Why are some people more inclined to spirituality than others?
Why are some people more inclined to spirituality than others? Answer, there can be broadly three reasons. The first is centered on their past life experiences. Experiences, while some people may or may not believe in the idea of a previous life and that whatever we experienced in a previous life has an effect on this life, we can nonetheless say that very few people can actually deny the fact that even small children have characteristics from their very start, which are very different from child to child.
What exactly is the cause of these distinctive characteristics is still something which eludes purely reductionistic explanations. So just as some children have an extraordinary interest in a talent for music or language or drawing or maths or chess, so similarly some people can have an extraordinary interest in spirituality right from their childhood itself, which is basically coming from the practice that they have cultivated in their previous life. The Bhagavad Gita talks about this in its sixth chapter in texts 43 and 44.
Apart from the past life inclinations, there could also be an upbringing from this life, which makes people more receptive to spirituality. If they have grown up in a family where life’s higher values and higher purposes have been talked about or grown up in a family where spiritual practices played a significant role in day-to-day life, then those impressions stay with them and prompt them to explore something similar in their own lives individually. The third factor broadly could be the realizations that the person has got through their own life experiences and that is where a person may start thinking more about what can bring greater meaning and value into my life.
That may be coming from either they having lost something very valuable in their life and the resulting disappointment and disillusionment may be inspiring them to redirect their entire life’s priority and focus or the other possibility is that they might be, they might have achieved something that they had dreamt of and they had found it unfulfilling and that dissatisfaction may prompt them to look for something higher in life. So it could be either the devastation of losing something of value or the dissatisfaction that comes from giving something of value and realizing that it is not as great as it was touted to be and thereby starting to explore something higher. So these three factors could be summarized by the acronym PER, P is for past life impressions, U is for upbringing and R is for realizations and all these three individually or collectively can contribute to a greater spiritual inclination in some people as compared to others.