Page 24 - All India Magazine Jun-2025

Aspiration and demand
What is the difference between aspiration and a demand?

When you have experienced both, you can easily make the dis-
tinction. In aspiration there is what I might call an unselfish
flame which is not present in desire. Your aspiration is not a
turning back upon self — desire is always a turning back upon
oneself. From the purely psychological point of view, aspira-
tion is a self-giving, always, while desire is always something
which one draws to oneself; aspiration is something which
gives itself, not necessarily in the form of thought but in the
movement, in the vibration, in the vital impulse.
True aspiration does not come from the head; even when
it is formulated by a thought, it springs up like a flame from the
heart. I do not know if you have read the articles Sri Aurobindo
has written on the Vedas. He explains somewhere that these
hymns were not written with the mind; they were not, as one
thinks, prayers, but the expression of an aspiration which was
an impulse, like a flame coming from the heart (though it is
not the "heart" but the psychological centre of the being, to
use the exact words). They were not "thought out", words were
not set to experiences, the experience came wholly formulated
with the precise, exact, inevitable words — they could not be
changed. This is the very nature of aspiration : you do not seek
to formulate it, it springs up from you like a ready flame. And
if there are words (sometimes there aren't any), they cannot
be changed: you cannot replace one word by another, every
word is just the apt one. When the aspiration is formulated,
this is done categorically, absolutely, without any possibility of
change. And it is always something that springs up and gives
itself, whereas the very nature of desire is to pull things to one-
self.
The essential difference between love in aspiration and

24 All India Magazine, June 2025