(The author, Dr Janki Santoke Ph. D. (Philosophy) gives discourses on Vedanta through weekly classes and public talks. She writes for many newspapers and magazines including Times of India and Economic Times. Her articles and lectures use the knowledge of Vedanta to analyse and solve the challenges faced in personal and professional life. She started her journey with Vedanta in 1988, when she joined Swami Parthasarathy's Vedanta Academy for a three year full time residential course in Vedanta. After the course she undertook administrative and tutorial duties there. She was re-located to New Delhi in 1998 where she founded the Vedanta Institute Delhi. The organization conducts public discourses on Vedanta and Bhagavad Gita as well as regular classes. She returned to Mumbai in 2005. Here she continues her work in teaching and writing on Vedanta).
Are spiritual people those who believe in God? What about agnostics who seem to be living more or less ideal lives? Without professing any devotion to God , they are a beacon light to their society. Surely, it is better to live an ideal life than mutter the name of the Lord! Then are the spiritual people, those who believe in goodness rather than in God. If goodness is spirituality, then we seem only to have shifted the question. Who are ‘good people’? What is the absolute measure for good? Would it not be easier to say what is better or worse rather than what is good? So how about we say then that spirituality is about getting better. It is the strife to improve oneself. If a man be very good, but does not conceive better, he stagnates spiritually.
Another, not as good, but striving, will no doubt catch up with, and better him, one day. Philosophically, what is important is not where one is, but where one is heading. The hunter Valmiki became the sage Valmiki. The sinners will be deemed righteous, says the Gita, “for they have rightly resolved”.
Thus, spiritual people are those who have resolved to improve. The desire to improve is said to culminate in Enlightenment, Self-realisation, the merger with the Self.
It is the state of a Buddha, Christ, Ram, Mohammed and all those revered personalities. Thus to be spiritual, then, must mean the desire for Self-realisation, the final Perfection. That desire, accompanied by a systematic plan to reach there, is what is being spiritual.
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