Tag: desire

“There is a purpose but not an end point.”

November 13, 2025

“Lord, is there an aim, like perfecting the world or uniting us all into the Godhead?”

No, not exactly.  There is a purpose but not an end-point.  The notion of an end-point derives from the model of the human will and its desires, getting what it wants.  The purpose of singing a song is not to get to the end.

There is no end-time.  The purpose of eschatology is to portray something about the meaning of the world.

Eschatology denotes religious ideas about the final purpose or culmination of history.

There are endings to particular worlds, but they are not apocalyptic, any more than an individual death is.

Well, just when a meaningful pattern was emerging, a sense of direction to life and history, it ends, as T. S. Eliot says, “not with a bang but with a whimper.”  History comes to nothing.  I found this answer distressing, and Abigail was more upset than I was.  One of the Jews’ gifts to the world is the very idea of history, not as a series of endless episodes or cycles, but as a progress, with a Beginning (the Creation) and a Grand Finale (the Coming of the Messiah).  Abigail doesn’t even like movies without happy endings.  And we weren’t talking about movies.  As we saw it, we were talking about whether life had any meaning or purpose at all.  This is a concern neither of us would let go.

“The Soul’s will is the will of God.”

August 18, 2023

 

 

I tried to step back to see what question my “soul” would ask. “How can I merge with You? I’m not sure if that’s the best way to put it, Lord: be at one with You, at rest with You, at one with Your will?”

The question is adequately formulated. The goal—one way to describe the goal—is to be at one with God, the God of All. At bottom, the Soul’s will is the will of God. The Soul is at one with God.

It is not that you and I are literally the same substance, the same particular. It is that we are “at one,” in perfect harmony, and not accidentally so. It is in the nature of what the Soul is, that it is at one with God. Remember that these metaphysical (philosophical) categories are crude and inadequate in the first place.

Back to your question: how can you become at one with God? Of course, the answer is that you already are—your Soul, that is. The task is to come to realize that this is so, to realize it not merely in theory, but in intuitive, felt understanding, in your emotions and feelings, and in practice.

“That’s the goal, Lord? It sounds simple. The one-ness is already inside. All we have to do is to bring our conscious selves along.”

That is right. It is the simplest thing in the world. And everyone, at some level and at some moments, knows it, at least glimpses it. But it is very difficult to actualize in practice. The empirical world—the world of desires and the senses—seems so real and is so powerful that is extremely difficult to redirect one’s energy.

And the empirical world is real, in its own way. The world is not an illusion, a mirage. If it is a mirage, it is one from which you can drink water. No, you must respect the empirical world while at the same time emancipating yourself from it, not letting yourself be identical with your interests in this world.

So the world of our experience (and desire) is quite real—it is the arena in which we live our lives and loves, joys and sorrows. In spite of that, we should not let ourselves be ensnared by it.