Man's Inner Space Is the Greatest Shrine, He Needs No Other Shrine
By Sumit Paul, New Age Islam
06 April 2026
There're four broad spiritual categories of humans: Those who're fully evolved and enlightened are not in need of any god; next to them are those, who've faith in a god but don't associate their god/s with any religion; there's a third category of 'spiritual' people who can't think of God without a faith or denomination. Their god is inextricably bound up with some religion. And the last category is of those, who're more into obscurantism and ritualism than any genuine love for God. A majority of humans fall in the last category.
Out of these four categories, it's indeed pretty difficult for most of us to belong to the first one, as very few of us are so evolved and enlightened as to not require any god at all. But there could be many who belong to the second category-The Faithless Belief. Why should God/ Allah/ bhagwan or whatever it is, should be restricted to man-made faiths? Can't we love Jesus (if at all he did exist) without having any association with Christianity and affinity for the Church? Can't you love God and his son without undergoing the irrational practice of 'baptism.'? Can't we love Allah without namaaz, roza and circumcision? Why does one require draconian religious agencies and practices to love the 'Creator'?
Must we all follow a particular faith, or worse, a denomination, to love God? Man is an innately spiritual being. Teilhard de Chardin put it so succinctly, " You're not a human being in search of spiritual experience. You're a spiritual being immersed in human experience." So, why should we defile our embedded spiritual make-up by tarnishing it with the unnecessary interference of any religion? Whenever I read the sublime Persian mystic poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, Sanai, Attar, Hafiz Shirazi, among others, I'm bowled over by the ethereal beauty, but always feel sad that those great mystics remained Muslims. Even such an exalted human like Rumi couldn't free himself from the clutches and constraints of his religion and died a Muslim. I'd have called him god, had he relinquished all. Man doesn't need religious intervention in his pursuit of spirituality. In short, evolved humans don't require any tags or labels whatsoever.
There's a story in Jatak Katha. Buddha was sitting under a tree. A distraught young man came to him. " I'm fed up with the rituals and customs of my religion. I've come to you to accept yours." Buddha smiled and said, " I was also disillusioned like you. I left that fold but didn't start my own or join any new one." Ironically, Buddha's universal consciousness and wisdom degenerated into an organised and ritualistic faith (Buddhism) with the emergence of three predominant sects as Theravāda (School of the Elders), Mahāyāna (Great Vehicle) and Vajrayāna (Diamond Vehicle). You can realise the truth without having to tie yourself to the apron strings of any religion. God (if at all it does exist) is independent of any religion. He's a cosmic consciousness that pervades and permeates the whole universe. It's the abysmal limitation of human thinking to confine god to a particular set of beliefs and think that we've got him. The moment man will realise that it's futile to fathom god through any religion and its weird practices, he'll be one step further towards emancipation.
Man's inner space is the greatest shrine, he needs no other shrine. "Mat kar, mat kar, mat kar, manuj parajay ke prateek hain ye mandir, masjid, girjaghar," exhorted Harivanshrai Bacchan in one of his poems. Man's intrinsic spirituality gets throttled by the numerous religions, cults and sects claiming to be the only real path to god. God cannot be captured or conceptualised by any religion, but it can certainly be concocted by it (religion)! No faith, however great it may be, has the monopoly on truth. When we start believing that only one book, or one ideology or one approach has all the answers, we're doomed. This is not to question the good in every holy book or ideological treatise but human beings must have the humility to admit that no one can really have all the answers and that too, all the time.
We can only get better and better approximations of the truth, but may never quite get there. But we can still get there if we've no baggage of religion and the obscurantism that's part of it.
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A regular columnist for New Age Islam, Sumit Paul is a researcher in comparative religions, with special reference to Islam. He has contributed articles to the world's premier publications in several languages including Persian.
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