No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is born in a particular society, and it is this society that creates the mindset of an individual. We imbibe the effects of our surroundings and the prevailing culture. Every person is a product of the environment or society they live in. These societal effects that are cultivated in one’s mind are referred to as the conditioning of the mind. Everyone possesses a mind that is conditioned in some way or the other, and this is the biggest issue we face. It is this conditioning that is responsible for turning us away from our original pure nature. In this respect, everyone is a sure case of a conditioned mind. It is very important that this unnatural effect is eliminated; which means the conditioned mind must be deconditioned. Hence, it becomes imperative that each one of us decondition ourselves and bring ourselves back on to our pure original nature. This process of deconditioning of the mind can also be called as the re-engineering of the mind.
I recently met a person in a tour to Europe. He told me that he had opened a school of spirituality.
I asked him what he did there. He explained that they had developed some exercises after doing which a person goes into a state of trance or ecstasy. He termed these practices a way of destressing.
I said this was de-thinking, or stopping one's thinking process. This may provide relief for a brief period. This is Anesthesia.
What's the benefit of this?
At most you can say that you gave temporary relief to people in stress and tension, by putting a stop to their thinking process. I consider this negative spirituality. That is, if spirituality has no positive role, then what's the need for it? Animals are already in this state of spirituality, then why should we be in need of it? There must be a positive role of spirituality, otherwise spirituality is nothing. The matter isn't so simple. The spirituality that people know of since thousands of years is heart-based. This is continuing to this day.
This spirituality is dismissed in the scientific age, just as the geocentric theory has been. Medical science tells us that heart isn’t the centre of our feelings, rather the mind is the centre. Mind is the centre of both our thinking and feelings. It was earlier believed that thinking is connected to the mind, while feelings are generated in the heart. This was a superstition. At present, heart-based spirituality has no place in the world. If someone takes you in a state of trance or ecstasy, then that's similar to taking a tranquilizer and nothing else. The spirituality I believe in is mind-based. It deals with re-engineering of the mind. Our mind has great capacity. We have to train the mind and make it capable of beautifully managing life's affairs.
Spirituality, according to my experience, is an art of problem management in a very beautiful manner. This is the meaning of spirituality. If you develop your thinking process, you arrive at a very high intellectual level. I was recently travelling somewhere and realized that flying high in the air was a demonstration of spirituality. The world on the planet's surface consists of jungles, rivers, mountains, and so on. The airplanes fly high above all this. Similarly, when a person elevates himself such that he leads his life by rising above the problems he faces in his daily affairs, he becomes a super human being, or a super man.
Spirituality makes you a super man. Spirituality elevates you, just as the airplane does. You are in a position to manage things on a high level with high thinking.
