Mindfulness journey begins the moment you become aware of your present experience. It is not something you achieve, but something you return to.
In this blog, we will explore the meaning and importance of mindfulness, and how it helps in building spiritual awareness without religion.
What is Mindfulness?
In Buddhism context, mindfulness means to remember to observe how the mind’s attention moves from one thing to another.
Dr Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), defines mindfulness as the awareness that arises from paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.
According to the Bible, mindfulness plays a key role in being aware of our own meditation and the benefits we can gain from this practice.
According to Thich Nhat Hanh, mindfulness is to be aware of what is going on, and everyone is capable of being mindful.
According to Psychology, mindfulness is defined as moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and the surrounding environment, characterised mainly by “acceptance” attention to thoughts and feelings without judging whether they are right or wrong.
From all these interpretations, we can understand a simple thing that mindfulness is all about being aware, being in the moment, and being attentive about one’s surroundings gracefully. When I say being attentive, I am not saying to be in alert mode. I am just trying to say that being attentive gracefully, like a sea absorbing its own wave, or being in the flow with life, like being carelessly careful.
The True Essence of Mindfulness Journey
According to Buddhist teachings, mindfulness is a prerequisite for spiritual awareness. The more we master our mind, the more our spiritual awareness grows.
Self-awareness is the foundation of spiritual growth, allowing us to understand our thoughts, emotions and behaviours.
Self-awareness keeps an eye on our ego as we develop spirituality, reducing blind spots. It is self-awareness that protects us from spiritual bypassing as we become more spiritually aware.
In our day-to-day life, we live in our heads. Modern society is cognicentric. We value cognitive ability and thinking. Our biggest influence is the constant stream of thoughts running through our heads. This pre-occupation and distraction result in us being totally oblivious to our other dimensions, which is why self-awareness is necessary to keep an eye on our minds and thoughts.
What is Spiritual Awareness?
Spiritual awareness adds another dimension to our lives. It makes our lives richer and more rewarding. It improves well-being and increases inner peace, and it supercharges our perception, making it more accurate and faster.
Spiritual awareness is awareness of the beyond-physical world, the non-material world. The more ethereal aspects of life. Those that are more intangible and ineffable, but just as real, all the same.
It is the ability to tap into that spiritual essence, the truth of who we are at our core. The part of us that never dies, that sacred part that begins, that expansiveness.
Spirituality vs Religion
As we know, religion is something which keeps people together who share the same ideology or follow the same rituals. It means in some way it can be called an institution or community which is organised and has certain rules and belief which needs to be followed, there should not be a scope for questioning it.
Here things get a little troublesome because self-awareness and then spiritual awareness are the ultimate truth, and so one thing that is most important to understand is that truth cannot be organised. The moment you organise it, you kill it.
Truth is an individual experience, and it can never become a collective phenomenon. Those who have attained the experience of it were individuals, not crowds, not mobs, not Hindus, not Mohammedans, not Christians, not Jews, but just individuals.
Mahavira is an individual, Buddha is an individual, and Jesus is an individual. They experience something in their aloofness, in their silence, in their innermost shrine of being. The temple, church and mosque are not outside; they are within you.
How to Develop Spiritual Awareness
There are multiple ways of developing self-awareness and then tapping into spiritual awareness. We can do it through yoga, trans personal awareness, or just by being in the moment.
There are many ancient stories that spiritual awareness struck people all of a sudden, out of nowhere; those who were ready to experience and grasp it got enlightened and those who were not ended up in some mental illness.
Let’s explore different methods and how they work.
Through yoga, we develop moment-by-moment spiritual awareness, uniting the individual soul with the universal soul through the eight limbs of yoga.
Spiritual awareness is achieved through practices such as pranayam, dharana, dhyana and meditation, which lead to samadhi – a state of blissful, non-dual absorption in pure consciousness.
Trans personal psychology explores and advocates for experiences that extend awareness beyond the individual sense of personal identity. It includes non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as those from meditation.
Similarly, there are many other ways in which different religious philosophies have suggested many ways in which one can choose, even though there is a book called “Vigyan Bhairav Tantra” which suggests 112 techniques to tap into spiritual awareness.
Out of all these, my personal favourite is the concept of “here and now” given by Alan Watts, which is about focusing on the present moment and immediate experience rather than dwelling on past events or future possibilities.
And I am very obsessed with this concept, and I have been practising it for the last year. In starting it will be difficult to get rid of thoughts, but eventually you will develop the ability to control your thoughts and even give them a direction.
I am not saying by doing this I have become spiritually aware, but I have been self-aware for sure, and it has helped me a lot both in my personal and professional life.
Final Thought
In the end, mindfulness is not about doing more, but about being fully present in what we already do. If we can remain in the present moment and bring complete awareness to even the simplest actions, life begins to transform in the most subtle yet powerful ways.
As many mystics have beautifully expressed, when I am eating, “I am just eating.” When I am walking, “I am just walking”. When I am thinking, “I am just thinking.”
In that simple act of presence lies clarity, peace, and a deeper connection with life itself.