Yearning, Late one night you may find yourself saying

Yearning, Late one night you may find yourself saying:
"But I don't care about the alleged benefits of higher consciousness. And, I'm not interested in forming new tendencies or discovering greater talents. I need help for the agony in my heart! I seem to be suffering from life itself, from the limitations of mortality. I'm not interested in being more conscious or less conscious. My problem is this gnawing in my gut, my deep sense of incompleteness. Even when I achieve what others call meaningful, I feel empty. Even when I'm a hero it seems meaningless.

"All the activities of life seem merely expedient — only a shadow play without substance. I am suffering within my skin, within the hollows of my skull. I yearn to live with purpose, yet my eyes are too coated to perceive worthwhile purposes in the 'get up/go to work/come home/eat/watch television/go to bed humdrum.' I ask others why they are doing what they are doing. After they say they are making a living or starting their kids through the same ultimate process, I ask them again. Then they say they don't know!

"I feel like Paul who said, 'Things I want to do, I don't do; things I don't want to do, I do.' I look at all of us pushing through life and ask why. Is the main purpose of existence only to maintain existence? Birth, copulation, death — is that it? Really?

"Sometimes I can preoccupy myself and drown out the yearning for a few days. Then it comes back. What's wrong with me that I can't be happy with the humdrum until I'm sixty-five? Why can't I look forward to retirement and the doctors escorting me to my hopefully penultimate tomb? Above all, either satisfy my yearning, pacify this aching heart and perplexed mind or take away, please take away, this yearning. I yearn to be better than I am. I crave that life have more value."