Reishit / Learning To Understand

In my previous post, I addressed an experience of essential unknowable knowledge, sharing my understanding that 1) this type of experience is one that cannot be prepared for, and 2) it enables the Divine Will to enter into history to shape the world of human events. This is true. Nevertheless, our purpose as human beings is, as Yaacov Branfman and Akiva Tatz (Jewish Mysticism: Questions & Secrets) have written:

The purpose of all learning of Torah is to prepare the intelligence to be able to come close to “hasagas haBorei” (understanding the Creator).

I agree. The purpose of our existence is to learn to understand. This idea also perfectly reflects my pre-verbal thought expression following physical incarnation, at the first point (which was rather immediate*) when I realized that incarnating actually entailed some things I didn't particularly like. I wrote about this in my description of my experience of the candle in the womb:

But words as I had spoken with You would not form in my mouth of edges. Realizing that for as much as definition was desirable, for the first time, i felt limit. Turning around to speak ... but i could not turn around in remembering edges! i turned my head instead.

Ohhh! no! i can feel and hear You, but i cannot see You!

I am here.

i did not understand!

This was my lack. I had no clue what it meant to be a physical creature. I did not understand. And this is what I was sent into the world to do - to learn to understand. We come to learn to understand everything that we may ever understand through coming to understand creation.

And that is exactly what I am doing and what my entire life has been and is constituted of - learning to understand. My life is, therefore, reishit.

*The very first experience of physical life was a vision of a perfect world which included the physical world (a messianic vision of existence) - a true שבת חזון (shabbat of vision). The reaction against the physical world came after the vision faded when confronted with the realization that I was stuck in a physical reality I did not understand and that my consciousness wasn't going to be allowed to just flit back and forth between worlds at will. I wasn't happy about it. I definitely understood then that I wasn't happy about it too.

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