1 8 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 By now, along with the dizziness and the smoke, he could hear terrifying noises, as though someone or some being were breaking everything around him, and yet everything remained in its place… he broke down into uncontrollable sobs…The smell of the dead, the smoke and the dizziness continued, as did the noise of things breaking, which was so loud that he had to cover his ears with his hands to deaden it. Coelho believed that this episode in his life was due to the severing of “ties with Christianity” and making an attempt to contact “negative energies” through black magic (Morais 2008, 206). He got so frightened that fear paralyzed him for months and he decided to renounce all connections with OTO. This phase of his life lasted just less than two months. A few years later, his fascination with drugs ended too, which, in his interviews, he has often condemned. A new chapter followed in Coelho’s life in 1986 with the catholic pilgrimage [3] to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, which was instrumental in bringing him back to the religion of his childhood. However, in his interview with Priya Bala, where he spoke on his book Hippie, Coelho confesses that he has “gone back to spirituality” and that there is a marked difference between religious people who “have to prove to themselves that they have faith” and people like him, who “think about contradictions” and have “doubts about life” (Bala 2018, 8). He also adds that “[h]is faith in a higher power is unshakeable, but he is increasingly disillusioned with organized religion” (Bala 2018, 8). As a matter of fact, while still a Catholic, he never believed in a single path to realizing God, which is evident from the books he wrote until his recent work Hippie. It is also apparent from his interviews that though he had an unshaken belief in a universal power he never subordinated himself to the authoritarian and exterior elements of the Church. On the one hand, keeping in view the key incidents around his experience with the Church and his shifts between religiosity and spirituality, it can be inferred that during his teenage years, when he rebelled against the mainstream religion of his parents as a hippie, he must have considered religion and spirituality as opposing forces. On the other hand, after his pilgrimage, when he decided to go back to the religion of his childhood, experientially he must have identified himself as religious-spiritual, considering spirituality to be an element of his being religious. However, identifying spirituality exclusively as his existential orientation, with no credit to explicit religiosity at all, in the aforementioned interview, suggests that he now considers religiosity and spirituality as two distinct concepts. Coelho distancing himself from the religious establishments recalls the polarized conceptualization of religion and spirituality in recent scholarship. This raises the following significant questions: 1. Is the polarized conception of religion and spirituality an offshoot of the evolving attitude towards the two? 2. Can the polarized approach or silence towards the subject of God explain and justify the matters of self and soul? 3. Do the references to transcendent reality in spirituality mean the same in the context of religion?
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