The Meaning of Life

Pleasure.

(But a totally different kind of pleasure than what we know of in our corporeal senses).

This isn’t my theory, rather it’s what people who’ve attained the meaning of life have been telling us. These people are called Kabbalists. They’ve been around as far back as 5777 years ago. Their attainment has shaped human thought, behavior, and world views throughout human history. Greeks called their wisdom philosophy because they didn’t have a translation of the word Kabbalah. It’s not a religious thing or a superstitious thing or a mystical thing. It’s a science that explains our place in nature, all the forces working in it (most of which we haven’t even discovered) and how to attain the highest level of pleasure. Why pleasure?

Because we are all what Kabbalists call a “desire to receive”. Receive pleasure. Everything in nature is a desire to receive pleasure. It simply grows and develops as it moves up from the still level, to the vegetative, animate and finally the speaking degree (us). Since we’re a desire to receive pleasure, when we have an unfulfilled desire we feel discomfort, even pain. So our basic operating system runs on “maximum pleasure at minimum pain/effort”. On the still level, that desire has a fairly limited amount of freedom in pursuing its fulfillment. A mineral’s desire, for example, is a desire to maintain its form - maintain a certain set of connections between other elements on the still level. Minerals grow, albeit slowly, by assimilating more minerals. On the vegetative level, that desire is has more freedom and can now take in nutrients and expel waste. It can also procreate and make better use of the food it’s taking in. But it’s still locked to the level of the entire vegetative degree: all plants face the sun, all plants are rooted in the ground. On the animate degree there are even more freedoms to pursue those pleasures. Animals can roam in search for food and can run away from danger. Animals procreate and animals also have families, herds, flocks. The speaking degree (us) is the most evolved. It has the most freedom to pursue pleasures. But even humans are still governed by our animalistic desires (food, sex, family) and our social desires (money, honor, power) and a slightly higher form of desire (knowledge). As you can surely feel, we also posses all the desires of the inanimate and vegetative degrees. To make matters worse, the moment we do manage to get some pleasure “inside of us” it starts to dissipate. think of a basic desire for food for example. In fact, the greater the pleasure the faster it disappears. Think sex for example. It’s as if there’s a mechanism at work here that short circuits the cycle of pleasure. Even worse, it seems like once you get something, you will only feel satisfaction later if you can get more of that. The same pleasure can’t fulfill you. When you have a thousand dollars in your bank account, you immediately think of having $2000. And these social desires we have are completely under the influence of the society in which we live. Think of advertising but in fact everything is influencing what we want, all the time.

At some point, there comes a point in a person’s life when none of these pursuits will fulfill him. You are basically realizing that all the food, sex, family, money, honor, power, and even knowledge of this world will not satisfy you because they are transient and incomplete. This is when a new kind of desire emerges. It’s called “the point in the heart”. It’s a desire for something higher, out of this world, above this cycle of chasing these fleeting pleasures. That’s when the true search for meaning begins. Usually when the point in the heart awakens, a person starts asking deeper questions, they start looking into Eastern Philosophies, esoteric books, meditations and superstitions. You name it. But if they keep pursuing this point, it will eventually lead them to the wisdom of Kabbalah. Kabbalah means “to receive”. To receive correctly the ultimate form of pleasure (whatever you desire). In fact, we don’t even have the vessel to receive all the available abundance. It’s like we’re trying to empty the ocean with a thimble. Kabbalah teaches us how to build a correct vessel. But to do that, one has to learn how this system is built and what is their role in it. I’d look here.

And being on this path, engaged in that search, is already an immense pleasure… :-)