Perhaps God is man's spiritual liability

Re-reading Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza - known as the 'most impious man' on earth - and mulling over his words, 'God is man's spiritual liability', i began to think how spot-on the Dutch rationalist was!

'Haif, khuda beech mein aa gaya / Vagarna maine toh asraar tasawwuf ka jaan liya tha' - 'Alack, god came from nowhere / Otherwise, I was close to understanding the mysteries of spirituality'. Agnostic Urdu poet Yaas Yagana Changezi's rather flippant couplet underlines the redundancy of god in spiritual matters. In fact, it seems a bit ironic that god is a superfluously concocted entity in the realm of spirituality because the general

tenor

is that god connotes spirituality and vice versa. Both are intertwined. But this ingrained perception needs a jolt, a soda-water-bottle shake, at that. We've dove-tailed god and spirituality. Even an atheist or a die-hard non-believer can be spiritual without any faith in god or divinity. Yours truly has never believed in god or an esoteric power, but he has been spiritually aware, if not active.

In one of his purely spiritual poems, Chilean Nobel laureate

Pablo Neruda

- who hardly wrote anything ostensibly spiritual as he believed that love itself was spiritual - once wrote: 'Talk to me not of god / I need no fabrication / Let me look for divinity among humans / To me, this is god; this is spirituality / For, I know that god is a monomania and spirituality is multidimensional / Then, why should I embrace the former at the cost of the latter...?' Rene Descartes also believed that god blurred our vision and so impaired our ability to see the spiritual side of the world. His famous dictum 'Cogito Ergo Sum' (I think, therefore, I am) stemmed out of his cogitative quest of a fictitious god who he considered as 'An illogical creation of lowly minds'.

Spirituality is a boundless ocean. It's the

summum bonum

or sum total of all that's sublime in us and that's inherently good in all humans. Then, where does god come from? Fariduddin Attar, the putative master of Jalaluddin Rumi, the only clearly specified atheistic Sufi mystic wrote in one of his Pahalavi verses: 'Shedun azqaaf ul-nizzat mee munfarid angaaf ' - 'I've delved into the ocean of spirituality; I need no medium or mediator'. His 'medium' or 'mediator' was god who he rejected at the age of 16 and never believed in such a concept again.

When we bring in god, we sabotage spirituality. God's a deviation, a digression. Towards the fag-end of his incarceration at Robben Island,

Nelson Mandela

believed that his intrinsic compassion was his embedded attribute and it didn't come from any god, Bible or scripture. 'My so-called spirituality came from no religion or god,' Mandela told Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel laureate in Literature, when he was released from prison.

Ascribing spiritual enlightenment to an imaginary god is akin to degrading one's in-built spiritual divinity. Rauf Akhtar stated in his Taslees: 'Khud ko na kar itna majboor / Khudi ko na kar paamal / Tu hi woh khuda hai jiski hai tujhe talaash' - 'Don't make yourself so helpless / Don't trample upon yourself / You're that god who you've been searching since time immemorial'.

Let god remain non-interfering in your spiritual quest. Look inward and evolve without any help from a fictional divine being.


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