Noun

spirituality (plural spiritualities)

1. Concern for that which is unseen and intangible, as opposed to physical or mundane.
2. Appreciation for religious values.

Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual's inner life; such practices often lead to an experience of connectedness with a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine realm. Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. It can encompass belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world.

Spirituality concerns itself with matters of the spirit, a concept closely tied to religious belief and faith, a transcendent reality, or one or more deities. Spiritual matters are thus those matters regarding humankind's ultimate nature and meaning, not only as material biological organisms, but as beings with a unique relationship to that which is perceived to be Reality beyond the bodily senses, time and the material world.

Sourced

• Politics and Religion are obsolete. The time has come for Science and Spirituality.
  • Often quoted by Arthur C. Clarke as one of his favorite remarks of Jawaharlal Nehru, though some of his earliest citations of it, in Voices from the Sky : Previews of the Coming Space Age (1967), p. 154, indicate that Nehru may himself been either quoting or paraphrasing a statement of Vinoba Bhave.

• The contemplation of celestial things will make a man both speak and think more sublimely and magnificently when he descends to human affairs.
  • Cicero, reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 562.

External links