The Meaning and Significance of Spirituality in Europe and in India

be reduced to purely physical, psychological, or social causes and must be considered as more or less direct proofs of the existence of higher scientifically not controllable principles or powers. This attitude, which avoids explaining higher facts by lower ones, prevails in Eastern and especially Indian religious and philosophical traditions. There are few possibilities of reaching any significant result when comparing these traditions with Western naturalism or positivism, which exclude such an approach to reality. A confrontation of this kind can lead merely to a false and yet often-expressed opinion that the spiritual approach does not play in the West the same fundamental role as in the East. Yet, an impartial glance at the whole history of Western culture shows not only that the spiritual attitude was prevalent until the middle of the nineteenth century but also that it is still alive in the most representative trends of present-day Europe. Its origins and characteristic tendencies are, however, more divergent from similar currents in the East than is generally admitted. The source of the very notion of the spiritual is the same in East and West, specifically in Europe and India: spiritual values are discovered inwardly in those psychical faculties of man which appear as giving him an immediate certitude free from contingency and which are generally considered as a reflection, in human beings, of a higher, non-physical principle. In India, this discovery is based on highly developed techniques of concentration, which by means of progressive elimination of all usual psychical processes lead to a self-revealing immediate cognition sharply separated from all other approaches by an existential leap. The results of this approach are: (a) inwardly, tho truly spiritual sphere is limited to this one specific cognition, while other approaches are considered implementary or even delusive, (b) it leads to the direct apprehension of an undifferentiated unity, in which all individual distinctions are absorbed, and (c) at the same time it remains an empirical, incommunicable, utterly individual cognition

Epistemology · Meaning (existential) · Pathology · Sociology · Spirituality · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion · Medicine · Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religion, Society, and Development · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology

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