We said, "Great! Sounds like a wonderful project!" But then we walked away, very excited. "Hey, we're creators! We're on our own!" Before you knew it, we forgot whose mission we were on. We forgot the whole point of the project: to create a world filled with divine light.

To use a term from modern psychology, we would say that the "ego" took charge.

God created us with an ego, because we had to be able to think independently. "Ego" as we're using the term means our basic human personality, including all the physical and psychological parts and functions that make it work. For each one of us to be able to fulfill the purpose in creation, we had to be able to use our own hearts and minds to understand the world and perfect it. Otherwise, we would have simply been robots doing what God thought of already. Ego is the structure of human personality wherein we can identify the exercise of free will.

But that very structure of the psyche that enables us to be independent also enables us to block infusions from God. God may send us messages about how best to handle this business of perfecting the world. He is probably sending us angels, and dreams, and intuitions all the time, but we have the capacity to shut them out. It's as if there is a "soul channel" that's broadcasting continuously, but we can flick a switch and turn onto a different one whenever we want. As Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, "We are surrounded by stars, planets, worlds of light, but we can shut it all out with one small hand."