Just visit a place of natural beauty, a place where there are mountains, flowing rivers, tall, lush green trees, birds on the wing, small white clouds floating in the sky, the sun shining, and so on. In such a spot, you will feel like exclaiming: “How wonderful nature is!” But nature is not simply 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 honeybee 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. That is, it is like a kind of drowsiness that causes blurriness in the conscious mind. But spirituality is very different from this, being marked by a high level of acute intellectual development. It is a form of intellectual awakening, rather than a semi-somnolent state of mind.
During the pre-scientific age, the notion had become current 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 was 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.
Maulana Wahiduddin Khan is an Islamic spiritual scholar who has authored over 200 books on Islam, spirituality, and peaceful coexistence in a multi-ethnic society.
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