The essence of spiritual aspiration is the essence of being a human being. The entirety of all our desires and wishes, of all the little things that we want, have one original longing, which feeds all of the others. When we live a life that doesn’t have spiritual aspiration, it is like the story of Sisyphus
Whatever we apparently gain, in time, we lose. If we fulfill our desires, we get more desires, and we get more frustrated, and so forth. It seems that something does not click, it is like a fixed game, like a casino game that you always lose in the end.
An Inside Job
You wish for something external in order to feel peace inside. You wish for something external in order to feel love inside, in order to feel happiness inside. Then you essentialize even that wish for happiness or that wish for love, and you find the wish to reveal who you are.
You deeply wish to be one with God or to devote yourself to whatever image you have of the wholeness of Creation.
Once this clicks, not as a mental idea, but as a burning longing, as a vivid, intense reality, like a spiritual hunger, then there is a chance to actually fulfill this desire. With this desire fulfilled even a little bit, agitation subsides.
Intensity of Life and Enthusiasm
There is a very profound engagement that appears when spiritual aspiration is present. The intensity of your life grows dramatically. The amount of enthusiasm, the amount of energy that you can put into what you do, just grows manyfold once this fire of spiritual longing appears.
When spiritual aspiration appears it overrides all the other petty needs; the wish for appreciation, the wish for money, the wish for approval, the wish for sex, the wish for pleasure, and the wish to avoid pain. All of those little, petty needs appear small compared to this very intense longing. And finally, all of these mediocre desires are sacrificed to fulfill this one big fundamental wish that stands out so intensely from the others.
Longing to Return Home
Once this wish for God is there, you discover that to fulfill your spiritual longing you have to become more loving, more generous, more humble, more caring, and ultimately a perfect human being.
The longing in the heart to return Home that you somehow intuit and you know that you are pushes you to sacrifice all of your limitations and defects. Whatever you have there; your pride, your judgments, everything that keeps you in this very limited lifeless shell of selfishness, of the ego. You just want to break free of all of it.
This longing becomes so vivid that the rate of transformation, the rate of spiritual growth accelerates tremendously. You are not going to linger and stay proud. You are not going to linger and wait for approval or appreciation. You are not going to be preoccupied with getting some petty pleasure that will not really satisfy you or to avoid some pain that is not actually so bad to experience.
The Wish For Something Greater
You are willing to take it all in. Because now you wish for something much greater. Because you are looking far at the horizon. Your life path, your daily path, what you do, how you relate to others; it all becomes very clear. It is not perfect yet but is moving intensely towards perfection.
Life without spiritual aspiration seems dim. We have all the glory of being a human being, of having such a complex body, such intelligence, and having all these possibilities. If you only use your time to watch Netflix, to have useless conversations with friends, and then to work some hours to survive, it is all dim.
It is all faint, as the amount of light, energy, and intensity put in is faint. Once spiritual aspiration awakens, light appears, and fire appears. Everything becomes bright with intensity, and you realize the glory of being a human being.
You realize why you have such a wonderful body, why you have light in your heart, why you have intelligence, why you care for others, why you have such immense power and enthusiasm inside. Awakening spiritual aspiration makes it all very clear.
Facing Death
There are a few ways to increase spiritual aspiration. One of them is to contemplate the big questions of life. To face death, for example. The certain reality of death. In front of death, you see that significant things in life stand out, and insignificant things in life disappear.
Having the experience of being close to death you discover all that matters is the love you had in your life and the people you loved. Facing such an important thing as death really essentializes this central place of the heart. And then, aspiration appears.
Ask yourself: what’s the meaning of my life? Where I am going? Why do I live? Such questions take your attention from the periphery back to the core, back to the heart.
Contemplating the Aspiration You Already Have
Once you have a spark of aspiration, contemplate it. Feel it. You have this love for something, longing for something. Maybe is not very intense, but if you give it life it will grow.
Share it with a friend, and meditate on it. Even for five or ten minutes. Ok, what does it feel like? What do I feel? If you contemplate honestly this aspiration will grow in the light of your attention.
Reading Spiritual Texts
Another tool is to read spiritual texts. You don’t read them for knowledge. Of course knowledge can be inspiring and great and so forth. You read them in order to ignite your heart. You read them in order to feel what these saints were feeling when they wrote the text.
Rumi’s poetry. The Gospels. The Bhagavad Gita. The Yoga Sutras. The Tao Te Ching. Whatever fits your sensibility, whatever ignites your heart. If you read it as a practice, every day, even just a little bit, you read it and read it, and it awakens this longing. These texts reflect back; they remind us of something that we already have inside.
Being Close to Spiritual Community
Another way to ignite aspiration is to be close to a spiritual community and a teacher. They don’t have to be enlightened teachers, but people who have an intense aspiration awakened in them. A community where spiritual aspiration exists.
The whole process of awakening aspiration is not that you awaken something that is not there, but that you remember something that is already there. If you remember frequently enough, and intensely enough, you discover, “Hey this is what I really want, compared to everything else that I want and I am not really sure of”.
If you really look into your spiritual longing, this appears as the clearest, most fundamental, most intense wish of the heart.
This article was transcribed and edited by Zita from the following video;