Tanya: Chapter 20

I spent a lot of time with this chapter, reviewing it for a few weeks now. It's an amazing chapter in that it so succinctly describes the flow and various stages of desire transforming into action.

The most striking point to me is that everything starts off in the intellect at a level of potential. Any desire is initially a dormant potential desire in the mind. Later it is awakened to actual desire in the heart, and finally it is clothed in letters of thought and speech (and action, i think) when planning and execution is needed to fulfill that desire.

My question is: how does the potential desire in the intellect get there in the first place. To which I have two potential answers. (1) The simplest, and at some deeper level the truest, is that all those desires are built-in to our essence. (2) The only major alternative is to suggest that these desires, even in the potential state, are acquired. I can see three means of acquiring new potential desires: (a) intellectual consideration and extrapolation, (b) a subset and perhaps a go between for the last method: seeing something through one's eyes. (The eyes see and the heart desires--as Chazal point out. Not to mention science says that the eyes are/were essentially specialized parts of the brain, not some entirely separate organ) Lastly (c) we may obtain new potential desires through experience. For example tasting a new food to see whether or not it is worth eating. (At an ice cream parlor they give you a little tasting spoon.)

I think it is clear that all three are means of gaining new potential desires whereas (b) might be the most powerful, (c) more rare, and (a) most challenging. Still, it seems to me that somewhere deep down (1) is fundamentally true.

If (1) is in fact true, and all of those potential desires are bound up within our very being, then that says a lot about the nature of creation. It does a good job of explaining why changes in the world in no way affect changes in HaShem. All of those eventual outcomes already exist within Him, in potential. The Baal HaTanya does touch on similar ideas elsewhere, including regarding how the "abilities" of the soul are clothed in the body, so I imagine we aren't far off the mark conjecturing here.