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Pico Iyer is a travel writer and novelist

What does spirituality mean to you?
It means the human being’s love affair with the truth, which comes in and out of focus.
It is not about sitting on a mountain top and seeing the light.
It is about being in the midst of everyday’s confusion, glimpsing the light, losing it, getting reflections and fractions of it, knowing it is there, but also knowing that one is not always in it --- though one is truest and richest in it.

Spirituality is a very human thing. And I have always been more interested in the human than in the divine, because the human’s attempt to recover the divinity inside himself is what most of us can relate to.
So for example when I think about spirituality, I always give it a small “s”; and sometimes I dispose of the word altogether.
And if you look at someone like the Dalai Lama, his power is not about sitting on a mountain top in Tibet, imbibing wisdom, but being in the middle of Washington, Beijing or Delhi trying to bring those principles into our very confused worlds.

So I suppose spirituality for me has as much to do with doubt as with faith, and as much with questions as with answers. It is the opposite of a fixed idea, or a finished process, or something that is even clear in our minds. It is a constantly evolving and changing thing.
Because of all this, I think of it as a love affair, an intense engagement with something really important to you, which you can’t expect to be absolutely stormless, nor absolutely clear. In our closest relations whether with family members or our partners, it is not and should not be a constantly levelled surface. It is something shifting and alive, changing at every moment, coming near us and then further from us as we change, and as the other person changes as well.

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