We need to live in the world. We need to look after our families. We need to do our work and while doing all this we need to have health, material wealth, success, achievements, harmony, respect and peace. Above all we desire contentment, a sense of fulfillment. We try to achieve all this by spending our time and energy chasing what we consider to be the good things of life in the material world with no thought for anything else. It is all an outward quest. In our endeavors the idea of an inward journey is completely alien to us. At best we go through hurried motions of prayer or follow some rituals mechanically and uncompre-hendingly. As Sri Aurobindo says,

The ordinary life consists in work for personal aim and satisfaction of desire under some mental or moral control, touched sometimes by a mental ideal.1