This is an abridged version of a story by Sri Chinmoy:
“Master, please help me,” said the young man. “For two weeks, I have hardly been able to sleep. I wake up with a desperate feeling in my heart. I feel that I am in desperate need of spirituality. I have tried in vain to understand this feeling. Can you help me?”
The Master replied, “You are crying for the fulfilment of your inner cry. It is not with the mind that you are crying; you are crying from the inmost recesses of your heart. The inner heart has infinite capacity. It is not limited like the mind. One does not approach the highest Truth with the mind.”
“Why am I feeling this cry, Master? What am I really crying for?”
“When we cry deep within,” the Master said, “it is because we feel the necessity of Peace, Light and Bliss. When we have this kind of inner cry, then these qualities either come to the fore from within or descend from above. We can develop the inner cry by giving more importance to what we really need in our life. When we give importance to our true necessity, then automatically our inner cry, our inner sincerity, is bound to increase. The more we feel that we desperately need Peace, Light and Bliss, the sooner our inner cry increases.”
“How can we fulfil this necessity?” asked the seeker.
“In the outer world, when we are hungry we try to fulfil our hunger. Similarly, in the spiritual life when we are really hungry for Peace, Light and Bliss, we will go to a spiritual Master who can fulfil our hunger. First of all he will increase our inner hunger and then he will fulfil it.”
– Sri Chinmoy