I will talk about some of the kind of dangers and pitfalls of the sbnr movement but that's not to detract from all the positives second the second big question I said I'm going to split into two sub questions the first sub question is what are the connections between Swami vivekananda's philosophy of vedanta and the Contemporary sbnr movement it's the first question second question how might Swami Vivekananda have reacted to the sbnr movement so let's look at the first sub question first what are some of the connections between Vivekananda zedanta and sbnr this espnr movement interestingly in an 1896 interview in London himself at that time over a hundred and whatever 30 years ago almost he noticed this phenomenon at that time so let me read to you read out from this interview he says the world of thought is being converted we are only at the beginning as yet the number of those who decline to adopt any special form of religion is greatly increasing and this movement is among the educated classes in a recent American census a large number of persons declined to clasp themselves as belonging to any form of religion all religions are different expressions of the same truth all march on or die out they are the radii of the same truth the expression that variety of Minds requires and then the interviewer says he's getting excited the interviewer and he says now we are getting near it what is that Central truth and then Vivekananda says the divine within every being however degraded is the expression of the Divine really fascinating he's talking about an American census from 1896 and he's noticing that more and more Americans were identifying as sbnr at that time and now that phenomena is Multiplied exponentially and far more people are becoming us better but he he had his finger on the pulse even at that time and he recognized that these people are ready for vedanta so he recognized that many westerners were becoming disenchanted with traditional religion and what that meant at that time was Christianity and still to some extent but they still have a spiritual hunger and they're open and they're hungry for religion well at least for spirituality and he felt that vedanta is the perfect thing for these people and he pitched vidante in exactly this way that's part of the reason why so why he made such a huge impact in the west actually at the same time he wasn't fully on board with this Espionage thing and that's clear too and I want to kind of clarify that a little bit but he parted ways with his contemporary sbnr people in insisting that being a vedant is strictly compatible with being religious if we accept vedanta we can be spiritual and religious we don't have to see spirituality and religion as contradictory as a dichotomy but we can be spiritual and religious at the same time okay and I'm going to try to develop that idea a little bit but according to swamiji what is vedanta the vedanta is not a religion among other religions but it's the underlying philosophical basis of all religions where does he say it I'll give you one example this is from another interview he gave in 1896 in London he says vedanta is really the philosophy of religion the kernel of all its outward forms all forms of religion have an essential and a non-essential part if we strip the ladder there Remains the real basis of all religion which all forms of religion possess in common Unity is behind them all we may call it God Allah Jehovah the spirit love it is the same Unity that animates all life from its lowest form to its noblest manifestation in man it is on this Unity that we need to lay stress whereas in the west and indeed everywhere it is on the non-essential that men are apt to lay stress notice that song He's not contrasting religion with spirituality he's contrasting the essential and non-essential dimensions of religion and the essential element of all religions is its spiritual core that's what he's calling vedanta okay so in contemporary parlance most of you know that Mark Zuckerberg has renamed Facebook meta right and that's the big thing now metaverse so if we want we can think about vedanta not as a religion but as a meta religion the underlying philosophical basis of all religions explains very clearly what he means by vedanta as a matter of religion in the epigraph to his book Raja yoga this epigraph consists of what I would call Four Maha mantras four great sayings many of you are probably familiar with them but I'll just read them out to you and then try to unpack them one by one number one each soul is potentially divine two goal is that this Divinity Within by controlling nature external and internal three do this either by work or worship or psychic control or Philosophy by one or more or all of these and be free work corresponds to Karma Yoga worship bhakti yoga psychic control Raja yoga philosophy Gyan yoga by one or more or all of these yogas and be free fourth Twins or dogmas or rituals or books or temples or forms are but secondary details so let's unpack these one by one so first each soul is potentially divine notice every word is important he's being deliberately open he's not he's not saying he's not taking a very specific stand on the exact sense in which the soul is divine each soul is potentially Divine and there's a good reason for it he doesn't want to say anything that's going to commit him to some particular sectarian View instead he wants to accommodate many different spiritual philosophies many different religious views much in line with his Guru sharam Krishna Shram Krishna used to teach Brahman and Shakti are inseparable Brahman is non-dual pure Consciousness it's the impersonal aspect of God and Shakti is the personal aspect the personal dimension of the same infinite Divine reality the same thing he said that our religion preaches an impersonal personal God personal personal God okay and in another place used to say for if there is one common doctrine that runs through all our apparently fighting and contradictory sects it is that all glory power and Purity are within the soul already only according to ramanuja the soul contracts and expands at times and according to shankara it comes under a delusion never mind these differences all admit the truth that the power is there potential or manifest it is there and the sooner you believe that the better for you so he's noting that different schools of vedanta different spiritual philosophies may have different understandings of exactly how God relates to the soul according to shankara the soul is actually identical with God because both God and the Soul are at bottom nothing but non-dual pure Consciousness ramanuary says the soul is is a portion of the Divinity of the Divine and that soul is not already identical with God but expands and contracts in a state of ignorance it's in a state of contraction in the state of knowledge of God it expands to its full manifestation and Swami Vikram says let's not highlight and emphasize and obsess so much about the differences these doctrinal disputes notice that the language each soul is potentially Divine that can accommodate shankara just as much as it accommodates ramanuja just must accommodates Christianity or Islam or Hinduism that was deliberate be as broad as possible in divining defining the nature of the Divine and the Soul's relation to the Divine that's the first tenet the first of the four key tenets of vedanta um the Divine can be impersonal it can be personal it can have any kind of form it can be formless second statement reminding you the goal is to Manifest this Divinity Within by controlling nature external and internal the goal of every religion is to realize God we can call it there are many names for it call it self-realization call it Enlightenment illumination Nirvana but it's the same idea but how does Swami Vivekananda cash it out the goal of religion is to manifest our innate divinity that's the second key statement you might ask well what about that last phrase by controlling nature external and internal it seems very kind of almost technical that's because of the context remember this is an epigraph to Raja yoga pulled it out of his commentary on patanjali's yoga Sutra okay and so we have to understand something about patanjali's metaphysics according to patanjali's school it's based on sankya metaphysics both the physical body and our minds are incention they belong to Nature and nature is insension it's called prakriti in Sanskrit it's very startling to some westerners when they hear that the mind is in sentient what could it mean that the mind is in sentient the mind is also a subtle form of matter according to not just sanky and yoga but also according to vedanta actually but then we say well the mind is thinking thoughts and it's conscious no it's a soul the soul that's conscious and by mistake we're identifying ourselves with the mind and we think that the mind is conscious but the mind isn't conscious the soul is Illuminating the mind with consciousness okay so that's the basic idea so now with that in the background what swamiji means by external nature is the physical body and what he means by internal nature is the mind that's why the subtitle of the book rajio is Conquering the internal nature because Raja Yoga patanjali's Yoga is based on Conquering the Mind Yoga Yoga is restraining the mental modifications so that's what swamiji means controlling nature external internal means by controlling the body the physical body but by also more importantly controlling the mind restraining the Mind self-control what does it mean in simple English we have to purify ourselves we have to try to reduce attenuate and ultimately eliminate worldly desires and attachments and thereby transforming ourselves through spiritual practice what are these spiritual practices he explains them in the third Maha Mantra the third grade saying do this either by work karma yoga or worship bhakti yoga or psychic control or meditation Raja Yoga patanjali Yoga Sutra or philosophy The Path of Knowledge intellectual reasoning vichara by one or more or all of these this is a very significant qualifications by qualification you can do it by any one of these four yogas by a combination of of one or more of the yogas or by all four of the yogas and be free now one thing to keep in mind is the notice the the language here again it's very broad he's not saying yoga means he says philosophy so it means the path of intellectual reasoning any spiritual religious path that involves intellectual reasoning can count as The Path of Knowledge or philosophy psychic control he's not limiting to just patanjali's very specific kind of yoga Sutra philosophy anything that involves control of the Mind can count right so he's being very very broad on purpose worship a Christian can worship just as much as a Muslim and just as much as a Jew just as much as a Hindu right so he's not defining these yogas in a narrowly Hindu way he's defining them in a very Universal way so that they can apply to all of the religions and we'll see in a second more specifically what what he means by that the key is that he taught the harmony of all the world religions on the basis of this Doctrine by one or more of these four yogas attain the goal of life which is God realization enlightenment what he says is the argument proceeds in two steps number one every world religion corresponds to one or more of the four yogas the kind of predominant emphasis run devotion toward a personal God or on active service of some sort or unattest action or mental control psychic control or it's very philosophical or some combination it doesn't have to be that it represents only one One Yoga it could be more than one yoga but this is a very very important Insight that Vivekananda had every one of the world religions corresponds to one or more of the four yogas and the second step in this argument or it's really the conclusion of the argument therefore every world religion is a direct path to enlightenment so the first premise is that any one of these yogas can can give us Enlightenment second premise every world religion corresponds to one or more of these yogas therefore any one of these world religions can take us to the high school the highest spiritual goal of Awakening of Illumination of enlightenment but he also went further than that I discussed this in detail in my in my book song I I use the phrase religious cosmopolitanism and what I mean by that is Swami Vivekananda often taught that we can and should actively learn from religions other than our own we'll be grounded firmly in one religion but we'll also try to learn from other religions and expose ourselves to other religions and actively try to incorporate aspects of other religious Traditions into our own okay and the law of one of the yogas and the ideal human being is the one who can combine all four yogas to the best of his or her ability and the fourth statement that Swami vacant on the makes the fourth mahavakya great saying let me remind you again this is the whole of religion doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples or forms are but secondary details so Swan vehicle is well aware that different religions differ at the level of Doctrine they disagree on all sorts of things one question simple a simple example did Christ die on the cross you might think well yeah of course you died of the Cross but that's not everybody believes that Muslims don't believe that Christ died on the cross in the Quran that's not accepted but of course the Bible accepts it for instance that's an example of a conflict at the level of Doctrine between different religions is rebirth true are we Reborn Orthodox abrahamic religions say no Hinduism and Buddhism say yes right so there's all sorts of conflicts what does Vivekananda say about these doctrinal disputes across the world religions he says doctrines are secondary details not that they're completely unimportant but they're not the be-all end-all they belong to the non-essential side of religion what's more even if some religions are wrong about something so look the example of Christ whether Christ died on the cross one of those religions is wrong either Islam is wrong that Christ didn't die on the cross or Christianity is wrong right so there had to have been a historical fact of the matter what shiram Krishna and some were going to say is even the errors in a religion don't substantially detract from their ability to lead to the highest goal that's the important thing and sriram Krishna used to use a wonderful example he said imagine that people you know wear watches he said everybody thinks his or her own watch is right my watch tells the exactly perfect time this is but no watch tells the league but everybody's watch is good enough to get the job done even if you're off by a few seconds or a minute even nobody's gonna kill you for you know it still gets a job and you're able to get to where you need to go on time and this and that that's the idea in spite of its dot triangle mistakes and every religion has some mistakes it can still be an effective path to Salvation or Enlightenment whatever you want to call it so to sum up very briefly what is vedanta according to Swami Vivekananda what is this meta religion of vedanta let me just give six to give the four I'm just going to unpack a little more so six things briefly one the infinite Divine reality is not only the impersonal non-dual pure consciousness of advaita vedanta some schools of Buddhism but also the personal God which Ram Krishna and Vivekananda used to call Shakti which manifests in countless forms manifests golly manifestes Christ manifests as Krishna and so on and so forth Allah Allah is not a form it's he's formless but personal but that too is an aspect of the same personal dimension of the Divine second key tenet of vedanta the goal of life is to realize the infinite Divine reality in any form or aspect and there's no higher or lower not everybody has to realize pure Consciousness for instance that's to give you one example and not everybody has to realize God is Christ or God the Father not everybody has to realize God is Allah but everybody has to realize God ultimately that's the goal of life God understood In This Very broad way as the infinite Divine reality which is personal in one aspect and impersonal in another third key tenet of vedanta any one of the four yogas can lead us to the realization of some former aspect of the Divine fourth every world religion corresponds to one of these four yogas fifth therefore every religion is equally capable of taking us to the goal of Enlightenment or spiritual realization and six we can make more rapid spiritual progress we can enrich our spiritual lives by learning from religions other than our own that's what I've been calling religious cosmopolitanism so keep these uh in the back of our minds as we continue now so now coming back to this question of this contemporary sbnr movement spiritual but not religious movement what I would say this is my take on it is that Swami vivekananda's vedanta philosophy is best characterized not as sbnr but as sbar not spiritual but not religious but spiritual but also religious he says this very clearly in an 1897 interview given in London he says is the rationale of all religions without the vedanta every religion is superstition with it everything becomes religion without the vedanta every religion is superstition with vedanta everything becomes religion it's a very beautiful statement so vedanta here is not a religion among other religions it's a meta religion which validates all the world's religions it doesn't invalidate them this is what we'll find eventually is one of the pitfalls or one of the weaknesses of the Espionage movement I think they're too quick to assume that if I'm spiritual then I can't be religious vedanta says you can be if you're truly spiritual you'll most likely also be religious and there's absolutely no contradiction between spirituality and religion so I think what Swami Vivekananda envisioned is that people would accept vedanta as their meta religion as their underlying philosophy their kind of spiritual philosophy while at the same time practicing any religion of their choice they obviously don't have to be Hindu they can practice any religion they want but with vedanta in the background as their kind of underlying philosophical framework that's what I think you had in mind uh he says for instance in one of his great speeches at the world's parliament of religions in Chicago in 1893 he says do I wish that the Christian would become Hindu God forbid do I wish that the Hindu or Buddhist would become Christian God forbid he wanted Christians to become better Christians Hindus to be better Hindus Muslims to be better Muslims how did they become better by accepting vedanta and again I don't want you to so again if without the word religion then he'd be just another proselytizer and trying to convert people but that's not the idea vedanta is a meta religion it's a meta philosophy that validates all of the world religions in Hinduism and in vedanta there's a very important Doctrine called ishta devatha which means the chosen deity the idea is that because God is infinite and God manifests in so many different forms each one of us is free to think of God and to worship God and to meditate on God in form that we love that in the form that we prefer based on our tendencies what we did in previous lives right so if I like to think of God as Christ and that's perfectly fine if I like to think of God as Allah then that's also fine there's no higher and lower there's no this is ultimately true this is a lower idea than this nothing like that so that's a very important thing to keep in the background so what does it mean for a Christian to be a vedant or a Buddhist to be a vedant it means that I like so imagine a Christian who who loves to think of God as God the father and to worship Christ as an Incarnation as as now one thing that's important is if you're a vedante Christian you can't say like Orthodox Christians that God only incarnates once once and for all is Christ because again that's limiting God so vedanta would say of course Christ is God but God can also manifest in other human beings can and has manifested other human so it's a kind of vedanta forces you to kind of expand your worldview a little bit it might make you uncomfortable but that's part of the point is that it opens you it makes you more generous toward other religions and short other viewpoints and a deep vedanta practice your own religion keep in mind that the goal of your religion whatever that religion is whether it's Christianity or Islam or Hinduism is God realization or Enlightenment or self-realization whatever you want to call it salvation never lose sight of the goal of religion I think what happens in many cases is that you get so caught up in what used to call the secondary details the doctrines fighting with people that you lose sight of the goal which is enlightenment and the third if you're a vedant while also practicing religion you'll always be actively trying to learn from other religions that Spirit of openness is always there so let me be a little bit more concrete imagine a vedantic Christian I'm let's say I'm a vedantic Christian I accept the Bible I worship Christ as God but I also believe that God can incarnate in other human beings as Krishna as Rama as ramakrishna possibly and so I'll never limit God to just Christ okay and also for instance actually if you adopt a kind of vedantic framework it can shed new light on many of the Great teachings of Jesus blessed are the pure and hard for they shall see God this is pure vedanta because it focuses on the essence of Christianity what does Jesus teach us he says that the aim of Christianity is love of God God realization how do you achieve that aim by purifying your hearts spiritual practice and if you a vedantic Christian if I'm a vedantic Christian I'll also actively try to learn from non-Christian religions what do they have to teach me because every religion has some unique unique return you don't find in your own home religion because every religion corresponds to one or more of the four yogas now coming to the second sub question how might Swami Vivekananda have reacted to the Contemporary sbnr movement imagine I don't know how many I'm going to reveal my age indirectly here but but one of my favorite movies growing up as a kid was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and so imagine Tommy Viking on the he was taking this time machine he comes to 2022 and he's observing this Espionage movement how might he have reacted how might he have responded to it I think first of all he would have been very encouraging very sympathetic and said that it's wonderful hear the wonderful points behind the Espionage movement I'll just mention three people who identify as sbnr are very open to spirituality and so they're not they're not dogmatic in the other direction the way that like Richard Dawkins type people are they're dogmatic atheists or no they're open there's a kind of spirit of openness intellectual openness spiritual openness second plus point they have a spiritual hunger there's a sincerity at bottom there and thirdly I think Vivekananda was one of the I mean you can see this in his lectures he could he could be scathing sometimes in attacking religious fundamentalism religious bigotry religious violence and so he says your usbnrs you're absolutely right in condemning these things these phenomena violence in the name of religion hatred in the name of religion bigotry in the name of religion he says this that's right that impulse is right to to kind of uh feel that this religion is going in the wrong direction if you're moving toward dogmatism and fanaticism and fundamentalism but I think you would also say it's good you what you're you're at a good place but you can evolve a little bit further and I think this is how he would make constructive suggestions to people who identify as spiritual but not religious I think you would have identified or maybe instead of trying to put words in his mouth I'll just say from Swami vivekananda's vedantic standpoint I would try to identify for maybe dangers in the Espionage movement first this is a little controversial but remember the term is spiritual but not religious I think it's a little bit presumptuous to call ourselves spiritual what do I mean by that virtuality is an achievement to be truly spiritual it means you identify with Spirit rather than with the body mind how many of us can truly say that we've identified with the soul I'm not the body I'm not the mind if somebody punches you in the face I don't feel pain can you really say that only then are you really spiritual think that from a vedantic standpoint it would be more accurate more humble to call ourselves not spiritual but spiritual aspirants we're aspiring to become spiritual so this is kind of a slight almost like a terminological quibble but I think it's important nonetheless I mean imagine if somebody I mean this is common more and more but if somebody says I'm very spiritual I mean I would roll my eyes you know it's it's a little bit pretentious to call yourself spiritual I I you know I but there's a humility in there okay but they're more substantive issues that I want to raise as well number two this is a more serious issue think that people who identify as spiritual but not religious have an unduly narrow understanding of religion they identify religion they equate religion with the worst forms of religion which is not really fair it seems to me they equate religion with religious fundamentalism with institutional religion all that's bad in the world's religions dogmatism fanaticism violence corruption abuse Blind Faith hypocrisy stupidity vulgarity but is that all there is in religion what if we Define religion what about the great Saints and religion the wonderful Souls who are completely egoists what about the saint francis's and the Mother Teresa's and the ramakrishnas and the Buddhas what happened are they not religious so so that's that's one thing that I think is important is that if we expand our understanding of what religion means we don't have to see religion as opposed to spirituality I think that's something that's funny because himself often emphasized let me give you one example from an 1896 lecture he says religion permeates the whole of man's life not only the present but the past present and future religion is therefore the Eternal relation between the Eternal Soul and the Eternal God now comes the question can religion really accomplish anything it can it brings to man eternal life it has made man what he is and will make of this human animal a god that is what religion can do take religion from Human Society and what will remain nothing but a forest of brutes so Swami Vivekananda never shied away from the term religion find it in a very different way from the way that many people especially people who identify as sbnr understand religion okay how did he Define it now this I think is really brilliant on his part ological meaning of the term religion the English term religion which goes back to the Latin term religare which means rebinding religion in its etymological sense means anything that reconnects the soul with God soul with the divine and what is a closeness the closest Sanskrit term to this meaning of religion in its etymological sense yoga yoga that's literally what yoga means it means connection it means connecting the soul with God by any of the four yogas so all the yogas are different forms of religion actually so from Swami vacant on the standpoint we can if we Define religion as yoga then we're not going to find any contradiction between religion and spirituality it becomes a kind of spiritual technology it becomes the essence of spiritual practice the means by which we become spiritual is religious third point I want to make from a vedantic standpoint and this directly follows from the second point you know the term spiritual but not religious it presupposes a false dichotomy between spiritual and religious the assumption is that spirituality and religion are opposites or Swami vikananda approaches the vedantic approaches the the is spirituality so religion is not opposed to spirituality the essence the core of all religions and spirituality what does he mean by spirituality the innate Divinity of every human being and the fourth point this is concerning that last phrase spiritual but not religious not religious I think Swami Vivekananda would have said that this is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and their dangers here I spiritual but I'm not religious this it's almost violent in rejecting religion and arguably and of course it depends there are more and less sincere sbnr people and I don't want to kind of make sweeping generalizations here but as I said a danger one danger in the Espionage movement is that some people want to have their spiritual cake without doing spiritual practice it's people so it's a way of kind of justifying laziness in a spiritual laziness you know I'm spiritual I'm already spiritual that's again is a kind of presumptuous idea I'm spiritual but I don't need any of these Traditions I don't need to go to church I don't need to do any spiritual practice I'm fine just the way I am I love myself this kind of the self-love sort of movement there's a danger of narcissism in this it becomes a religion of one in fact uh one common criticism of the Espionage movement from traditional religions is what they call sheilaism Sheila ism s-h-e-i-l-a is the name of a woman named Sheila this is like in the 80s or 90s she was interviewed and she was asked about her religion she said you know I don't go to church I don't belong to any religion but I believe in God and you know what I practice I practice sheilaism I practice my own religion and so what happened is that people who belong to like an actual traditional religion they pounced on this and it says see the Espionage movement leads to sheilaism these narcissistic people who to create their own religion without actually doing any spiritual practice without trying to Humble themselves before any higher reality the dangers this danger of narcissism complacency and as I said there's something a little violent a little polemical in saying spiritual but not religious I'm not that no there's a there's a more generous attitude to be had toward religion I think um so I think the more mature attitude that I think vedanta adopts is that spirituality and religion are dependent on each other they need each other to thrive they're mutually interdependent and mutually corrective they correct for each other's dangers and excesses what do I mean religion without spirituality degenerates easily into fundamentalism into dogmatism right and spirituality without religion can degenerate into superficiality into laziness into narcissism into complacency and egoism of a sort I don't need anybody or anyone or I don't care for it you know I'm just following you know my own religion now finally as I promised I wanted to cover one more question briefly what's the future of the sbnr movement well I've kind of kind of already hinted at it but I think Swami vika on the would have deeply sympathized with the Espionage Movement we don't even have to speculate because I quoted from that interview from 1896 where he already noticed this sbnr trend in his time and he was deeply sympathetic and he recognized that these are the people who are most receptive to vedanta right but at the same time I think you would tell these people who identify as spiritual but not religious be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water um try to question that that that latter phrase not religious question yourselves about that you really have to go that far I think he would have been happy if or he would be happy sbnr movement were to evolve into the sbar movement spiritual but also religious where they have a more generous understanding of an attitude toward religion where they judge religion based on the best exponents of religion rather than the worst exponents of religion and where they are humble enough to learn about other religions to engage in spiritual and religious practices because one of the things that Swami Vivekananda used to say is no person is born into a religion every person has a religion in the depths of his or her soul and so one of the first steps in spiritual life is to discover what that religion is in the depths of our heart and for that we need a lot of help we can't do that on our own read the Bible read the Gita read the Quran read the Buddha scriptures meet people who follow different religions different spiritual traditions and by doing that what happens is you're even you might think that well this is very external in your time but what it helps you to discover that that individualized religion and the depths of your soul oh this is [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Ramakrishna Monastery

Views: 25,006

Keywords: Vedanta, Vivekananda, Ramakrishna, Spirituality, Religion, Swami, Monk, Spiritual, Lecture, Talk, Education, Educational

Id: CILyTjCnOuY

Length: 49min 57sec (2997 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023