A conscious evolution is our best hope for the future. But what will be the direction of this evolution? Here too we can find useful hints that Nature has thrown at us. She gives glimpses which we often discard. These glimpses have been coming to man in his dreams of a perfect life upon earth. They come to us in our waking life as an aspiration for perfect Love, unmixed Truth, need for Freedom and Immortality. Nature has also provided us with examples, rare and yet not so rare that they may be, of a certain class of human beings whom some may call as mystics while others as the luminous mad. In these seekers and scientists of the Spirit, Nature has often overleaped her limits of expansion of the mind and heart and life creating a genius in this fragile house of clay. There she has shown to man possibilities, even of the body, that are ordinarily concealed in us. Some of them have even given a path to man following which we too can share something of this higher divine nature that we do not know or experience at present.
It is true that the majority of mankind has turned these truths and the path shown by the pioneers of the race into a fixed and formal religion with an ignorant or even a diabolic priest occupying the throne of power. Others are lost in the mazes of sects and cults with their own belief systems and ritual practices. Yet there still exist some human beings, in all places, in every religion and cult, who are touched by the fire of aspiration brought to man by these mystics. Such human beings outgrow the narrow, often stiflingly formal and rigidly organised boundaries and going behind the appearances and the word of the scripture intuitively discover the secret Reality it embodies. All that is needed is a faith that burns ceaselessly upon the altar of the heart, an aspiration that climbs towards the summits of human possibilities and beyond, a sincerity that does not allow oneself to be side-tracked into corridors and bylanes of power, prestige and position due to some kind of a lurking spiritual ambition. Last and not the least it requires a will to endure and go through whatever it may take to climb the inner mountain against all the resistances and gravitational pulls of our earth-nature.
It is this spiritual evolution of man to something beyond Man that is the need of the hour and also the cry embedded in our soul. We are born for this transcendence or shall we say transgress beyond the limits of our surface mind and senses and explore and dare the impossible. A mere religious belief, a tepid urge towards some kind of spiritual path, a limited system of practice done with an eye on some ulterior egoistic motive is not enough. If the aspiration for spiritual life can be visualised as a fire, which indeed it is, then we can say that the fire burns brightest and highest when our whole being is offered into it until the last vestiges of the ego are burned down in the sublime sacrifice.
