It is often very difficult to have yearning for God in the beginning, and the reason is that God does not seem a reality to us. With most of us this body is our soul, and it is for the enjoyment of this body on the material plane-it need not necessarily be a very gross form of enjoyment-that we are most anxious. Religion to most of us is something highly amateurish and a kind of fashion, just like so many other fashions. But if some day, through our spiritual striving, God comes to be a reality, we feel that our whole being responds to that reality and longs for it alone. If the world is real to us, it absorbs our entire attention. If something else is real, that too does the same. That which we take to be real for the time being affects us, stirs up our feelings, draws out our will; it occupies our whole intellect. In fact, our whole being responds to this reality.

If we carefully study our own lives and the lives of saints, we find a great difference. It is the reality that affects the minds of both, but the reality is something different to the saint from what it is to us ordinary people. To us this world is real; to them the spiritual world alone is real. Their whole life is filled with this one idea: how to realize the Divine, how to make Him a reality instead of an intellectual and vague concept. If we are able to appreciate what the saints call 'reality', we can also appreciate why they are ever ready even to lay down their lives for the sake of God-realization.

Reference: Meditation and Spiritual Life by Swami Yatiswarananda (p.8)