The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the higher purpose of religious life in guiding individual evolution over societal morality.
Muhammad Iqbal suggests that the ultimate goal of religious life transcends mere moral improvement within society. Instead, it seeks to direct the individual's personal evolution towards a more significant spiritual destiny, highlighting the importance of personal growth and fulfillment over societal norms.
In practice
In a discussion on spirituality at a community gathering, one could quote Iqbal to highlight personal growth through faith.
The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.
I have seen the movement of the sinews of the sky, And the blood coursing in the veins of the moon.
let this be our beautiful departure from stagnation; let our minds come alive; enter another dimension; go beyond the stars eagerly struggling to find that... which our naked eyes did not know existed; rise like a falcon born to soar and not be alone but be present amongst others.
The soul is neither inside nor outside the body; neither proximate to nor separate from it.
The wing of the Falcon brings to the king, the wing if the crow brings him to the cemetery.
The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.
Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.
For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
This is why moral uneasiness is destined to become even more acute. It is obvious that a fundamental defect, or rather a series of defects, indeed a defective machinery is at the root of contemporary economics and materialistic civilization, which does not allow the human family to break free from such radically unjust situations.
It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.
Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph
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