If we understand ourselves, we can be ourselves

What do I mean by that

Unless we understand who we are and more importantly how we function, we obviously are like an animal; run by forces which we have not chosen

Who we are, of course is Divinity within a body

How we function, is another story

We function as follows

As the Zohar teaches, three functionaries / masters rule us

Ideally, is our minds

What makes us different to an animal, is our ability to self-discipline ourselves

If a child was God-forbid born in the wild, they would be exactly like an animal would

However we have a keyboard that can give instruction to the harddrive, thus presenting new ideas, thoughts, hence feelings and emotions

Now on the subject of feelings and emotions, that’s the other driver of man – and this is very important to understand – for most of us think our thoughts are objective – they are 99.9999 percent of the time, only emotions in words

For example, I saw once on TV, that studies show, men mainly daydream about vacations, women about marriage.

So is the person thinking or expressing thoughts relating to a desire, in other words imagining?

Rarely indeed do we think.

So independent of us – i.e. we haven’t chosen this – God created us with instinctual needs and desires; primarily, they are firstly (similar to Maslow’s hierarchy) for security, for food, relationships and meaning (which really relates to our Divine soul, for animals have bodies that need the previous three but don’t have a need for meaning.)

But tragically, God gave us yet another all-encompassing challenge and that is the unique human desire for grandeur.