The Religious Aspiration

By H.D. Paramahamsa Omkarananda Saraswati

The continually impelling power for the persistent exercise and progressive manifestations of the many-sided personal spiritual activity, comes from an irresistible aspiration innate in all intensely self-reflective conditioned human consciousness, and assuming such varied forms as an ardent longing to be better, to become the best we can be, in all the powers of our knowledge, will and life, the recurrent promptings from the purified inward nature urging the sacrifice of everything that precludes the possibilities of the sharpening of the discriminative thought, the widening of the spiritual vision, the development of universal perspectives, the habitual operation of the cosmic outlook, of a Love that finds itself in all beings, of that experience which touches the Heart of the Divine wherever it ranges itself.

Deeply laid in the very grain of man, religious aspiration assumes many forms, both negative and positive, and in its essential nature consists of all those processes that aim at stretching the soul of man beyond the present frontiers of his life, confer on him a continual consciousness of himself being primarily a unit of the Immortal Being, set him engrossed in labouring for that Power which God-realised Saints gained by solitude, prayer, contemplation, love, service, that calm wisdom which Buddha's supreme determination, supreme renunciation and supreme self-possession, poise and light of the Self, won for him…

Intimately bound up with the central spiritual Reality within his inner constitution, in the law of his inner Being, the religious aspiration in man recreates him from within, applies to the energies of human nature the touches of the all-uplifting Ideals, to the human instincts and impulses the powerful and purifying powers of Love, conditions human consciousness to a perpetual awareness of the Divine Being, constantly liberates in thought, in spirit, in truth, the human soul from the tyranny of its bodily hold, aids the human mind to abandon the human standpoint and see everything from the altitudes, and in the reference-scheme, of the Divine…