Spirituality might be described as a lifestyle, a way of engaging with the world, and a way of disengagement with the world. Spirituality is also a deliberate cultivation of an atmosphere in order that we manage the mind and keep it focussed on our spiritual goals. The worst thing one can do is to discuss spirituality with someone who has no spirituality. In the words of one paramaguru, it will lessen your own spirit.
You can create your atmosphere by controlling your thoughts, … controlling your actions, turning them exclusively towards the sadhana (spiritual effort, spiritual activity), abolishing all desires and all useless, external, ordinary activities, living a more intense inner life, and separating yourself from ordinary things, ordinary thoughts, ordinary reactions, ordinary actions; then you create a kind of atmosphere around you.
… If you act only in conformity with what can lead you to the divine realisation, if you abolish in yourself all desires and impulses turned towards external things, if you calm your mental being, appease your vital being, if you shut yourself against suggestions coming from outside and become immune to the action of people surrounding you, you create such a spiritual atmosphere that nothing can touch it, and it no longer depends at all on circumstances or on whom you live with or on the conditions you live in, because you are enclosed in your own spiritual atmosphere.
And that is how one obtains it: by turning one’s attention solely to the spiritual life, by reading only what can help in the spiritual life, by doing only what leads you to the spiritual life and so on. Then you create your own atmosphere.
But naturally, if you open all the doors, listen to what people tell you, follow the advice of this one and the inspirations of that one, and are full of desires for outside things, you cannot create a spiritual atmosphere for yourself. You will have an ordinary atmosphere like everybody else.
Source – Collected Works of the Mother, 17 vols (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2013), 6.356–7.
