Our Inner Expansion: Why Do We Want to Become Something More and Better Than We Are?

What is it that drives us, from our very first breath to our last? Why do we feel an innate longing for growth, development, and a deeper meaning in life?

Here we look at the idea of “inner expansion,” the universal call to grow, create, learn, and become more than we are. We set out on a journey through time and existence: from the birth of the universe, through the vast landscape of evolution, and all the way into the core of our soul.

We ask: What happens to us when this longing is lived out constructively, and what happens when we suppress it? Why do many people experience illness, emptiness, or stagnation when the force of expansion is suppressed or left dormant?

And most important of all: How can we recognize, acknowledge, and use this force as a tool for expansion and growth on the way to a more meaningful and fulfilled life?

Human beings differ from all other creatures on this planet in one unique gift: free will. We can choose. We can dream. We can change the direction of our lives, fully consciously. At any time.

If we look at the diversity of nature, from the simple earthworm to the wise, deeply feeling elephant, we see a common trait: All of them live fully and completely in accordance with their nature. They do what they were created for, without questioning their own worth, meaning, or direction.

Only we humans can pull the emergency brake and say:

“That’s enough now. I can’t take any more development. I don’t want to follow my inner drive anymore. I’ll just have to hold out until I retire.”

And we are also the only ones who can go to the opposite extreme and think:

“If I just work harder, if I just acquire more, all the things I can’t take with me anyway when life is over, then I will finally feel fulfilled.”

We are the only beings who can actively choose to stop our natural growth, or spend our whole lives chasing what has no lasting significance for the soul or for our deepest existence.

That we can make such choices is both humanity’s greatest strength and our greatest challenge.

We are the only beings who can actively choose to stop our natural growth, or spend our whole lives chasing what has no lasting significance for the soul or for our deepest existence.

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Inner expansion: our fundamental nature

To understand what drives you, from the moment you draw your first breath until you take your last, you need to see both the material and the metaphysical side of existence. Both are equally important and equally inseparable from each other. And both carry within them a force that keeps pushing you forward, often without your noticing.

This force is not something you have made up. It has always been there. It is embedded in your very nature: in your body, in your energy, in your soul.

Everything you are made of in your physical existence has its beginning in the birth of the universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe exploded out of an infinitely small ball of energy around 14 billion years ago. In the beginning, everything consisted of gas, primarily hydrogen and helium. Over billions of years, gravity, pressure, and enormous heat shaped this gas into stars, planets, and galaxies.

And everything that was created in the stars, all the heavier elements we know, was later scattered across the universe, where it gradually became part of new solar systems, new worlds, and finally you.

You are, quite literally, made of stardust.

Once you understand that, one thing becomes clear:

The elements that build your body were created by explosion, heat, pressure, movement, and endless expansion. They come from a cosmic process that constantly seeks to become larger, broader, richer, and more complex.

In other words:

Expansion is part of your nature.

Deep within you there is an innate drive that always reaches forward: toward development, toward learning, toward becoming something more than you were yesterday. It is the universe’s own movement continuing to live through you.

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A desire to grow lies in the very building blocks you are made of.

Deep within you there is an innate drive that always reaches forward: toward development, toward learning, toward becoming something more than you were yesterday. It is the universe’s own movement continuing to live through you.

What caused the Big Bang?

Perhaps you have asked yourself the question: What was it, really, that set off the Big Bang, and why?

It is one of the greatest mysteries humanity has ever tried to understand. Grasping the intention behind the force that created everything we know, space, time, matter, energy, the very possibility of all life, is almost impossible with our human logic. Whether we choose to call it the creative force, universal intelligence, god, or something else entirely, it is hard to fathom the motive, the purpose, and the deep cause behind it.

It lies beyond the reach of thought. And yet we can sense some answers.

For even if we cannot fully understand it, we can observe. We can look at nature. At the sun, the stars, the rhythms of the earth, the cycles of life, our own inner drive. We can look at how everything in the universe moves, grows, expands, and constantly seeks new forms, new expressions, new possibilities.

By contemplating what exists around us, and within us, we catch a glimpse of something greater:

A force that wants to create.

A force that wants continuous development.

A force that constantly unfolds in new forms.

We will not go deeper into the philosophical side here, but by observing the world and the universe as they are, we can begin to sense the outlines of what this creative force is really about.

Evolution

The Earth came into being around 4.6 billion years ago, and it was not until almost 600 million years later that the basic conditions for life arose: the atmosphere and water. From there began an unimaginably slow but purposeful journey. It took evolution a full 3.6 billion years to create the first multicellular organism, but after that, development accelerated at a pace that is almost hard to comprehend.

Some milestones in this enormous span of time:

• Dinosaurs walked the earth about 250 million years ago.
• The first mammals appeared more than 200 million years ago.
• Our early human ancestors emerged about 4 million years ago.
• And according to modern science, it is only around 300,000 years since the first modern humans walked this planet, a “truth” that probably needs some nuance, something I will return to in a later article.

When we view evolution from a bird’s-eye perspective, we see a clear pattern: Everything is about expansion.

Life does not evolve in order to stand still. It wants to explore, grow, transform, and become something more. This applies to species, to ecosystems, and to the universe as a whole. But it also applies to us humans.

Our human nature carries within it a deep, innate drive: a longing to learn more, become more, understand more, express more of our potential.

Believing that we humans are the final end product of evolution’s long journey is probably a misunderstanding. If evolution continues, as everything in nature suggests it will, the future will likely create beings who are far wiser, more mature, and more harmonious than we are.

And perhaps it is precisely this expanding direction that evolution has followed for billions of years that also awakens our own inner drive to grow, to develop, and to reach beyond who we are today.

The creative force’s motivation behind our existence

If we try to make an educated but humble guess based on everything we can observe, in nature, in the universe, and in ourselves, one thing clearly stands out:

Everything in existence seems to be driven by an impulse toward expansion.

If the creative force, whatever name we choose to give it, actually has a motivation or purpose for the material world and our existence, it seems likely that this purpose is deeply connected to precisely this:

a continuous development, expansion, and evolution of all that is.

This means that our own fundamental nature, all the way down at the cellular level and all the way up at the level of the soul, carries the same drive within it.

We are created by expansion. We are shaped by evolution. We live in a universe that stretches outward in every direction in every single microsecond.

So perhaps it is not so strange that we humans also feel this longing.

The longing to grow.

A desire to learn more, understand more, become more.

An inner movement toward expanding who we are: in consciousness, in insight, in love, and in experience.

When we see it this way, it becomes clear:

Wanting to become something more than we are today is the very core of our existence.

It is nature’s rhythm pulsing within us.

It is the impulse of the creative force continuing its work through our choices, our dreams, and our lives.

Destructive expansion

The deep inner longing for “something more” is a natural part of us, a drive that can actually lead us toward development, meaning, and growth. But in our modern society, this force is all too often turned in a direction that makes us ill.

Instead of developing as human beings, many seek to develop the facade:

more material wealth, higher status, a bigger career, more recognition, and ever more achievements.

The problem does not lie in the desire for security or good material circumstances.

The problem arises when these things become the goal itself, when the chase for them comes at the expense of the body, the soul, our relationships, and the joy of life.

We live in the most prosperous era in human history, and yet society is marked by an epidemic of burnout, depression, anxiety, and chronic health problems. This wave of suffering is closely linked to a lifestyle that lies miles away from the natural rhythms that shaped us through evolution.

(I go into this in more depth in the article “The Art of Living According to Nature’s Healthy Rhythms.”)

We live in the most prosperous era in human history, and yet society is marked by an epidemic of burnout, depression, anxiety, and chronic health problems.

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Many of those who come to me for help finding their way out of burnout are stuck in a combination of workaholism, perfectionism, and a lack of boundaries. Often this happens completely unconsciously. On autopilot, they use their inner force of expansion in a way that burns the candle at both ends until it finally goes out.

The inner force that could have created life and well-being is instead turned into something that slowly breaks us down and makes us ill.

Putting a lid on the force of expansion

Suppressing our inner force of expansion is just as harmful as misusing it.

When we put a lid on the natural urge to grow, explore, and become something greater than we are today, something quiet but deeply dramatic happens inside.

We begin to lose our spark.

It can show up as a feeling of inner emptiness, numbness, or lack of motivation. For some, it turns into low mood or depression. For others, it appears as a mild but persistent frustration that life is “standing still,” or a feeling that something important is missing, without quite understanding what it is.

This experience is not uncommon in phases of life where expansion naturally comes to a halt:

when you go from an active working life to retirement, lose your job, live with long-term illness, or simply fall into an everyday life where everything runs on autopilot and nothing in life stimulates growth, learning, or inner development.

When we ignore our inner expansion, we also close the door to life force, meaning, and hope for the future.

The key to a healthy force of expansion

We humans are the only living beings on this planet who do not automatically live out our natural force of expansion, the drive that nature intended to accompany us from birth to death. Unlike animals, we have free will, and with it comes the possibility of choosing against our own nature.

If we look at traditional Indigenous peoples, such as the Aboriginal people before the modern world marched in, we find something remarkable:

It was unthinkable for them not to live in full contact with their nature. They lived in deep resonance with the earth’s rhythms, cycles, and pulse of life. In such cultures, concepts such as emptiness, numbness, depression, anxiety, or chronic illness hardly existed, simply because they did not experience existence that way.

For us modern humans, the key is therefore quite clear:

We must consciously use our free will to channel the inner force of expansion in a healthy way, so that it leads to contentment, joy of life, vitality, meaning, and good health.

This does not happen by itself.

It requires effort.

It requires cultivation.

It requires a conscious choice to live closer to our own nature.

And the first step is to begin to understand nature’s rhythms, because nature holds the answer to what our own healthy, innate rhythms are. That is the wisdom we have gradually lost touch with in modern times.

If you want to rediscover these rhythms and integrate them into your own life, I warmly recommend the articles:

• “The Art of Living According to Nature’s Healthy Rhythms”
• “Forest Bathing: Nature’s Medicine Against Stress, Anxiety, and Burnout”

They offer practical advice and concrete methods for finding your way back to your natural and healthy rhythms.

The soul’s urge to expand

The third, and perhaps most powerful, mechanism that drives us toward growth, development, and the desire to grow beyond who we are today springs from the soul’s own nature. The soul’s home ground is a place without time and space, a field of being where it is one with absolutely everything that exists. It carries an infinity of wisdom, insight, and resources, a wholeness that cannot be limited.

When the soul chooses to incarnate into this life, something quite unusual happens:

It voluntarily steps into a limitation.

Almost like putting on a symbolic straitjacket of body, time, space, karma, and free will. Most of the soul’s innate abilities and knowledge are left dormant. Not because they disappear, but because they would make the incarnation itself meaningless if we had full access to them.

For imagine this:

If from the first moment of your life you had access to all the wisdom your soul carries, if you knew everything, understood everything, and could never be surprised:

how could life then teach you anything at all?

How would you grow, develop, experience anything new? What would be the point of being here?

The truth is that the soul must be limited in order to learn in a setting like the one we live in.

That is the very contract with the human experience.

And it is precisely through this limitation that the soul gets the opportunity to explore everything it cannot experience in its infinite form:

• the taste of a strawberry
• the feeling of falling in love
• the joy of a warm hug
• the depth of melancholy
• the grief that tears at you and heals
• challenges that push us to grow
• the boundless love for a child
• the calm of a sunset
• a starry sky dancing with the northern lights
• adversity, breakthroughs, joyfulness, and everything that comes with human life

This is what the soul came here for:

to experience what it cannot experience in its boundless nature.

That is why you carry a deep urge to expand.

It is not the ego’s demand; it is the soul’s calling.

The resonance of your soul

Deep inside you is a part of you that is not bound by time or space, a quiet, strong resonance that always pulses in time with your soul. This inner core also carries a deep yearning: a desire to return to oneness, to the boundless, to its original nature, where it is one with everything.

It longs for home.

Even though your heart carries the flame, it is often overlooked in our modern society. It is ignored, underestimated, ridiculed, misunderstood, or suppressed by the ego’s and the intellect’s eternal need for control, achievement, and outer recognition.

Yet the soul’s flame keeps burning.

When you begin to understand it, and more importantly: when you begin to work with it, you open the door to a force far greater than anything the intellect can create. This is the strongest of the three mechanisms we have talked about: the deep-seated drive that keeps pushing you toward growth, expansion, and a desire to become something greater than you are today.

For the soul always seeks to return to oneness.

It grows, expands, learns, and longs, until one day it gets to experience wholeness again. It will never stop driving you forward.

But what you do with this force is up to you.

You can use your free will to:

• suppress it
• ignore it
• try to fill the void with material goods that will never satisfy the soul’s longing
• or drown it in the ego’s demands, stress, and ambitions

But you can also choose something else.

You can hear the whispering voice in your heart.

You can follow the longing that is already within you.

You can say yes to the soul’s calling and begin the journey home, the epic journey your soul came here to experience in this incarnation.

And you can start right now.

You can say yes to the soul’s calling and begin the journey home, the epic journey your soul came here to experience in this incarnation.

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The Soul’s Epic Journey

If you want to understand the deep longing that lives within you, and how you can begin to live in tune with the soul’s calling, I recommend reading the article “When Life Feels Empty and Without Meaning: Are You Ready to Begin the Soul’s Epic Journey?”

There I describe in detail what the Soul’s Epic Journey really is, why it is so important for a meaningful life, and how you can take your first steps into this life-changing process.

Do you want to go deeper? On my blog and in the podcast The Journey to Self-Realization, we explore the topics in this text in more depth. If you want to walk the path yourself, it begins at the Yggdrasil Shamanic School with our free online course on primordial shamanism: Nature’s Path to Freedom and Self-Realization. No path could begin more simply. How far it reaches is up to you.

This content does not replace professional medical help from a doctor or other health professional, and it is not intended as medical treatment. If you are ill, always see a doctor first.