Outrider,
Spirituality is about an inner quest. You might consider that statement as vague but that is the truth. It is about identifying the core part of ourselves shorn of mental images, personality and so on.
Just imagine that you are somehow connected through wires and stuff to a virtual reality game. Within the game you are living as a person in a virtual world. In the game you do lots of things that the game is programmed to do. You enjoy and suffer as a virtual person. You identify with that personality completely. You even forget that you are a separate human being independent of the game.
If at one point, when you realize that you are not the person within the game but that you are a real person independent of it...you will then try to extricate yourself from the game and its numerous connections to you. That is when you start detaching yourself from your virtual self and identify with the real you.
Spirituality is similar. It is about detaching ourselves from our earthly personality and realizing that we are actually independent of it. That is what 'Knowing Thyself' means.
Religion is one of the means of achieving this Self Realization. It is a cultural and regional creation with a spiritual base. In the absence of civil courts and law enforcement, it also has many other purposes such as social control and enforcing discipline.
The magic element is not relevant at all, except that in the process of realizing our independence we also realize that there is a bigger world 'outside' the virtual world...which in fact creates the virtual world. This might appear as magic for some people. It could be normal for others.
Cheers.
Sriram
I'm sure that might mean something to you, Sriram, but it's a world away from my idea of spirituality, and it just serves to demonstrate the way how loosely that word can be fashioned to suit a person's ideas.
For instance, in contrast to you, spirituality for me is all about understanding 'mental images, personality and so on', and by understanding being hopefully more able to relate to the world around us.
The idea of 'Knowing Thyself' for me is inextricably bound to understanding my earthly personality(I know of no other, unless you are willing or able to produce evidence of this 'other').
If one takes Outy's magical 'spirit' element' as a defining element of spirituality, of course, then he is entirely correct, as there is not the slightest evidence that such an element exists.
For me this 'bigger world' outside the 'virtual world' which our brains inhabit is accessed mainly through rationality, logic and science which are often able to demonstrate that our intuitive(and quite possibly useful evolutionary) assumptions are not necessarily the way the world works. In contrast to that, religions often seem to encourage and exaggerate such assumptions such that the 'real' world tends to become lost in a world of unreality.
