“What’s the difference between being spiritual
and being religious?”
The answer to this question very much
depends on whether we come at it from the perspective of the man in the street,
or from that of the scriptures.
The Man in the Street
The man in the street thinks a mystic
is spiritual and a priest religious. He sees the religious person as a cog in
the ecclesiastical machinery, observing traditions and doing his duty as part
of a larger religious community. The “spiritual” person, on the other hand, is
someone operating outside institutional religion; thought to be in harmony with
the natural order, and communing with the universe or some such. The religious person
would always be in church on Sunday (or Saturday), while the “spiritual” person
may or may not.
