Maulana Wahiduddin Khan | The Sunday Guardian | July 05, 2020
Just visit a place of natural beauty, any place where there are mountains, flowing rivers, tall, lush green trees, birds on the wing, small white clouds floating in the sky and the sun shining. In such a place, you will feel like exclaiming: “How wonderful is nature!” But nature is not just a wonderful world. It is rather an amazing garden of spirituality. Indeed, everything in nature gives you a taste of spirituality. For example, when you see a honey bee hovering over a flower, you suddenly realize that it has a lesson to impart, for every part of nature is like a flower for you. In each part resides the nectar of spirituality. Take out this spiritual nectar and you will be motivated to turn yourself into a spiritual personality.
It should be borne in mind that spirituality is not a state of ecstasy. Ecstasy is a state of bliss or a semi-conscious condition. But spirituality is different from this, being marked by a high level of acute intellectual awakening, rather than a semi-somnolent state of mind.
In the age of science, it is possible to place spirituality within the framework of a mind-based discipline. Being a science just like other sciences, spirituality should be associated not with meditation but rather with contemplation. The domain of spiritual science encompasses the contemplation of the qualitative aspects of nature, so that within its scope, it is things of a spiritual nature which are brought to light.
For a honey bee, its whole world is a world of flowers. It concentrates on flowers, takes the nectar from them and returns to its hive. The same is true of an awakened mind. For an awakened mind, the whole world is a world of spirituality. It extracts spiritual content from everything. The awakened person thus enhances his spirituality until he grows to be a spiritual giant.
Spiritual science, in developing the mind, enables one to analyse matters in an objective manner. In complex issues, it is an aid to right judgement. It helps one to view things in such a way that mental confusion is dispelled, and one can think with total clarity. If heart-based spirituality was no more than thoughtless ecstasy, mind-based spirituality has emerged as a fine-tuned form of high thinking.
Our world is like a garden of all good things, and spirituality enables the individual to live in and benefit from this garden.