There is a growing interest in new spirituality in our times. With its all-inclusive approach to religion accompanied by its emphasis on the spiritual disciplines, the East has become an object of great attraction. Eastern spirituality offers a wide variety of options from which one can choose depending on inclination. Prominent among them are yoga, astrology, holistic healings, and transcendental meditation, among many others.

The term ‘spirituality’ is sometimes used in a very vague sense. Gordon Wakefield offers a very helpful definition which says that in “all (Christian) traditions, and in many non-Christian faiths and philosophies, the underlying implication is that there is a constituent of human nature which seeks relations with the ground and purpose of existence, however conceived.”(1) The Bible describes this same predicament as a consequence of God’s work in us so that mankind would somehow desire and reach out for the Divine.(2) Over a period of time, this basic truth about human nature has taken different shapes and forms in terms of its expressions.

According to the new spirituality, the diagnosis of the problem of mankind is not moral sin against a Holy God (as diagnosed by the Biblical view) but that mankind suffers from “a type of metaphysical amnesia—an ignorance of their divine nature.”(3) In order to overcome this ‘metaphysical amnesia,’ the new spirituality has introduced several mystical paths as a means of attaining salvation or, in other words, to awaken people from a deep seated ignorance to the realization that they are god. What then lies at the heart of this path to ‘self-realization’ is the “transformation or alteration of consciousness,” which involves the process of “following a mystical path,” which would ultimately aid in the union with the Divine.(4)

These prescribed paths in turn are to be pursued with the sole spiritual objective to acquire the union between the finite and the infinite, wherein the individual in the ultimate sense ought to lose one’s identity by being one with the divine (like a drop of water loses its uniqueness when it merges with the vast ocean). Clearly, one has to strictly follow all that has been prescribed in order to earn one’s salvation. However, despite the labor that this spiritual exercise demands and the length of time that it consumes, there is, in fact, no assurance that one can ever attain success. Most importantly, there is also no way for us to verify if these paths are at all true.

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