Difference Between Mind and Soul
What is the Difference Between Mind and Soul?
The soul is the place where we feel pleasure.
The mind is the place where we calculate how to receive the pleasure.
The soul (or in easier terms, "the desire") tells the mind what the pleasure should be, and the mind then has to work, like a calculator, on how that desire should be fulfilled. (Read Baal HaSulam's article "A Thought is an Upshot of the Desire" which deals directly with this issue.)
If you take the time to analyze your desires, you'll discover that they are aimed at transient things - things which will eventually die away. Perhaps a moment enters here and there where you contemplate the eternal, but this moment is always followed by drives for transient things.
There is no eternal soul until we attain one in this lifetime, through working on our desire until we really want an eternal soul. Then, this desire expands our mind: it starts calculating how to fulfill this desire with eternal life.
The more one works on this, and the harder one works on it, the more one comes to realize that it's impossible: our mind wasn't made to calculate eternal things.
If one then truly wants this, works for it, exerts maximal efforts and reaches the realization that they can't get it, they are brought to what is called "a prayer." This isn't a religious prayer where someone reads some words from a book, or asks God for some things to be well in his life in this world... It is a true prayer. The person has tried everything he/she could to satisfy this desire for eternal life, found it impossible to do so, and out of this exertion, bringing no results (and furthermore, making the person feel increasingly worse rather than better)... reaches an inner cry for help from above.
Then something happens to this person, called "a remedy." This is when the desire is finally filled - not from the calculation in one's mind, but from beyond this calculation (you can say, from the mind existing above one's mind). When this "Great Mind" sees that the person has done everything in his/her power to achieve eternal life, and that this person has a complete desire only to achieve this... then this "Great Mind" decides that the person is now worthy of having his/her desire for eternal life fulfilled.
Achieving this fulfillment is called attaining one's soul.
Until one reaches this stage, of attaining the soul in one's lifetime in this world, such a person will continue reincarnating in this world, dressing after dressing, until the stage when this desire starts evolving and causing inner discomfort.
According to Kabbalah, our era is unique because this desire has started evolving in more and more people - and now the method for its fulfillment is being disclosed.
The method is called "Kabbalah" (Hebrew for "reception"), and is available to anybody who truly desires to feel his/her eternal soul during this lifetime. This method states how we can work to increase our desire for eternal life, and achieve its fulfillment while living in this world.
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