Examples of people who had spirituality without religion

People who had spirituality without religion are not new in our history. Many people, even before the depopulation of the churches in Europe, lived spirituality without religion. What I am giving here are three cases of notable people who exhibited this condition in their life, one who had spirituality without religion.

37 years living on a pillar

The first person that comes to mind is a Christian who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries in Syria. He stood on top of a large pillar or pole for 37 years. His name, Simeon Stylites (the Elder, to distinguish him from others of the same name) is quite famous because he started this kind of life and others followed him.

Simeon was born around the year 390 in Turkey, the son of a shepherd. He entered a monastery before he was 16 years old. Due to his extreme bodily penance, he was told to leave the monastery. He hid in a shack for a year and a half. He then headed to a mountainous area where he practically imprisoned himself in a diameter of less than 20 meters. But he was sought out by people asking for his prayers and advice and this led him to make a radical decision in his life. He wanted to avoid them in order to spend more time in prayer. He found a pillar and climbed on it and lived there for 37 years, rain or shine, in intense heat or in the fiercest cold. He only tried to get down when some church authorities tested him whether he would still obey them or not. The shortest of the pillars on which he lived measured 4 meters. Later he climbed a 15 meter pillar.

During this space of more than 30 years, he did not attend our usual religious services, such as Mass or preaching, he did not openly profess a creed or doctrine, and he did not study or follow any moral code. He mainly spent his time communicating with God. There were times when he wrote letters full of wisdom. He was a very good example of a person who had spirituality without religion.

He died on September 2, 459, an example that was followed by many others who lived on pillars. He is recorded in the 2010 Guinness Book of World Records that his 37-year stay on top of the longest pole is also the longest ever recorded.

The destroyer of a centuries-old custom

Slavery has been with humanity even before recorded history. It was taken as a normal fact of life. Even in the Bible, slavery was considered part of the normal activity of life. The man destined to destroy this custom, at least legally, was someone who had a spirituality without religion.

Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States of America. He had only about a year of formal traveling teacher education. But he continually learned things on his own. He eventually became a lawyer. In 1837 he said “[The] The institution of slavery is based on both injustice and bad policy…” He continually opposed slavery until he was able to abolish it through the Emancipation Proclamation he issued on September 22, 1862. He followed this with the amendment to the US Constitution banning slavery throughout the nation, which became the famous Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

That Lincoln played a pivotal role in the abolition of slavery is a fact well known to most who know anything about United States history. But he is not so well known that he did not belong to any church. He entered the churches and participated in the activities, but not as a member of those churches. He was just an observer. He developed religious skepticism early in life. He doubted that the Churches were teaching what was really true. But he read and meditated on the Bible and used biblical terms frequently. By any standard, he was never a religious man. He did not profess any of the standard Christian creeds, he did not take into account the morality of his time, he did not attend religious services. But he was deeply spiritual. In fact, he dreamed of his imminent death and passed through it with resignation. He is a true example of a person who is spiritual without religion.

Power greater than nuclear energy

Most Christians who have some working knowledge of the Bible believe that they are temples of God, that is, that God dwells within them. This belief may be only intellectual. They may not feel the presence of God within them most of the time. But the idea is that God is somehow in his body after the Apostle Paul’s reminder in 1 Corinthians 3:16, “You are the temple of God.”

There lived a man who did not take this idea of ​​God living in man only intellectually. In fact, he lived this idea in his thoughts, words, feelings and actions, and he taught it to others and made a living from this teaching. He read and taught passages from the Bible and interpreted them in a way that no mainstream theologian would. For example, he not only taught that we have an imagination that we can use to create reality. He taught that Jesus Christ is our imagination. In other words, not only is God in us, but God is our imagination. The activities of our imagination are divine activities. They are not simply reflections and human images made by our brain.

This man was not religious at all. In fact, he never bothered to enter the churches on his own. His morality was not in accordance with the usual code recognized by most people. His name is Neville Goddard.

Neville was not only aware of a power within him that was greater than nuclear energy. He identified with this power and used it to achieve everything he wanted in life. But he did not perform any of the religious ceremonies with which we are familiar, nor did he conform to any religious creed, nor did he teach any morals. Rather, he believed in the creative power of the imagination to make anything that comes to mind, and he put this belief into practice in his own life and in the lives of others.

Neville Goddard was born on February 19, 1905, in the British West Indies. Seventeen years later he went to the United States. He studied theater and became a dancer. While performing dances in England, he became interested in New Age teachings. He became a US citizen after brief training in the military. Later through a tutor named Abdullah he studied Hebrew, Kabbalah and the esoteric interpretation of the Bible. He then began lecturing on the powers of the human mind. He centered his teachings around the imagination of human beings. He was a popular speaker in the United States in the mid-20th century. Even today he is still heard through recordings of him. He died on October 1, 1972 at the age of 67.

This man is another example of a spiritual person with no religion. He fully agreed with what William Blake said: “All ritual, all creeds”, everything in the form of ritual “was antichrist”.