Q: Are the soul and the point in the heart different names for the same essence?
A: A desire that is created by the Creator to enjoy Him (the Light) is called a “soul.” That desire remains in perfect form and complete adhesion with the Creator as it was initially created. In order for the soul to attain that situation in its own right, and to equalize with the Creator independently, thus becoming like Him, the Creator separates it from Himself by rendering it with opposite attributes to Him.
Ultimately, the soul stops feeling the Creator, the eternity and perfection, and clothes a corporeal body with a will to enjoy for its own pleasure. Through this will, the soul feels what we call “Our World.” In order to feel its true, original, and complete state again, the soul must develop within it similar attributes to those of the Creator, as though giving birth to them, creating them.
In its original and complete state, the soul consists of the same volume as the Light that descends from the Creator and is filled by it. The more detached the soul grows from the Creator, the smaller its desire becomes. At the farthest distance from the Creator, there remains only a point (in size and power) and we can feel only our own will to delight our animate bodies. That point, however, which is in each and every one of us, can start “talking!”
The original soul is divided into 600,000 parts. Each of them evolves gradually from a point to a vast spiritual vessel (620 times greater), over the course of 6,000 consecutive corrections, called “years” or “degrees.”
When it first appears, the soul is felt as a point in the heart, at the center of all desires, in man’s ego. The soul exists within everyone in this world. But what soul? At what level? That is something we must all discover.
Q: Why are there so many bodies in the world, but only 600,000 souls?
A: Most people in our world don’t have a spiritual soul, only an animate soul, like any other animal, which is enough to sustain them. But in them, there is also an embryo of the future spiritual soul, called the “point in the heart.” The heart is the desire to take pleasure in everything around us.
Throughout history, and through their many lifetimes, humans develop desires for physical pleasures, and then for wealth, power, control, and knowledge. Following those desires for worldly pleasures, generally called the “heart,” is the desire for spirituality.
The desire for spirituality seems to appear within the animate desires, hence the name, “point in the heart.” Of course, those desires have nothing to do with the heart in our body. If we planted a new heart in someone, it would not change a single characteristic in that person– even if we implanted a new brain. The spiritual sphere has nothing to do with our biological body.
But the point in the heart is not the soul (yet). It is more like a human drop of semen, from which the embryo develops and the child is born. The point in our heart is like a drop of desire, a yearning for supreme attainment, for the Creator. If a person begins to develop it, it grows like the semen that has evolved into a fetus. When it becomes independent, it is called a “soul.”
Q: What does it mean to receive a soul?
A: The soul is born out of spiritual semen, which is developed by the Light that descends on a person when studying Kabbalah. The point in the heart then begins to inflate and expand under the influence of that Light, and finally evolves into ten complete Sefirot; a complete structure called Partzuf, or a Guf (body) of a soul. The Upper Light is drawn into those ten Sefirot. This is how a person begins to feel the spiritual world, the Upper One, the Creator.