There are many cultures and each of them has its own individual way of perceiving spirituality.....but the essence is the same. The way people grow spiritually and the inner mechanisms are also the same.
Its like there are many different types of cuisine in the world but the basic ingredients are the same and the process of digestion and assimilation are also the same.
If you look at the many varieties of ‘spirituality’ from the point of view of their sameness then this is what you will find. If you look at them from the perspective of their clear differences then you’ll get a very different picture. We tend to see what we want to see, and appealing to some alleged universality has obvious merit for those seeking to validate their own beliefs.
It isn’t difficult to find family resemblances among the major religions but belief by its very nature suggests a certain fixity of mind that reifies difference and privileges its own view. When it comes to ‘spirituality’ things get much more complicated because it’s almost impossible to say what it is. I tried looking up definitions of the word and soon got lost. The first one I came to defined it as ‘the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.’ The next described it as the ‘recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than myself.’ Other definitions focussed more on values, meaning and connection. We probably all have a sense of the limits within which the term normally operates but that’s likely as far as we would agree.
Identifying some unifying ‘essence’ to spirituality is much harder. Some approaches explicitly refute the very notion that things even have an essence. So if you want to argue that your understanding of spirituality is common to all its forms you might find you need to trim the unruly spiritual shrub rather hard until it conforms to the contours of your own beliefs, by which time it will no longer be able to lay claim to any universal shape.
It seems to me you can argue that spirituality is relevant and applicable to everyone - and I think people who take the word seriously do generally believe this - only if you don’t put your own limits on what it means, which I think would exclude any attempt to locate an essence. For example, approaches that involve dualism or marginalise sensory experience or the so-called material world simply make spirituality irrelevant and meaningless to many people. If those approaches are essential to spirituality then the whole idea simply collapses and it becomes a peculiar preoccupation relevant only to a certain kind of person. I’m afraid the kind of discussions that typically occur here take us down that particular route.
