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If it were in our interest to seek spirituality, or at least approach it, where would we start? With complete certainty we can affirm that the majority would look for spirituality inside a temple, or perhaps in a secluded and preferably natural place, or perhaps there are those who, due to time and money limitations, try to approach spirituality in some corner peace of one’s own home in which an altar, however modest, has been erected. Continuing with these ideas, spirituality will be sought in silence and at some specific time of the day, perhaps at dawn or perhaps when darkness reigns, not lacking, of course, elements that favor solemnity such as candles, incense and relaxing music. . But is the above enough? Or is it necessary? Where is the sacred?
The spiritual life can be linked to religion, but it also exists without it, since religion, rather than being a path of virtue, is a bandage and a rope that subjugates its practitioners. Religion deals with the theme of the sacred, of the divine, but more in a political than a spiritual sense. On the contrary, spirituality dispenses with all dogma, does not adhere to laws or mandates, nor is it conditioned by threats or punishments. In this sense, spiritual life is the impulse that makes people search for a reality located beyond of the senses, of the material, of the physically perceptible.
But it is precisely the freedom of the spiritual life that plays against it and this is because its practitioners, not being clear where to hold onto, end up in a whirlwind of ideas and unfounded beliefs that more than favor the development of the being , they end up perverting it to a greater degree than it was before starting the search for inner progress. Spirituality has no rules, true, and is eclectic as it feeds on different spiritual traditions, but it is for this very reason that its practitioners fall into the worst of errors: superstition, in such a way that they end up living in unprecedented chaos. .
The word ‘superstition’ comes from the Latin ‘stare’, which means ‘to stand’, this means that ‘superstition’ is a sister word to ‘statue’, which also means ‘to stand’, but the difference is that the superstitious is the one who is standing on top of something, hence it has the prefix ‘super’, which means ‘above’ or ‘above’. Considering the above, the superstitious is the one who is above reason, but not because he has overcome it, but because he has lost his feet on the ground, thus falling into the same error as religious minds: fanaticism. Yes, the superstitious and the religious are alike insofar as they have lost their sanity and that is that being spiritual, or seeking spirituality, does not in any way mean renouncing reason, and is it not nature itself that is the most obvious evidence? great of rational thought? And this is because nothing in nature is superfluous and everything, from the macro to the micro, has a purpose and a function in the chain of being to which we all belong. Nature is rational and its internal order is logical, that we do not understand it is another matter.
The risks of superstition could be explained from the teachings of the chela Damodar Mavalankar, who was born in India around the second half of the 19th century and who left the comforts of his home to follow in the footsteps of the great mahatmas, which is understandable. , for the word ‘chela’, in Hinduism, is used in a sense of ‘servant of the masters’. Damodar Mavalankar began in the priestly caste of the Brahmins when he was twenty years old, however, in that same decade he met Helena Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society, and decided to abandon religion for spirituality. Of the two writings that Mavalankar bequeathed to us, we can cite the one on “Contemplation” to understand the risks to which superstition leads:
«There is a general misunderstanding of the term ‘contemplation’. Among us, the popular idea that contemplating consists of shutting oneself up for half an hour —or, at the most, two hours— in a private room and passively looking at one’s nose, or a stain on the wall, or perhaps a piece of glass remains. This, people suppose, is the true form of contemplation or meditation, but it is not so, since contemplating or meditating requires physical, mental, moral and spiritual development to run in parallel lines. Therefore, contemplation is the continuous attention of the mind on a particular subject, it is attention to sacred things. It is therefore hard to imagine how the idea of staring for half an hour has come to be associated with the word contemplation. Meditation is a state of continuous attention.”
Far from what is generally thought, and following Mavalankar’s ideas, meditation is not a passive state, but an active one. The practitioner of spiritualism must seek, by all means, to overcome his physical barriers to land on the plane of the metaphysical, of the transcendent, but, and this is the difficult thing, without renouncing reason, because doing so would be falling into the superstition mistake. Belief, because it is in the realm of superstition, is passive and typical of conformists, while, on the contrary, certainty, because it is in the realm of argument, is active and typical of true contemplative spirits.
Nothing is known about the last days of Mavalankar, since he left the life of the city to give himself up to the service of the mahatma in Tibet, after all he was a chela, a servant. Mavalankar not only confronted the superstitious and passive meditators, but also left an extensive written work in which, more than indoctrinating, he seeks to guide those who desire spirituality, teaching them that to serve the Masters there is nothing more than to serve faithfully, sincerity and selflessness, to the mortals who are with us today (family, friends and strangers). Meditation is here and now, in chaos, and not between candles and incense and for half an hour.