Did You Know That Your Soul Is a ‘Desire to Enjoy’?
Like the earth in the story of Genesis, the soul must go through a certain process of development in the body. It takes more than one lifetime to complete the process, meaning that the soul clothes itself in many bodies over many cycles. Although the process is clear, we can go our entire life without feeling that we have a soul, a spiritual component, thus not realizing the purpose of our life in this world.
As we have said, the soul is merely a desire to enjoy, to receive. It defines the attributes and the needs of the body, while the body itself is a dead object. The development of the soul creates different needs in the human being. Its desires change with its evolution from desires for bodily pleasures—food, sleep, and sex, just as in animals—to the desire to return to its spiritual state, its primary state from which it descended to this world.
Those desires do not evolve one at a time, but in a jumble. That is why a person can feel he or she has a craving for knowledge and at the same time a desire for money, honor, and sex. It happens in any person, because all the desires are made of a unique compound.
Why the Desire for Spirituality Is Unique
The same principle applies to the desire for spirituality. It can be revealed along with lower desires, but what distinguishes it is that we cannot satisfy it with anything mundane, because the source for this desire is outside our world. The revelation of such a desire testifies to the degree of development of the soul.
The souls return and descend to this world’s bodies and develop over many lifetimes, until the moment when a person feels an attraction for something that is outside this world. Humanity undergoes various phases of development, and contemporary souls reveal desires for spirituality. In the past, such desires only appeared in distinguished individuals, but today we can see them surfacing in millions.
How a Person Gradually Comes to Need Spirituality
The process of developing of the desires can only happen in souls that are dressed in bodies, meaning in souls in this world. To receive infinite pleasures, wholeness, knowledge, and eternity, there has to be an independent desire for the pleasure and the sensation of its absence. That is why the primordial soul, as perfect as it was in its creation, could not appreciate its own perfection and had to descend to the lowest level, to our world, to rise from this low point and learn to appreciate the perfect state.
Because we are all parts of the same soul, any person must, either in this life or in a future one, develop to the point where he or she will begin to feel a desire for connection with the Creator or Upper One and return to the initial state from which his or her soul came and to which it must return. However, we must attain that preliminary state while still in this world, when our souls are clothed in a body. In the beginning, the soul was at its place, connected with its root, but denied of a body. The difference between that situation and the state when the soul is clothed in a body is that, in the latter, the soul attains a great deal more upper light and pleasure than it had in the preliminary state.
Why the Desire for Spirituality Is the Greatest of All Desires
Our desire for spirituality is not a big one. We therefore have to intensify it to the point where we can be filled with the entire upper light and sublime delight. Our entire life’s work, therefore, is to obtain a desire for spirituality that is greater than all other desires. To help us develop a desire to feel the perfect, eternal pleasure, an invisible light descends to our souls from our roots, which awakens in us new desires we do not understand.
It is that light that creates around us a certain environment, internal and external conditions that awaken in us the need to develop these desires, such as a hostile environment or a sensation of fear from an inner enemy inside us. If such feelings come to a person “out of the blue,” it will be frightening. But if a person is made to understand, either directly or through a messenger, that these external conditions were sent on purpose to awaken him or her to connect with the Upper One, that person will not be afraid of these so-called enemies.
All kinds of unpleasant situations are sent to us so that we will finally understand that it is not the external things that we should fear, but the lack of contact with the Upper One, the absence of spirituality. A complete desire for spirituality is built gradually, by ascents and descents that come intermittently: descents to desires of this world and ascents to desires of the Upper One.
“4 Things You Absolutely Must Know to Thrive Spiritually” is based on the book, Awakening to Kabbalah: The Guiding Light of Spiritual Fulfillment by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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