Writing in
The Times of India - an excellent source for spiritual aspirants, as one of India's top daily newspapers features reports on India's spiritual heritage - Shri Shri Anandamurti makes the following observations on humamankind's true nature:
Human existence is trifarious, a combination of three currents: physical, mental and spiritual. Most people may not transcend the limits of their physical existence: they get enmeshed in crude worldly pleasures, tormented by desire. Subtleties of life, expression and practice are perhaps beyond their reach. Their world is limited to their bodies and physical requirements.
There are others who are more concerned with their minds as they feel that it is the supremacy of mind that sets them apart. Their lives are guided by their desires for mental satisfaction. By virtue of their endeavours they create poetry, art, music and sculpture, for instance. They express the finer human feelings of mercy, sympathy, love, friendship and pity. They believe that the mind flows for the sole purpose of attaining the Infinite, and hence they focus their energies on the contemplation of the Transcendental Entity. They are spiritual aspirants. Drawn by the magnetic attraction of Cosmic Consciousness they speed forward and reach the stage which marks the end of mental existence and the beginning of spirituality. At that stage one is no longer a human being, one is a veritable god.
Clearly drawing from India's Vedantist heritage - perhaps the true source of most, if not all, of the spiritual traditions - at a deep level, Anandamurti's comprehensive comments encompass Christianity's "trinitarian" nature of God, and idealized Man.
The
entire article is worthy of review for its observations of how cultures and societies in this phase of their evolution have lost their focus on mental and spiritual accomplishments - and, thus, their 'humanity' - in the pursuit of physical comforts and stimulation.
