Man has two facets to his personality - body and soul. Both need sustenance for their health and progress. Material things such as food and water sustain the body. If anyone is deprived of food and water for several days, his or her physical health will suffer. If such deprivation continues over a long period of time, he or she will be starved to death. The same is true of the soul. Maulana Wahiduddin Khan believes that Spirituality is man's spiritual food for the soul. It boosts man's inner personality and is a guarantee of man's spiritual life. Without spirituality, man would languish.

Maulana has developed a full-fledged Ideology of Spirituality, based on Islamic Scriptures of Contemplative Spirituality rather than on heart-based meditation. According to Maulana, the mind is what differentiates man from the rest of the creatures. It is the mind that gives man answers to his eternal questions: Who am I?, What is my purpose?, Does God exist?, Is man's life dependent on destiny or free will?, etc.

According to Maulana, the quest of man's spiritual journey is two fold: one is to solve the riddle as to why all men and women undergo negative experiences in this world; and the other is with regard to finding positive solutions. It addresses the paradox of human beings having been given the freedom to make their choices. But their frequent misuse of this liberty causes them to repeatedly face situations in which people do each other harm; losses are incurred because of the injustice of others; severe provocations are suffered because of untoward experiences. These trigger negative thoughts such as malice, anger, arrogance and greed. But when man raises himself above his immediate surroundings - from the material level to a higher level of thinking - he is able to eradicate his negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones.

True Spirituality thus provides human beings with a starting point for their lives and tells man about his creation plan. Spirituality is, indeed, a representation of truth - Truth is Spirituality and Spirituality is truth.

Spirituality, in fact, is a mental condition, which starts with the Art of Right Thinking and teaches man the Principal of Conversion or to convert everyday material events into spiritual experience, negative experiences into positive ones, non-spiritual matters into spiritual matters. Although such conversion takes place in the spiritual rather than in the physical sense, the principle by which this conversion operates governs the entire material world.

Maulana believes that everyone may be born spiritual, that is, one may be spiritual by nature, but, after birth, one lives in a society, which, with its multiple influences conditions or shape man's personality or nurture one based on negative feelings - just like the layers of the onion that cover its bulb. These negative feelings can be of anger, revenge, jealousy, hatred and rivalry.

The individual, to regain his spiritual character, has, therefore, to de-condition himself through a superior intellectual process. And it is spirituality, which makes it possible to de-condition the individual by training him in the Art of De conditioning, so that he may revert to the natural state in which he was born. For this to happen, he has to re-engineer his mind. In this way, spirituality trains one to become positive. Man thus becomes disciplined and does not allow his personality to develop under the influence of external incentives. He, by his own decisions, undertakes his intellectually awakening and personality development on the basis of higher principles. Only then does he develop a divine character. He shakes and jolts and remoulds his personality to abide by the plan of the Creator. He thus turns himself into the kind of person who is shaped not by society, but by spirituality and thus lives a God-oriented life.

So the Ideology of Spirituality, based on contemplation, helps individuals to re-engineer their minds and build positive personalities. In effect, we can say that contemplative spirituality - by awakening of the mind - provides the best formula for character building and makes one a peaceful and positive person. When such positive thinking reaches a collective level in society, it results in what is known as peace.

Go through the following sections to understand the Ideology of Spirituality.

Intellecutal Awakening and Personality development