Spirituality is our recognition that, beyond matter, and the events and beings we perceive with our physical senses, there is something else. The material world we occupy is an expression of this something, which is itself a deeper, more fundamental reality.
“Religion” comes from the Latin re ligo, which means to reconnect or retie. Religion is the practice of re-linking oneself to the Spiritual World, the deeper meaning of that which surrounds us.
We can say therefore that spirituality is religion, but in this original sense, not the type of hierarchical socio-political structure more commonly associated with the word.
Spirituality can be free, arising from inner searching, doubt, and self-questioning.
Perhaps we sense that there is something not solely material in the world that surrounds us, that all beings embody beauty and meaning, evoking feelings and thoughts which spur us to action.

Nature speaks to us through its beauty and perfect functions. It is a living record of the marvellous beings that have created it and that maintain it. No beauty or perfect function can exist in the world without being first carefully designed by some form of consciousness.

Everything existing speaks to us on a level equivalent to that of the consciousness that created it. A table tells us of the carpenter’s level of awareness and creativity. It wasn’t created by chance. An oak tree, an eagle, or a child likewise testify to their Creator’s level of awareness and artistic creativity.
Science has drilled down to the finest level of molecular structure, splitting open the atom itself to discover quarks, gluons, protons and electrons. After all of that deconstruction, has it given us the ability to create an oak tree, an eagle or a child? No.

It is reasonable to conclude therefore, that some form of consciousness superior to that of mankind carefully created that which exists, as we don’t yet know how to.

By observing our own lives and that of others, we can gradually realise that events do not unfold randomly. Circumstances guide us in certain directions, stimulating us to do some things rather than others. All these actions are opportunities to work on ourselves, for our personal growth. Seen this way, the events of our lives form a set of instructions in what work we need to undertake in order to develop, similar to a script outlining scenes within the confines of which we, as actors, are called upon to improvise. The places, costumes, time period and flow of events are chosen for us with wisdom and love, and it is up to us to engage.

The fundamentalist materialism of modern science, what Rupert Sheldrake calls “scientism”, argues that everything is accidental, that all creation is the result of probability and random events, proceeding chaotically from an explosion of the building blocks of all existence from the void – the Big Bang. From this singularity, we are told, everything existing has emerged and structured itself randomly. Every form of beauty and being, every ecosystem, thought,  feeling, even the flow of time itself, a blind march from a burst of something out of nothing. After all this senseless blending and re-blending of inanimate chemical compounds acted upon by physical laws of gravity and electro-magnetism, the emergence of intelligence and consciousness is simply a by-product of this randomness, a “hard problem” viewed statistically if dealt with at all.
This is actually a fairly unscientific way of thinking. As Robert Anton Wilson said, “in fundamentalist materialism, it is the fundamentalism I object to”. This limited understanding of existence, bounded by an unwillingness to engage with the numinous or the qualitative, dominates our desperate materialist culture. This “negative superstition”, as Rudolf Steiner called it, is a way of closing our eyes and extinguishing our hearts.
To demonstrate the unswerving belief in the ability of probability to deliver the world of multiplicity we inhabit, a thought experiment:
Imagine yourself on a beautiful beach. You fill a bucket with sand and throw it in the air, where it disperses and falls back down to earth. You do this again and again, hundreds, thousands, even millions of times.

According to the law of probability, the falling sand must at some point necessarily arrange itself in the shape of a beautiful castle replete with moat, walls, towers and battlements. Mathematically, this is outcome is possible. In essence, that’s how modern science believes the universe formed, with all its worlds and creatures.
Do you think you would ever obtain such a structure by that method? Even if our descendants continued the experiment all day every day for millennia?
A sand castle will never arrange itself randomly, let alone the  complexity, balance and beauty of the plant world, the animal world, the mineral world and the human world.

Spirituality is understanding and feeling within ourselves that the same world of thoughts and feelings that is within us is present in all things, that everything existing arises from the love of of a higher intelligence who designed this evolutionary experience on Earth as a stage capable of stimulating us to grow and become gradually more like itself, capable of improving the world through creative, loving thoughts and actions.

We are children endowed with the full potential of our creator, sent to Earth to develop the same loving, creative qualities that can be observed everywhere around us, in a sunset, a good meal, a flowing river, a flying bird, a blooming flower.
Spirituality is recognising and embracing the non-random, intelligent river of divine love in which we are immersed, and to learn to make it flow within us and out of us in order to improve ourselves and the world we live in, with purposeful joy.