"The rapture of being alive" Joseph Campbell

The squirrel doesn't need a reason to live, it just does. The rose doesn't need a reason to be, it just is. The cloud doesn't need a purpose, though it has one.

Yet people- myself included- despair over not having a reason to live or a purpose in life. Just being- like the squirrel and the rose and the cloud- seems far too unglamorous to sate the human's yearning for meaning and significance.

Light existed for billions of years on this planet before the light sensitive tissue that evolved into eyes developed. Somehow the existence of light drew forth the evolution of life-enhancing organs of vision.

Without the prior existence of sound waves would the ear have developed, appearing as if out of nowhere over a vast period of time?

One wonders what other vibrations exist and what other sense organs or capacities might be teased into existence through the life-promoting laws of evolution. It seems unlikely that the five senses so far developed are the end of the unveiling of reality into the realm of perception. Who knows what vibrations now undetectable by any sensory neuron may someday be received by a new neuron of knowing?

Which brings me back to the strange yearning for meaning and significance stamped upon the human heart. Could this be the inklings of a type of new organ or sensory apparatus, akin to the first membrane of light sensitive tissue which had the glimmer of light perception? There is something precious about the unquenchable longing for meaning: it is an inbuilt compass, and not easy to read or follow. One detour or error in the search for significance is "the absurd overvaluation of fame" (Eckhart Tolle). Making a splash in one way or another (whether winning a Gold Metal or blowing up a federal building) and garnering massive quantities of attention from others does not confer significance to one's existence.

Meaning becomes a vital nutrient without which we languish. We become rudderless and stall in the course of our life without some sense of direction conferred by meaning. I've been there many times, and still find myself at times disoriented and directionless, unable to glimpse that elusive sense of meaning to navigate through the day.

Meanwhile I enjoy the squirrel, the rose, the cloud, and all of nature, and the people I love, and the air moving in and out of my lungs. And I find myself entranced by these words from Joseph Campbell:

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

I don't know the answers, but I wonder...and this sense of wonder itself is perhaps a vital sense organ, the sense organ that has come into being in response to the finest of all vibrations: the presence of mystery. A mystery which seems to be the very substance of every atom and the space in between. The sense of wonder is the deepest possible rapture at the sense of being alive.