The pull toward something larger than the self looks to me like an evolved feature, not an accident. Jonathan Haidt calls it the hive switch. Moving and singing together turn a selfish primate into a member of something, and he thinks it was selected for.
I put the higher calling one step further out. It is a spandrel, a by-product of minds built for agent detection, coordination, long planning, and a story about the self. Belonging was selected. Pointing it past any group is what the machinery does on its own, as beauty falls out of the machinery of pleasure.
Half of the craving is fear. Terror management theory descends from Ernest Becker. We know we will die, so we build worldviews and self-esteem to hold the terror off, and the immortality project is the purest case. I think the theory is right and pessimistically incomplete. The published objection is the meaning maintenance model: any broken expectation, not only death, sets people restoring meaning. It explains most minds most of the time, not the rest.
The other half is appetite, and it runs with no death in view. Jaak Panksepp found seven primary emotional systems in the mammal brain, and SEEKING is the itch to explore and expect. Sex is there as LUST, one of seven, so it is not the answer either.
Awe is the feeling of something vast that forces the mind to make room for it. A canyon, a proof, or a piece of music will do. Flow is absorption in a task that fits the skill, self switched off. When I say clarity of mind and spirit, I mean those two.
So the drive has two engines. One pushes away from death, and the other pulls toward the vast and the absorbing. Terror management sees only the first, which is why it reads as bleak. Russell’s cure for the fear of death, widening one’s interests beyond the self, is the second engine at work. The arts build that engine on purpose.
I hold this lightly. The spandrel claim is an inference, not a finding, and Haidt reads the same machinery as an adaptation. Both can be true. The machinery was selected for belonging, and the higher calling is what it does when it slips the leash. Emotions lists transcendence among the existential states. This is my guess at where it comes from.