Ramesh Balsekar approaches religion and spirituality from the standpoint of Advaita, treating both as conceptual frameworks that arise within Consciousness rather than as ultimate realities in themselves. Religion, in his view, is an organized system of beliefs, rituals, and identities that can serve as a provisional support for the mind, but it remains at the level of concepts. It may point toward the truth of non-duality, yet it is not that truth. Religious doctrines, practices, and even moral structures are seen as interim measures, useful for certain temperaments and stages of understanding, but not the final destination. When taken as absolute, they tend to foster division, guilt, and conflict by reinforcing the sense of separate individuals aligned with different creeds.

Spirituality, for Balsekar, is also not exempt from this scrutiny. He distinguishes between spirituality as “seeking” and the actual understanding or realization of non-duality. Spiritual practices—meditation, prayer, ritual, or any form of disciplined seeking—may prepare the ground, but they cannot themselves produce enlightenment, because both the seeker and the path are ultimately concepts within Consciousness. Even refined spiritual striving can subtly maintain the illusion of a separate doer who will one day “attain” something. From his perspective, genuine understanding is the clear seeing that all actions and experiences arise spontaneously in Consciousness, without an independent individual controlling them.

Within this framework, both religion and spirituality are ultimately transcended. Balsekar emphasizes that there is only One Consciousness, and that the apparent multiplicity of individuals, paths, and traditions is a play of concepts within that singular reality. Religious conflict and sectarianism arise when there is identification with the body–mind organism and belief in personal doership. When that belief relaxes, the sharp boundaries between religions and between “religious” and “spiritual” lose their grip. What remains is an impersonal understanding in which surrender to “God’s will” and the Advaitic insight of non-doership are seen as expressions of the same fundamental truth.