Spiritual aspiration essentially creates a positive emotional field in the mind which directs the will to seek God. It is this refined spiritual emotion that has the power to activate higher spiritual brain centers and create spiritual samskaras. Simultaneously, it also modulates and deactivates the lower brain centers where the samskaras, the seeds of impressions of past actions responsible for worldly tendencies, reside.
Normally, our mind creates repetitive patterns of thoughts
resulting in endless mental gyration. Aspiration takes the mind out of this
whirlpool of replicating mechanical thought currents and thus frees it from the
grip of past memories. It is this uplifting power of aspiration that enables us
to raise the mind to a higher level — of divine consciousness — just as an
aircraft, when taking off from the ground into space, works against the tremendous
gravitational pull to keep itself afloat and soar higher. The yearning for God
thus conserves and reorganizes the mental energies and gives them a higher
focus making the mind pure and luminous, creating in turn favorable conditions for
spiritual experiences.
Aspiration is a state of higher awareness in which we are
striving constantly to relate our ‘I’ sense, our ego, to God, in order to
discover the truth about its existence. Since we normally relate and identify
our individuality very strongly with the outer personality — the lower self
consisting of body, mind, and activity — our relationship with God is
unconscious and very feeble. As we intensify our sadhana and longing for God,
our relationship with God gets stronger, brighter, and deeper, creating an
emotional field in the mind and heart called bhakti. This pure emotion in our
heart blossoms as spiritual fervor and the mind gets suffused with yearning for
God, bhava-vritti. In the state of continual aspiration, ego, intellect,
emotion, and will turn towards God. Thus the process of transformation sets in.
Source – excerpts from article titled 'Aspiration' by Swami Muktidananda published in Prabuddha Bharata January 2010 issue.