Why Do I Need This Imaginary World?

great A question I received: What is the science of Kabbalah’s approach to the perception of reality?

My Answer: The approach is very simple. A human being is a desire. This desire imagines itself from within – who am I, what am I, what do I consist of, how do I exist, as well as what and how do I feel? In addition, it imagines that it supposedly exists outside of this desire, as though there is another form of desire somehow depicted as outside of itself.

There is a great gap between the desire which seems to belong to me (in which I imagine myself), and the desire in which I perceive everything that surrounds me. The desire in which I imagine my external environment is disconnected from my internal “I.”

This external desire feels foreign in regard to my inner desire; however, I analyze it only to the extent that the inner desire can benefit from it, meaning, receive pleasure from it in my inner desire. Therefore, I can kill this external desire; I can rid it of all life and Light because I don’t care what happens to it. The most important thing for me is to gain in my inner desire. I use the external desire only to benefit my inner desire.

Why do we perceive the world and ourselves this way? Baal HaSulam explains that there is only one desire, but it has two inner, inherent differences – the separation into the internal and the external. Through this breaking, the Creator enabled us to feel the difference between Him and ourselves – to feel how opposite we are to each other and how distant He is from us. However, instead of feeling Him, we are imagining the world that surrounds us now.

So how else can He instill Himself, the quality of bestowal, into us, the quality of reception? He does so by giving us an example of what these two forms of nature represent, what it means to receive and to bestow.

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