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Mani Shankar Aiyer is a senior Congress leader

What does spirituality mean to you?
It is something very noble which was grossly misused by most of humanity and through most of history. In essence, it is about that which is not material, that which cannot be reduced to those obvious realities around us. It is about a world of the mind anchored in a value system which cannot be justified in terms of reason, and which exists in the realm of “ought” rather than in the realm of “is”. So whatever has appeared to the human mind anchored in value systems constitutes spirituality.
Most of it has been written up and retained through religious instructions. So although spirituality today is so often affiliated to religious beliefs, it needn’t be so. For me, it is rather about the life of the spirit, as distinct to the life of the body.

How does it manifest concretely in your life?
I was born a Hindu, but I do not espouse the body of beliefs called Hinduism. Most of the time I tend to be an atheist, though at times of personal crisis I find myself pushed to find a straw to hang on --- in the direction of agnosticism, but rarely of religion.
So much of our culture is bound by religious beliefs and practices that it is very difficult to disentangle the spiritual from the religious. Yet, we are not good human beings because we have been so instructed by religious books; rather, because value systems have been created by society and through the process of nurturing, as distinct from nature.

There is a huge influence of religion on spirituality but one can talk about the latter without reference to a particular set of beliefs embedded in religion. Also, most of the things we agree should be done or not be done can be found in the bodies of all religions. The differences are at the margins, not at the core. If you deal with the essence of religions and not the periphery, you can build a secular society.
On the overall, I am convinced it is possible for a society to live without religion, but impossible for it to live without the values embodied by spirituality. Spirituality as the life of the mind is essentially the consensus at any point in time within the individual of the totality of values and its prioritisation, which enable him to live his life. You cannot determine it mechanistically or materialistically in the Marxist sense of the word. It comes out of an evolution of “ought” from “is”.

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