Human beings have a strange feature that is not shared by any other creature. And that is, the unlimited desire to search. Every human being has this desire within him, from birth itself, which makes him constantly search for something unknown that he has not yet found. No success or achievement whatsoever manages to satisfy this desire. Nor does any failure destroy it. Philosophers have termed this as the desire for the ideal.
It is this desire for the ideal that is the real and final moving-force behind all human activities. If this desire were absent, all activities in this world would all of a sudden stop. It is this powerful desire of the human mind that Sigmund Freud wrongly termed as sexual desire. Alfred Adler wrongly branded it as the desire for power. William McDougall erroneously claimed that it was a mysterious result of the combination of various animalistic instincts in man. Karl Marx tried to prove that it was the desire for material or economic accumulation, which, in his view, controlled all other human activities. In order to write all these explanations off as erroneous, it is enough to note that even when some people acquire the things that the above-mentioned thinkers labeled this desire to actually represent, it did not make them at all content. Rather, their inner being remained as restless as before, and they were no different from other people.
For thousands of years, people have been trying to search for this ideal in the things of this world. Yet, no one could gain the satisfaction of having obtained the complete answer to this quest. In this regard, an Emperor is as unsatisfied as an unemployed pauper. This long experience of humankind is enough to prove that the answer to an individual's quest is not present in the visible world. Rather, the answer lies in the world that is not visible – the unseen realm – a world that a person can sense but cannot see.
The fact is that this desire is the desire for God. The Creator is the ideal which a human being is so anxious to find. The thing that everyone is actually in search of is God, the Creator of every soul. On the basis of his or her innate nature, every person remains continuously in search of God. This inner emotion drives people to the things of the world. They imagine that perhaps these things are the answer to their search. But when they obtain these things and experience them at close range, they realize that they were not what they were looking for.
Source: Man and God
