Why do some people go looking for spirituality? Who invented the idea in the first place?
For the length of this argument, let us set some things aside. Forget belief in gods or any other supernatural being — whether it arrived through culture and tradition, through the convictions of our parents or of whoever else had influence over us, or out of our own imagination. Forget the fear of death that pushes us to look for meaning beyond a limited body. Forget the absence of existential meaning produced by monotonous routines and dull lives, by depression, by mid-life and quarter-life crises. Forget everything we have learned in the course of our lives and inherited from our parents or our surroundings.
Set all of it aside, hypothetically and temporarily, just while this argument runs.
Let us try to find a little objectivity by emptying the cup for a moment, leaving the page blank, starting fresh — without short-sightedness, and without rose-colored glasses, or any other color.
So where is it?
Having discarded all that, where is spirituality? What is left of it?
It does not exist in the past or the future; both are irrelevant. Only the present, this moment, this instant, is relevant, because it is the only thing we have.
And what is the present? This moment is made of our perceptions — the images created by our senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. To those we add one more, the sense of mind, as Buddhism defines it.
All of these generate a perception of reality in the mind. But taken separately, without being sorted under a label or an opinion, an idea or a concept, they are mere differences in frequency of vibration, in light, in signal — producing perception across different dimensions of space, sound, temperature and so on.
Perceived exactly as they are, they shed their meaning. They are nothing more than small parts, divorced from one another. The sense of belonging, of being, disperses.
What the dissolution shows
This realization of the parts — the dissolution of the complete entity — produces the recognition that a great deal of our self is genuinely not there. That it is no more than a complex set of random elements reacting with one another, creating a false impression of a self that is compact, independent, real and defined.
When in fact we are not a complete entity at all. And more than that: we are the products of definite causes, and subject, in exactly that same sense, to change.
That recognition generates a new spiritual impulse — toward liberation, toward understanding, toward self-discovery at a different level.
A different kind of seeker
Many pursuers of spirituality are really pursuers of self-knowledge.
They stand apart from the conventional notion that being spiritual means chasing, following or conforming to specific rules laid down in a belief system — or pouring oneself into emotions of worship directed at a deity defined by other people or by oneself, and performing the particular actions that belief calls for.
These unconventional spiritual people look rather more like philosophers. They are trying to understand their own nature. It is a search for truth, as objectively as they can manage. It is the relinquishing of every possession, as far as that is possible — and among those possessions, preconceived ideas, and self-image, and everything else we build to give our lives a sense of meaning but which is really founded on half-truths or on outright illusion.
This range of practitioners is the truest definition of one who seeks the quintessence of Truth.