The yearning for self is essential to our development but it is of course a quest that can never be fully satisfied. We can never fully grasp the infinite — God's or our own. There's very little difference between the secular belief that we can know who we are and the religious fundamentalists' belief that we can know who God is. Both lead to arrogance and what Christopher Lasch called a culture of narcissism. Could it be that all the striving, the pushing, the climbing, the acquiring is rooted in this yearning to know that which can never be known? Rather than trying to define who we are, what if we sought an ever-deepening understanding of how much we are? Perhaps that's what deeper yearning is really all about.

Irwin Kula, Yearnings