Spirituality

There is a spiritual revolution taking place—you have probably seen it on your street corner in the form of meditation and yoga centers popping up everywhere. Everyone has their own view of spirituality and their own spiritual practice. For many people, being in nature, playing music, or painting is a spiritual practice. Oprah Winfrey’s definition of spirituality is “living with an open heart”.

In 1957, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said that:

Spiritual development is the birthright of everyone, for it is the unfoldment of the essential nature of the soul, or inner consciousness…. Soul is the individual property of everybody. It is the natural and inseparable possession, nay, the very existence, of every man. Everybody has the right to enjoy his own possession. Everybody has the right to enjoy the sat [truth] chit [Being] ananda [bliss] nature of his own soul. In the most natural manner, everybody has every right to enjoy permanent peace, bliss eternal, which is the nature of his own soul.[1]

Some people feel that the outer or material joys of life are opposed to, or diminish, the spiritual value, and that one has to give up, or become detached, from material values in order to achieve inner fulfillment.

Below is a short video of Maharishi reflecting on the topic of spirituality. Here Maharishi points out that inner spirituality does not conflict with the outer material value of life:

In 1958, Maharishi said, “I differ entirely from the age-old common concept of spirituality, which pleads for detachment as an essential prerequisite for spiritual development.”[2]

Maharishi always said we should enjoy 200% of life—100% of the inner spiritual value along with 100% of the outer material value. He offered Transcendental Meditation as a simple way to integrate abstract absolute being with the concrete details of the relative.

Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation technique enables the mind to transcend the field of objectivity—the material value of life— and experience the eternal blissful field of pure consciousness, pure silence within—the realm of the soul. In his commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita (4:2), Maharishi explains that spiritual development is the basis for all other forms of development. By integrating the silence of your being with the outer material values of life, you are developing the total spiritual content of life.

Let’s live not just with an open heart, but with a heart that is full and overflowing from the depths of our soul—sharing its own essential blissful spiritual content of life!