The Elusive Pursuit of Pleasure

But do we truly experience pleasure? While there are many good moments in the lives of most of us, the overall picture is less than rosy. The increasing rates of drug abuse, extreme violence, terrorism, depression and other ills of our affluent society testify that something very basic is missing in our lives. None of these problems is the cause; instead, they are symptoms of a much deeper problem—our inability to fulfil our desire to feel pleasure.

To understand why we are dissatisfied, we need to remember that the Creator is a force of love and wishes to give us pleasure. Since the greatest possible pleasure is being in "His shoes"—omniscient and omnipotent—this is what He wants to give us, His power and His mind, Himself.

In other words, His goal in creating us is to make us similar to Him. And by consequence, the only state in which we will ever be happy is when we are like Him, when we discover and share His qualities. When we obtain these qualities, we will be infinitely, completely happy.

All the above is very nice, but if we take a look around and honestly ask ourselves if this is the world of a Creator who loves His creatures and wants to benefit them, we will probably think that something went very wrong, either with the Creator, or with us.

The first option that something went wrong with the Creator has been our stance since the dawn of history. This is why we keep trying to change the world He created and "improve" it. We constantly invent new foods, technologies, means of transportation, social rules, and the list is endless. We have been pursuing the "better," "stronger," and "faster" for millennia; but has this pursuit resulted in happiness, or even contentment? Probably not. Otherwise we wouldn't keep replacing and changing what we have. Indeed, why are we never satisfied?

Now as on today many people would begin to think that, perhaps, the stance that something was wrong with the world had not been the right answer. They would begin to feel that the problem wasn't with the world and its Creator, but with us! This new concept is gaining momentum, and more people than ever are aware that the problem is not with the world, but with humanity.

This is a critical shift: it means that we acknowledge that the problem is with human nature, and not with anything else. In consequence, just as we turn to the program vendor when software we install doesn't work, when human nature fails us, we must ask the "nature vendor" to provide us with a different nature, one that works properly.