So, at all times I’m given what I long for, God or otherwise? If so, why is there any suffering?
Nothing is quite so sublimely beautiful as an epiphany that leaves us seeing old things in new ways. 
Yes. That is exactly how I interpret it. Aside from the ubiquitous message of God being love, nothing so permeates His teachings as what you describe. Significance is found in what we value — the beauty within, and not in what rules we follow. Consider all these teachings:
He was told that the food He was eating was making Him unclean (sinful) because He had failed to do the ancient hands cleansing ritual. He replied: It is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of his heart.
He was told that He was breaking God’s law by working on the Sabbath. He said: The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
He was asked when anyone would see this Kingdom of God that He kept yapping about. He answered: You will not find the Kingdom of God by looking here or looking there, for the Kingdom of God is within you.
He was asked what rules it is necessary to follow to enter God’s Kingdom. He responded that the whole of the law is summed up by the commandments to love God and your neighbor, and added: Put (value) God first above all else, and all else will fall into place.
When describing how to recognize those who follow Him, He stated not one single rule, but said: By this will all men know you are my disciples, that you love one another.
When the rabble of disciples insisted on a commandment that they could follow, He waived the opportunity to say something like, “Do this ritual, and say this incantation.” Instead, He said: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another.
When asked to describe the Kingdom of Heaven, He likened it to a great pearl that a man discovered in a field. He then described how much the man valued the pearl: He sold everything he had to buy the field.
And so on and so on…
You’ve already got it. I don’t mean to trivialize the point with this example, but it fits. I hate — hate hate hate — seafood of any kind. It is an abomination so foul that I cannot stand even to smell it. There are people who have expressed how sorry they feel for me that I can’t appreciate the joys of seafood that they experience. But there is absolutely nothing that makes me happier about a dinner or gathering than that there be no shred or hint of fish. My dinner heaven would be a fishless affair. But those without the ability to empathize might never understand why this would appeal to me.
For existentialism, I would recommend Sartre. He was the one who drew the line in the sand between the two philosophies by stating, “existence is prior to essence” (From Being and Nothingness). For essentialism, I would recommend Plato, Aristotle, and Popper. (The former two conceived essentialism, and the latter split it out from nominalism.) If you want just a general (and very abridged) introduction to the concepts, Wikipedia has articles. But Sartre really pegged it, I think. Existentialism may be described as existence preceding essence — something must exist before it may develop an essential nature. Essentialism may be described as essence preceding existence — something must be definable before it may emerge into existence. For a more in depth look at essentialism, see Stanford University’s Aristotle’s Metaphysics.
Not at all times, just eventually — specifically upon completion of your moral journey (your biological life), for which suffering is a sort of landmark upon which you calibrate your moral compass. Keep in mind that two very different perspectives are at work: (1) the perspective of existence, which is temporal; and (2) the perspective of essence, which is eternal. You perceive, as a biological organism, that your journey is a longwinded affair with ups and downs. But as a spiritual entity, you perceive the universe has not yet having begun, still ongoing, and completely finished — all at once. Pain hurts the animal, but not the spirit. What hurts the spirit is worthlessness.
You know, I just realized how burningly true that statement is for me. I absolutely cherish those epiphanies; they’re immensely valuable to me. Hmm…
Lib, another just-checking-my-understanding post:
Let’s say the “value one treasures most” happens to be the same as God’s: edification. That means you’ve got a problem because, unlike God, you have a subjective reference frame, making it very difficult, if not impossible, to know how to edify someone else, let alone what might edify them.
But what you can do is edify yourself. This pursuit of edification will be somewhat public; not because it’s a public process per se, but because the pursuit is inherent to who you are, and, humans being social critters, some level of self-exposure is inevitable.
And then a miracle occurs
Other people become edified by your pursuit of edification. Much like other physicists pursuit of physics became enriched and enlarged by the dogged pursuit of some very strange ideas by that young patent clerk in Bern. Thus, edification grows.
Your understanding and mine appear to be one and the same. From this time onward, we can discuss quite much and with a mutual comprehension. Now you can understand why goodness compels the existence of God: without goodness, existence would destroy itself as quickly as it manifested. Existence needs God in order to continue; i.e., it is contingent on Him. The beauty of it, then, is that existence itself is proof of God. The phrase “God exists” is therefore not only true, but redundant. That’s why I’ve said in the analytical logic threads that God is a tautology — something that cannot not be true.
Perhaps you would care now to discuss the essence of spirit?
Yes! I have a sense of the (if you will) “essence” of Spirit, but it’s pretty blurry. As I said earlier, I’m not clear on exactly what it is or entails. It seems there’s something about Spirit that’s pre- or meta-epistemological; that it involves a “knowing” that only analogously resembles intellectual knowledge. It also seems (and this is a concept that I have a hard time remembering) that Spirit is atemporal. And in moral choices (behavior), Spirit is like a magnet, pulling you toward it’s recurrent theme. (i.e., If the physical universe is like Baskin-Robbins 31,000,000,000 flavors, Spirit is the voice in your head forever chanting: “Chocolate. Chocolate. Chocolate”)
Is any of that close?
Damn spot on, I’d say. 
Spirit is what you find in a man after you have peeled everything physical away. It is man’s (and God’s) essential “self”. Spirit and reality are synonyms.
What prevents you from appreciating fish, someday?
Other than my severe allergy and almost knee-jerk built-in response dating back some fifty years, nothing really. But then, it was only an analogy. Essence doesn’t change. It it did, it wouldn’t be essence.
How do you know essence doesn’t change?
Like I just said, if it changed, it wouldn’t be essence. That’s what essence is: to ti ên einai (the what it was to be). If something were not what it was to be, then it would be something else. See the article on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, to which I linked earlier — in particular, the section titled: “Substance and Essence”. Here is the link once again, for your convenience.
I might be able to field this one. You can think of “essence” as what makes something what it is. A change in essence would mean a change in what a thing is; it would cease to be what it is and therefore, literally cease to be.
And besides, Lib already stated that our essence is spirit, and that spirit is atemporal. If there ain’t no time, there ain’t no change.
Isn’t this circular?
Also, the background assumption seems to be that contradictions don’t exist.
Finally, what can’t existence and consciousness itself be the essence? Why a value or “goodness”?
I suppose so. But then, all definitions are circular, and all circular arguments are valid.
Yes. I take that as axiomatic.
If existence were the essence, then we would have no separate identities. Existence is a property that we all share.
I don’t understand the part about value and goodness, though. Perhaps Otherwise’s response answered that for you.
Wait a minute. I just realized that I’m wrong. The above is poorly worded and implies that if something ceases to exist, so does it’s essence, and that is incorrect. Please ignore.
This, however, is correct (um… I think).
Lib, are there other attributes of Spirit in addition to the ones I mentioned?
Also, although Spirit is atemporal and unchangeable, it nevertheless effects change within the temporal universe through our ethical behaviors (although the physical changes themselves are ethically neutral, and not all physical changes are effected by spirit), right?.
Consider that spirit and reality are synonyms, and recall our discussion in the thread, Is The Universe Real?. We established that the attributes of reality are essence, necessity, and eternity. The universe is none of these, and therefore is not real; whereas the spirit is all of these, and therefore is real.
(Note for Sentient: We cannot say that the universe is eternal in the sense used here, even from your point of view because we do not mean eternity in the sense of all time, but rather eternity in the sense of timelessness. You will agree that time is not only an attribute of the universe but along with space defines its very fabric.)
I agree with you that spirit may (but is not required to) effect change in the universe. We ourselves are examples of exactly that happening. The deeper question, perhaps, is what is the mechanism by which that occurs, and I believe that both Nietzsche and Schopenhauer touched upon it — Nietzsche from a political perspective (the will to power), and Schopenhauer from a metaphysical persepective (will as the thing-in-itself).
But obviously, if we are to continue the examination of aesthetics, then we need an aesthetical perspective. Not surprisingly, it comes from Jesus: The spirit is like the wind — you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. (In fact, the term he used for spirit was pneuma, Greek for wind.) As it happens, wind arises as a result of thermal changes in the atmosphere. Warm air rises and cold air sinks, resulting in a current of air. The air itself is not the wind. And neither is the heat or cold. The aesthetic will may be likened to the energy that feeds the wind, its intensity determined by the level of energy it receives and the mass of atmosphere.
This is the nature of the mechanism by which the spirit interacts with the universe: the more intensely we value something, the more the universe is manipulated by our essence. Jesus described this in terms of persistence, telling the story of a man who knocked desperately on his neighbor’s door late one night. When the neighbor first heard the knock, he was annoyed, and dismissed it by saying to himself that the man was crazy for knocking so late at night. But the man kept on knocking, and it became impossible for the neighbor to ignore the sound. Eventually, he got up out of bed and went to the door. Jesus then interpreted His story this way: Knock, and the door will be opened. Seek, and you will find. For the door will be opened to all who knock. And all who seek will find.
Changes to the universe brought about by the drive for aesthetical fulfillment are described by physics in the same way as default changes brought about by the movement of time. If you throw a knife at a man because you hold him to be worthless, then the exact same laws of gravity will describe the path of the knife as those that describe a falling apple or an orbiting moon. Your picking up the knife and heaving it may even be described in terms of Newton’s Law, that the force of your hand caused the movement of what had previously been at rest. But the moral evaluation is quite different because, unlike a rogue asteroid that knocks a moon out of orbit, your hand is moved by your intention. The force is incidental to the intention, and is merely a means by which the intention is realized. The asteroid has no intention. It neither values nor devalues the moon.
That all covers the essence and necessity, but what about the eternity? Interestingly, this is quite often the least appealing attribute to those who examine the issue. Eternity, as you say, implies a state of permanence, a lack of change. And so they picture the fate of the faithful as some bland blend of boredom stretching out into infinity. And indeed, were eternity its only attribute, the spirit would be not only boring but pretty much useless. But once again, we may turn to the teachings of Jesus to discover an understanding that certainly satisifies. He taught: You will do even greater things than I, because I go to be with the Father.
On first blush, that doesn’t really appear to be saying much. He walked on water, so maybe we will dance on the ocean. Or He made water into wine, so maybe we will make plastic into platinum. But then, we pause to consider Who He really is. He is the agent through Whom the universe itself was created. Consider this passage from the beginning of the book of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.
That means that His statement was utterly profound. He created a universe, and we will do things even greater than He. Therefore, eternity is whatever you shall will it to be. You may introduce temporality if you wish, and space, thus creating a universe of your own, one that is designed with your aesthetic in mind, to be the fulfillment of your essence. We will do what He did — create universes and visit them, and we will do it better. Hardly a banal fate.
And so we have these three: the essence of spirit as intensity of will, the necessity of spirit as the agent for influencing contingencies like the universe, and the eternity of spirit as the fabric for weaving the fulfillment our aesthetic longings. It is all quite a beautiful thing.
Wow.
Lib, while I’m absorbing that last post, let me ask a few random questions that are coming up:
Is everyone hardwired with just one core value?
Does free will amount to choosing between: A) Behaviors that reflect or align with our value and B) All other behaviors?
Could you expound a bit on how and why we choose our behaviors? I’m still not quite grasping how or why our unchanging essence would “choose” any behavior that was not a manifestation of itself. IOW, what part of “me” values with more or less intensity?
From the point of view of our spirit, the universe was, is, and has already been manipulated to the full extent possible by our spirit, correct?
More double-checking: spirit that values edification is the only, er, “type” of spirit capable of creating universes; a universe designed with any other aesthetic would faceplant before it left the starting blocks, correct?
I suppose I could muster up some semantic argument that the universe is timeless in a sense (just as the shape of the Earth is timeless) and eternal (just as the Earth is global), but it’s probably better just to say that your reality lies outside the universe by definition rather than you having to tiptoe around all the … err … time.