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Jatin Das has been painting for over four decades and is one of India’s prominent artists.
What does Spirituality mean to you?
Very often people mix up spirituality with religion. Maybe at some point religion was born out of a spiritual quest, but it has long gone far away from it into all kinds of “-isms”. So even though I was brought up in a traditional Hindu family, I have nothing to do with religion, I do not have any religious practice, in any shape or form. But I do fundamentally believe and invest into spiritual elements.
When I walk, or paint, or eat, or look at the sky, it can be a spiritual experience. Even when I sit in the toilet it can be a spiritual experience. If you and I are having a conversation that elevates us, that elevates our imagination, our thoughts, our perception, then it is spiritual. When I drink coffee, it may be a dull experience or I may enjoy it in a way which is beyond the materiality of the coffee, which is not about the coffee itself. So spirituality is not tangible, it is metaphoric, poetic, beyond the immediacy of the element that provokes it, but which can come from any concrete entity. If you are in tune, a glass or a chair would talk to you.
Also, spirituality has no paradigm, no doctrine. This is why you may be from Timbuktu or the North Pole and we may deeply connect, while I may not have a genuine interaction with someone I have known for twenty years.
So in everything I do, I look for the spiritual element. Otherwise I get bored very quickly. I am a very restless person. But I can have a lot of patience if I find that the experience and the journey are more than what they look like.
One more point: money, power and other tangible material things are divorced from spiritual elements. Yet, if money can buy freedom, then it becomes spiritual. It is simply in that case a means to freedom.
Do you believe you are guided and protected by a superior force?
Of course there must be guidance of some sort. I believe there are actually three levels in us. The top layer deals with this reality --- “it is night, let us get ready and do something” etc. The...
