42 Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 according to Eliade, never depended on any institution. Since this relationship to the sacred is disturbed by secularization, it is essential to draw attention to it again and develop it consciously, as it brings undeniable benefits to human. If Eliade talks about religion, it is precisely these qualities that he notices in any spiritual manifestation. For Eliade, concept of spirituality is implicitly present in his entire work, when he comments on any manifestation of religiosity or religious thinking of a person, which, according to him, existed in human consciousness before we started building any religious institutions. For Eliade, spirituality appears in the sense of a transpersonal overlap present in all things around us, but also in the consciousness of man himself. And it means intimate, closely connected relationship of human beings with the environment in which they live. From this point, Eliade views all religious phenomena as spiritual, connecting man with the environment, which provides him with the necessary meanings. We perceive that wherever Eliade expresses himself about religion and religious phenomena, as well as when he speaks about a religious person, his attitude is free, far exceeding institutionality and rules, he speaks rather about the spiritual essence of man, so he has in mind exactly this personal relationship man with the sacred. However, this article is not a comparative study, but rather an insight into Eliade’s own thinking. We focus on the interpretive and explanatory aspect of Eliade’s scholar texts, while trying to find and define the important concepts and describe them. In our case, the description also includes the comprehention and reflection of the material, while the emphasis is placed on understanding the meaning of the analyzed material. So the content analysis also takes into account the hermeneutic method. We concetrate on Eliade’s philosophy of time and follow the main line of his thinking, which touches on the existential experience of time, the essence of understanding the structure of being, and the transformation of an individual or the entire society in history. We perceive temporality as the reference point of Eliade’s thinking, so we focused our attention on how Eliade grasped the human need to help oneself and break free from the bondage of possible everyday events. Here he discovered a huge difference in the perception of the world of the so-called archaic and modern man. The article argues that his understanding of archetypes, symbols, and the spiritual nature of the human being is closely tied to how he thinks about time. We will see that his understanding of yoga and Indian philosophy helped him a lot in his approach to time, which in turn is related to the authenticity of the human experience. The article provides a view of Eliade’s philosophy, which by looking into people’s visions and beliefs discovers the timeless nature of human consciousness. 2 Methodology of Mircea Eliade At the center of Eliade’s philosophy is the concept of the sacred. The sacred has the ability to manifest itself in symbolic structures and does not have to be explicitly linked to some religious institution. The sacred is a concept that had basically not existed until Durkheim’s time. It was in the period of modernization that an intellectual distinction was created, which made it possible to perceive the mutually opposing attitude of phenomena having a religious or secular meaning. Gradually, a situation occurred, which Nietzsche figuratively expressed as the definitive death of God, when people began to be aware of this dissension, whether in the scientific environment or in general. Nowadays, when this dichotomy is part of the common perception of the world, the question of how to define a group of spiritual phenomena, which do not belong to any official religion, is equally difficult. Despite the traditional wording, the term sacred can still be used, precisely in the context of today’s spirituality and transformed new religious movements, the content of which does not presuppose belonging to any formal faith. The concept of spirituality, which was also used by Eliade, is still a legitimate concept today that covers “classical spiritual phenomena, concepts and practices” that go beyond the understanding of ordinary everyday human experience (Harris 2017, 14). And just like the sacred, we can look at spirituality as a quantity that changes the quality of human existence. It was during his stay in India that Eliade came up with the idea of the existence of a cosmic spirituality, which for an extended periodwas part of the spiritual ideas of people from ancient times and was still practiced in some places in Eliade’s time, for example in the Indian rural environment. Indian rural people see in agricultural matters a sacred mystery that connects them to the continuous cycle of being – life, death, and rebirth (Pals 2015, 259). Eliade likes to speak about cosmic spirituality “in which the sacred is expressed through phenomena that draw us to the universe” (Ferrier and Lannes 1998, 58). What is important is the ability of a person to perceive the transcendent; then he can become part of the whole and he can communicate with nature (Ferrier and Lannes 1998, 58). Eliade’s concept of religion goes beyond organized religion, in the sense of it being institutionalized and bounded by rules. For Eliade, the sacred is transcendent and numinous (as e.g., Rudolf Otto perceived it), but at the same time it is also personal; it connects us with the world,
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