Practical Spirituality

Authentic 'spirituality' has to be contextual and experiential. It has to touch and transform life in this world, instead of offering great rewards in an imaginary 'heaven' of innumerable pleasures after death. Most religions in the world today are offering to their gullible members such other-worldly rewards for a price paid in this world in terms of money and material. In place of such sickening and life-negating religiosity, we need a life transforming spirituality based on a concrete spiritual sadhana that can be practiced, experimented with and experienced by any one, anytime, anywhere. 'Sahana Yoga, the yoga of forgiving, enduring and self-sacrificing love as taught and demonstrated to the world by Sadguru Jesus Christ, is such a spiritual sadhana. It was used effectively as a large-scale socio-political sadhana for the first time in the world by Mahatma Gandhi in the freedom struggle of India. 'Satyagraha' was a socio-spiritual sadhana of liberation he had developed based on Sahana Yoga. Constant abuse and misuse of the term 'Satyagraha' by all kinds of groups and parties with vested interests have made this sadhana of social transformation lose its spiritual vitality and moral power. It is funny today to see even government servants and trade unions resort to 'Satyagraha' to get their salaries and perks increased in a country where the lowest paid government servant draws a salary ten times more than the average per capita income of the citizens of this country! In 1990 some of us developed a new socio-spiritual methodology for applying Sahana Yoga to bring about non-violent social transformation. We termed it 'Upavasa Prarthana Yagnam. It was first applied effectively during the Parents' Movement for De-Party Politicisation of Education (PMDE) in Kerala. It consisted of collective fasting by a group of like-minded people (Upavasa) and prayer (Prarthana) at a public place. It is made as a worshipful offering to God (Yagna) for a specific purpose upon the altar of one's own life. Today 'Upavasa Prarthana Yagnam' has become a popular methodology of expressing public protest. 'Upavasa Prarthana Yagnam' is further modified as 'Tyagarchana' in the context of the Second Freedom Struggle of India initiated on 30th Jan 2008 from Gandhi Mandapam, Kanyakumari. The objective of Tyagarchana' is to reduce the life-negating selfishness and greed within each one of us so that we can be set free from the grip of this all-pervasive evil. This is the first step to eliminate poverty and hunger from the world. 'Tyagarchana' consists of 'har din kutch tyag karo - har din ek prarthana karo (make some sacrifice everyday - say a prayer every day) for the success of the Second Freedom Struggle to build a 'hunger-free, caste-free and corruption-free India.