Creation’s plan for humanity was that it would develop through experiences of beauty and joy.
All of Creation bears the eternal seal of its Creator’s Love. Hence, the seed of the spirit was meant to blossom into the full flower of the human being through beauty and joy.
Take our encounter with the beauty of nature. It was meant to awaken the upward striving within the spirit toward the source of all beauty.
That beauty exists in higher worlds, of which the material world is only a pale reflection.
Nature’s beauty was also meant to awaken in the spirit a longing for its true home: Paradise, because this world is not its home, only a place to develop.
And it was meant to stir deep gratitude in us, the way any guest is grateful to a generous host. And nature is a very generous host.
Joy was meant to lift the spirit in the same way.
The joy of marriage, for instance, was meant to awaken in both partners the wish to rise together. (In Hebrew, the word for marriage shares its root with the verb “to be lifted up.”)
And the joy of a child being born was meant to carry within it the knowledge that a soul had been given another opportunity for correction and growth, sometimes after waiting hundreds of years in the world beyond.
But hundreds of thousands of years ago, we left the path we were meant to walk and chose to enslave the spirit to the intellect, and later to the emotions as well. As a result, our whole perspective narrowed.
So we became greedy and possessive toward the very things that were meant to uplift us: nature, our partner, our children.
Which is why, today, it is almost impossible to awaken the human spirit to its purpose through beauty and joy.
And because God’s Love is solely for the spirit, and not for whatever the intellect and the emotions find pleasant, suffering is what is left. For now, it is the only thing that can awaken us.
However, for anyone whose spirit has awakened, whether from collective suffering such as war or from personal suffering such as illness, and who has begun an inner process of purification and correction, the Light, in Its great mercy, will reveal hidden paths on which the spirit can climb again, through beauty and joy.