When Sex, Power, and Knowledge Don’t Do It for Me

When desires for worldly pleasures—food, sex, family, wealth, power, and knowledge—fail to keep their promise of lasting happiness, “the point in the heart” begins to develop. It’s a desire for something higher, appearing when all the mundane desires have exhausted themselves.

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Kabbalearn

Kabbalah distinguishes the desire for the Creator from all other desires. Desires for worldly pleasures are called “man’s heart,” while the desire for the Creator is called “the point in the heart.”

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The Point in the Heart

The point in the heart, the desire for Light—the Creator—awakens within the egoistic desires, which an individual cannot fulfill. Faced with the inability to satisfy the desire for the Creator through worldly means, a person comes to the final state of the evolution of the will to receive.

When that happens, that person often feels dark inside. But this is not because he or she has grown worse. On the contrary, it is because that person has become more corrected, drawn more Light, and the new Light shines on new places in the soul. But because these places are not yet corrected, they often give off a “dark” feeling. When darkness appears, it’s a sure sign that you have made progress and that Light is sure to follow.

In the “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Baal HaSulam writes that it’s as if the Creator appears to a person from amidst the cracks in a wall and offers hope for future peace. In Kabbalah, this is called “putting one’s hand on the good fortune.”