Man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards

From India Post:

The sense universe is only one portion, one bit of that infinite spiritual universe projected into the plane of sense consciousness. How can this little bit of projection be explained, be understood, without knowing that which is beyond?

It is said of Socrates that one day while lecturing at Athens, he met a Brahmin who had traveled into Greece, and Socrates told the Brahmin that the greatest study for mankind is man. The Brahmin sharply retorted:

"How can you know man until you know God" This God, this eternally Unknowable, or Absolute, or Infinite, or without name - you may call Him by what name you like - is the rationale, the only explanation, the raison d'etre of that which is known and knowable, this present life.

Take anything before you, the most material thing - take one of the most material sciences, as chemistry or physics, astronomy or biology - study it, push the study forward and forward, and the gross forms will begin to melt and become finer and finer, until they come to a point where you are bound to make a tremendous leap from these material things into the immaterial.

The gross melts into the fine, physics into metaphysics, in every department of knowledge. Thus man finds himself driven to a study of the beyond. Life will be a desert, human life will be vain, if we cannot know the beyond. It is very well to say:

Be contented with the things of the present. The cows and the dogs are, and so are all animals; and that is what makes them animals. So if man rests content with the present and gives up all search into the beyond, mankind will have to go back to the animal plane again.

It is religion, the inquiry into the beyond, that makes the difference between man and an animal. Well has it been said that man is the only animal that naturally looks upwards; every other animal naturally looks down.

That looking upward and going upward and seeking perfection are what is called salvation; and the sooner a man begins to go higher, the sooner he raises himself towards this idea of truth as salvation...


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Other interesting observations on human/animal comparisons:

"I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
-- Sir Winston Churchill