Spiritual But Not Religious- why aren’t these the same?

Religion is everywhere in India. Growing up, I didn’t think much about the question in the title, “What is ‘spiritual but not religious?'” Myriad Gods with their own stories, sundry festivals with their rituals. Temples, mosques, and churches all around, some old and forgotten and some newly marked on the side of the road, just as an orange blob on a stone with flowers. Religious leaders, the Gurus, the Shankaracharyas, the Fathers, and the Moulavis… were all representatives of some brand of after-life. Spirituality and religion were synonymous to me then and continued long after I left home.  Now I know better, if only a little better.

All food is not the same.

Mexican food tastes very different from Chinese, and both taste different from Italian food. Eating makes hunger pangs disappear- this is common to all cuisines. When we are hungry for food, we’re not specifically hungry for Italian or Indian food. We may crave a particular taste, but our hunger knows no taste. It’s an experience that demands fulfillment, a question that begs an answer. Hunger wants to be replaced with fullness.

There’s another kind of hunger.

A kind of hunger that cannot be answered by eating. This hunger makes us feel incomplete, unfulfilled, and unfinished. We look for ways to satiate this hunger, but all efforts fail. This is spiritual hunger. It cannot be expressed in words, but everyone knows the experience. A yearning, a hope, and an emptiness that screams out a cry for completion. Every external quest to answer this spiritual hunger goes unanswered. It remains just as it was. Questioning. Like a question received on text, waiting to be answered.

Some solve their spiritual hunger and become whole.

There are people through the ages that have addressed their spiritual hunger permanently. When they first experienced this unending peace for the first time, they knew that the spiritual hunger was gone. They had become “whole,” these holy men, and there was a method that got them there.  These methods became the recipe handed down to their followers from generation to generation.

Changing Taste Buds.

Now the cultures all have recipe books remembered loosely as the religious traditions of their culture. The ingredients may have shifted over time, and fusion cuisines were created to be more palatable to the changing tastes of the cultures. Religious traditions are just cuisines from different cultures for this spiritual hunger. Maybe you grew up in the Hindu tradition, and the Hindu religious tradition offers hope for your spiritual hunger temporarily. Maybe you’re a global citizen eager to try other tastes from other traditions.

Hunger and Taste.

It doesn’t matter what your taste in food is. The hunger that these religious traditions try to solve is of the spiritual kind. When I hear someone say they are spiritual but not religious, l hope they know their spiritual hunger is beyond a matter of taste.

Religion’s role as spiritual food is not just to be palatable— it must make us whole.