The Aim of the Heart
Q: What is the role of the “aim” in creation?
A: The aim is the one thing that the creature acquires in addition to the desire to delight in the Creator. The Creator made the creature with an inherent desire to delight in Him, in His Light. The creature feels only one thing: the absence or the presence of this pleasure. It doesn’t even feel itself, but only the pleasure and its quantity and quality.
The reason is that one can only feel oneself relative to something opposite the self. Therefore, the creature cannot develop from a sensation of pleasure alone. Such a feeling exists in the still, the vegetative and the animate (including the animate human being).
The ability to sense the Creator is what differentiates man from other forms of creation. It would be more correct to say that one who feels the Creator is called “Man.” In the language of the Kabbalah, Man is the vessel that feels not only the pleasure, but also the source of the pleasure. It is necessary to develop the will to this extent because the still, the vegetative and the animate are different to one another only in the measure of their will to receive.
The measure of the desire causes changes in its quality. The will to receive (that is, beyond the still) brings life with it. A greater will to enjoy creates animals and brings about movement in order to search for the pleasure, the feeling of the self as an individual entity.
Pleasure is possible only on the border between two opposing sensations. The sensation of oppositeness between creature and Creator creates the aim in man. A creature is a desire to enjoy. Only the aim allows for two situations: the aim “for me,” which is the corporeal state; and the aim “for the Creator,” which is the spiritual state, because in that man becomes similar to the Creator.
An aim “for the Creator” is the one thing we need to acquire from the Creator, the Light. The aim leads us to the purpose of creation and makes us equal to Him. Because of that, the Kabbalah is the “wisdom of the aim.”