Religion vs Spirituality

A few months ago someone close to me publicly disagreed with me on my assertion, "Spiritual but not religious people are either mistaken or neither." There is a reason this is true.

Religion is structure, deriving from the Latin word to tie, bind, or in the estimation of Joseph Campbell, to mend what was separated or broken. Brought forward, it refers to any discipline designed to reconnect an individual with the Sublime.

Spirituality is the naked pursuit of the Sublime.

Vocabulary is important. Words have meaning, they have power. Any spiritual person knows this. Which is why the phrase "spiritual but not religious" makes no sense to me.

Which reminds me. I've used the word "Sublime" here twice as a proper noun without any explanation. Sublime is actually an adjective alluding to moral, transcendent, or spiritual perfection or as an adverb, the pursuit there of. Personified, as it is here, suggests it is a state of being or an individual being whose perfection cannot be conceived.

Now that that's out of the way...

Being spiritual but not religious is an impossibility. Spirituality is the pursuit of the Sublime while Religion is by definition a discipline which focus on achieving human sublimation. When a person pursues spiritual development they seek knowledge from various sources and attempt to implement and integrate what they've learned and found useful into their daily lives. They create a structure. A discipline. A religion. There are things they do or avoid everyday to mortify the flesh and fortify the spirit.

"Well, I meant an organized religion." Still counts, in fact organized religion considers an aspect of the human condition that most "spiritual but not religious" people would rather do without, the need for other people. The idea of a discreet individual is an illusion, the very heart of Vodou in particular is that you are a part of a greater whole.

Organized religion has a peculiar flaw at the root of it's greatest strength. Organized religion is ultimately a consortium of spiritual pioneers united under one set of presumptions about spirit and centuries of research and development into that area. Because of organized religions' success in a given field or avenue the tendency to assume their methods are universally applicable have merited the less favorable reputations. That said, they are no less useful as disciplines in the pursuit of spiritual development than less organized paths and provide the added benefit of an innate support structure.

So are all religious people spiritual? Not by a long shot. Having the structure to evolve spiritually doesn't provide you the impetus to use it. Plenty of people follow the rules for the sake of playing well with others. But these people are usually more inclined to evolve incidentally and they often turn to spiritual pursuits once their material concerns have been addressed. The transition from material to spiritual is already built into their lives, they only need to shift focus.

So in the end, religion and spirituality are flip sides to the same coin with one side necessitating the other. People who say otherwise are unaware of their own rituals or are too lazy to be either and to dishonest to admit it.