If you look at early eastern religions, especially Buddhism, Taoism, and Bön (Tibetan), spirituality is regarded as the basis of all practices and teachings. Spirituality is essentially the foundation shared by all indigenous religions (Native American, Aboriginal...) and in this sense is the connection to (or experience of) oneness and the transmission of knowledge on how to maintain this connection.
Religion is simply the way people put this foundation into a conceptual and possibly institutional vessel. Because we tend to be more comfortable with concepts rather than something abstract and beyond any language's capacity to express, we divide this basis, spirituality, into schools of thought; as we allow conceptual thought to dominate and widen this division and attach to a particular religion, it is easy to forget oneness.
This is the point at which dualism enters our lives more forcefully and causes a lot of suffering and strife. We separate seamless consciousness into separate entities, subjects and objects, us versus the enemy. We allow fear, hatred, greed, and ignorance to control our lives. Some people get so used to this that it becomes something solid and permanent, and they accept a limited notion of "self" and are comforted by the consumerism and ethnocentrism that is fed to them.
I do not believe in "god" as a separate entity. As something perpetuated by religions who have become so superficial and intolerant from pushing away spirituality, and are as empty as the concepts which sustain them.
It could be said that spirituality is the same as pantheism, the idea that "god" is the entire universe. "god" is only a word, no different from the others used to point out the same thing (Being, Oneness...). But "god" has become a symbol of the dualisms I've mentioned, and may have lost its connection to its true meaning.
Spirituality means letting go of the extremely limited human conditioning you've taken on, as well as freeing yourself of greed, hatred, and ignorance. It is non-dual awareness. It is knowing that all phenomena that you perceive are your mind. Your perceptions and your mind are the same. The objects we interact with every day exist only conventionally, tied to the meanings, words, and concepts we attach to them. At the ultimate (or quantum) level, they are all the same: a seamless background from which conventional phenomena manifest.
It's like waking in a dream and realizing that the dream and your mind are the same thing.
Something I find very interesting about Aboriginees is that the dream world is as "real" to them as waking life. They are so close to oneness that attachment to material things is completely alien to them. But colonizers were oblivious to this. It's sort of....painfully funny to see how some Americans take life so seriously and have seemingly tried to remove dreaming from our culture. Most people I know can't remember hardly any of their dreams.
I wonder how long it will take for the synthetic, fearful world we've created and invested in to change into something more compassionate and incredibly enriched by the true nature of reality; like waking in dream and remembering its infinite potential.
~cygnus
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