We learn from our religious scriptures that spirituality is the natural expression of a person’s religious convictions. But the twin concepts of religion and spirituality are so deeply intertwined that it may never occur to us how one leads to the other. Or, perhaps many of us conduct our daily religious worship quite mechanically and without any contemplation of our fundamental religious goals. We never really ask ourselves how religion prepares the ground for spirituality. Let us ask ourselves, ‘Are we benefiting from our practice of religion, and how? How are we, or are we at all, living our religious ideals? How do we find out if our religious endeavors are meaningful? In what ways can we prove to ourselves that we are making spiritual progress in our lives?’
The practice of religion becomes meaningless if we do not mould ourselves into better human beings and demonstrate our inner transformation through acts of spirituality in our daily life. We must develop an enduring spiritual consciousness, to undergird our worldly undertakings with the principles of ideal living.
The goal should be to actually live our religious ideals. Only then can we as human beings transcend from a lower to a higher, and finally to the highest level of humanism; this would be perfectly humane evolution. The steadfast pursuit of truth and selfless love in all our undertakings are goals worth living for, all the more so to countervail the crisis of the spirit endemic in the modern world.