Aspiration

The trees aspire for the light. What is this light?

The sun, my child. Have you never seen leaves closing up when night comes, as soon as the sun dips below the horizon?

Can trees have an aspiration for something else?

Something else means what? What are the possible openings for a tree?

To become a man?

A man? But they know nothing about man! As man aspires to be a god?… I knew animals which aspired to become human beings, but they were living with human beings. Cats and dogs, for example, which lived in a close intimacy with human beings, truly had an aspiration. I had a cat which was very, very unhappy for being a cat, it wanted to be a man. It had an untimely death. It used to meditate, it certainly did a kind of sadhana of its own, and when it left, even a portion of its vital being reincarnated in a human being. The little psychic element that was at the centre of the being went directly into a man, but even what was conscious in the vital of the cat went into a human being. But these are rather exceptional cases.

19 August 1953