Spirit of Islam October 2017

22 Spirit of Islam Issue 58 October 2017 GARDEN OF SPIRITUALITY Seek its Nectar J UST visit a place of natural beauty, any place where there are mountains, flowing rivers, tall, lush green trees, birds on the wing, small white clouds floating in the sky and the sun shining. In such a place, you will feel like exclaiming: “How wonderful is nature!” But nature is not just a wonderful world. It is rather an amazing garden of spirituality. Indeed, everything in nature gives you a taste of spirituality. For example, when you see a honey bee hovering over a flower, you suddenly realize that it has a lesson to impart, for every part of nature is like a flower for you. In each part resides the nectar of spirituality. Take out this spiritual nectar and you will be motivated to turn yourself into a spiritual personality. It should be borne in mind that spirituality is not a state of ecstasy. Ecstasy is a trance-like state, a state of bliss or a semi-conscious condition. It is like a kind of stupor which causes blurriness in the conscious mind. But spirituality is very different from this, being marked by a high level of acute intellectual awakening, rather than a semi-somnolent state of mind. During the pre-scientific age, the notion had become prevalent that the heart was the source of spirituality. This was taken for granted and led to spirituality becoming a subject for meditation, that is, heart-based spirituality. Since the heart is devoid of any thinking capacity, spirituality could not therefore, become an advanced discipline. It was reduced rather to being an array of ill- defined assumptions. Now that we live in the age of science, it is possible to place spirituality within the frame work of a mind-based discipline. Being a science just like other sciences, spirituality should be associated not with meditation but rather with contemplation. Since the domain of the physical sciences encompasses the exploration of the quantitative aspects of nature, what is discovered therein is necessarily of a material nature. The domain of spiritual science on the other hand, encompasses the contemplation of the qualitative aspects of nature, so For an awakened mind, the whole world is a world of spirituality. It extracts spiritual content from everything. The awakened person thus enhances his spirituality until he grows to be a spiritual giant.